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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