during an intervie w, employers should consider better informing candidates of their options as they approach the final stages of extending an offer. The culture of recruiting often treats candidates as sales targets to close, rather than team members to nurture and include in the process. Many diverse candidates are not aware of the cost of living in large cities, don’t understand stock liquidation, are not aware their stake in a company can get diluted with further funding rounds, or don’t know how much runway the company has available to continue operating, among other big issues. Instead of seeing this as a win because you get a better deal out of this candidate, be candid about the reality of working at this company. In the end, any purposeful exclusion of important information will become very evident, and the employee may grow to resent the employer or hiring manager, leading to a negative working relationship.

A third intervention we recommend is for hiring managers to reconsider the process of paid employee referrals to make new hires. Encouraging employee referrals at an exorbitant rate ($5,000, per hire, for instance) may actually encourage employees to put anyone through the pipeline, instead of the most qualified. This serves to further flood the hiring pipeline with candidates who resemble your existing workforce. Employees tend to know people who look like them, have similar interests, and studied at the same school or peer institutions. If hiring managers reduce the monetary incentive to put every living soul through the pipeline, and increase the incentives for diverse candidates specifically while still keeping it under an exorbitant amount (perhaps no more than $1,000 or $2,000 for diverse candidates), the incentives will be better aligned with building a better, more diverse team, and less with making an extra $5,000 from a referral.

Our final recommendation is to be
open and honest about your desire to
diversify your workforce. If a company
is not outwardly honest about this in-
tention, applications from diverse can-
didates will not simply increase of their
own accord. Candidates want to know
their application will be taken serious-
ly, despite their background differing
from the norm in some way. Compa-
nies should make it an explicit initia-
tive both internally (within teams) and
externally (through public material
such as websites, media communica-
tion, and recruitment literature). Com-
panies gain a reputation as “inclusive”
or “not inclusive”; being open about
your intentions can lead to the creation
of a culture and reputation for inclusiv-
ity. Internally, we recommend actually
setting a concrete goal for the compa-
ny to hit. Without a diversity goal it can
be hard to track success.

Such a goal could take the form: “We want our company to look like the available candidate pool of those with relevant education and/or experience within 24 months, with progressive check-ins every quarter. We’re specifically focusing on the hiring of Latino and African-American candidates for every role where we are most deficient, as well as more female engineers.”

Since setting diversity goals often engenders questions, if not outright backlash, it’s important to explain the business reasons for doing so. Pointing out the changing demographics of your customers will be important if this is an important part of your cus-tomer/client/user base. Citing research on the advantages to creativity and profitability of diversity may be important to your current employees.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Hidden biases of hiring managers are holding back organizations from hiring in a more meritocratic manner, therefore limiting the diversity of their companies. The human brain is built to recognize patterns based on information it has seen before, so hiring tends to take the form of hiring more people who are like the existing workforce. This means highly qualified candidates who break these assumptions about gender, background or ethnicity are not getting a fair evaluation, or even a first look.

We recommend thinking carefully
about what qualities are really crucial
in executing a job well, and hiring
based on skills relating to the actual
execution of the role. Steps that miti-
gate the recruitment managers’ im-
plicit biases, and measures such as
anonymization of resumes, may help
organizations get closer to their meri-
tocratic ideals. How many other ex-
amples can you think of that are used
in tech companies to “identify talent”
but which, in reality, are merely prox-
ies for accidents of birth and not for
merit or potential?

We have developed the Kapor Center Impact Fellowship, which places students from underrepresented backgrounds at startups for the summer. Most of our candidates are from “ non-Ivies,” and many come from the South and Midwest regions of the United States—areas not generally associated with the technology industry. We’ve taken a more holistic approach to evaluate our candidates; we look at general cognitive ability to do real workplace tasks, writing ability, excitement for the role and mission of the organization, motivation, long-term goals, and distance traveled. We’ve gotten an outside party to evaluate their technical ability and have been quite impressed with our results thus far. We’ve effectively rejected typical proxies like SAT, GPA, or school attended, and are finding exciting results.

 

References

[ 1] Moss-Racusin, C. A. et al. Science Faculty’s Subtle Gender Biases Favor Male Students. PNAS 109, 41 (2012).

[ 2] Bryant, A. In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be
Such a Big Deal. Ne w York Times. June 19, 2013.
http:// www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/
in-head-hunting-big-data-may-not-be-such-a-
big-deal.html?_r= 1&
[ 3] Walton, G. and Cohen, G. A Brief Social-Belonging
Intervention Improves Academic and Health
Outcomes of Minority Students. Science 331, 6023
(2011).

Biographies

Freada Kapor Klein is the founder of the Level Playing Field Institute, which strives to increase fairness in education and the workplace by closing the opportunity gap and removing barriers to success. The Institute’s Summer Math and Science Honors Academy (SMASH), a three-summer high school program serving underrepresented students of color, works to ensure racial equity within the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. As a Partner at Kapor Capital, Klein invests in women entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs of color whose I T start-ups aspire to generate economic value and positive social impact.

Ana Díaz-Hernández is a venture analyst at Kapor Capital and manages the Kapor Center Impact Fellowship, which places students from underrepresented backgrounds in summer internships at tech companies. She is a graduate of Stanford University and participated in several research projects relating to urban planning, public health, and civic engagement. She has also worked at two startups, Spool and Dropbox, doing product marketing, sales and internationalization.

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