Improve the Diversity of Your Teams

“People want to join companies where they’re not just a token. Instead, they’re joining a group of people that’s welcoming them and their leadership by buying into it from day one.”

One way companies can ensure they have a diverse team is by making sure to bring in a diverse group to interview for every available position.

“Another technique is something that a lot of companies have borrowed from the NFL, the Rooney Rule. It basically states that for every hire that you make, you need to have some candidates on the on-site who are from a diverse background so that you’re not just interviewing one type of group.”

“If you combine that with standardized interviewing, you will find that there are a lot of candidates that maybe don’t look like the people you have today, but that have the skills that you’re looking for and really can help your company move to the future.”

“You also have to have a good culture. A culture that’s inviting and open to people from different backgrounds — and that doesn’t just mean gender or skin color, but also in different places in life. In modern times with remote work, we have much more flexibility for people with families and we can create environments that allow people to come back to work after they’ve been on maternity leave or changed careers. We no longer live in a 9 to 5 world. A lot of the work can be done remotely.”

“It took me a long time to realize that the things that I was doing were optimizing for finding candidates just like myself and that was very detrimental to building a diverse team. By the time I started to realize that, we already had 30 or 40 engineers on the team. To go back and rethink how you do diversity is much harder the longer you wait.”

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Key Takeaway: Companies can combine fair, standardized interview practices with flexible work conditions to create a diverse team.