Recruiting Strategies for Hiring Diverse Engineers at Early-Stage Startups

I've heard the horror story time and time again... a startup with 100 people with not a ton of racial or gender diversity realizes they need to start thinking about diversity and inclusion when recruiting. ??

Turns out, the bigger you get, the harder it becomes to solve a problem that could have been proactively thought about from the beginning. A better approach is to start as early as possible and have DEIB intertwined with the startup's overall strategy and culture. ?

When it comes to being recruited as an underrepresented software engineer, I receive dozens of recruiting emails from startups every week wanting to hire me. At this point, it's easy to identify those red flags and be able to tell when diversity is clearly not a priority. ??

When it comes to being on the other side of recruiting, I've talked with dozens of technical founders and heads of D&I at tech companies directly through my connections on LinkedIn, the mentoring sessions I offer, and the work I've done with a number of different nonprofits that serve underrepresented communities. ??

If you want more BIPOC and women engineers getting to the final round of interviews, here are some recommendations I can offer from my experience as a Latina software engineer and DEIB leader in tech. ??

(1) Re-Evaluate Your Technical Interview Process ??

I'm against using whiteboarding as a proxy to hire engineers. By prioritizing day-to-day skills over data structure and algorithms, you can eliminate performance anxiety and systemic bias.

Example: You can use Byteboard and Woven for the initial technical screening process instead of relying on a high-pressure live coding DSA question.

Pro-Tip: Show off that your startup doesn't whiteboard by adding them to the popular hiring-without-whiteboards repo on GitHub.

(2) Practice Purposeful Community Outreach ??

There are a lot of communities and nonprofits catering to BIPOC and women in tech (e.g. Natives in Tech , Women Who Code , Techqueria , /dev/color ). You can partner with these communities by sponsoring events or posting to their job board. Alternatively, you can adopt a model of offering free resources upfront and handling the heavy lifting yourself.

Example: You can share a link with the communities for a free resume review for members who are job searching and interested in senior engineering positions. It's a win-win — the community members get a free resume review and your startup gets potential candidates.

Pro-Tip: Allow members to book a session using Calendly and then link a Notion doc that showcases the free resource and who would benefit the most from the session along with more details about your startup and a link to your careers page.

(3) Understand the Seeing is Believing Mentality ??

Many of us have experienced traumatic or toxic situations in the workplace and have learned key ways how to tell if we're gonna have a good time or not at the next place. A huge red flag is seeing a team with no diversity.

Example: Take the effort to make sure your LinkedIn posts or career page, website, product screenshots, etc feature BIPOC and women as users or employees so that we can feel included and more likely to want to join.

Pro-Tip: If your team is not super diverse (e.g. all cis straight white guys) yet, be upfront about this on your careers page and make it clear how much you value DEIB and have certain practices in place to ensure diverse candidates are being considered. If the audience for your product is just cis straight white guys, you're probably okay though.

(4) Adopt Inclusive Language & Values for the JD ??

Make sure your values aren't catering to just a certain privileged group of people and that the language you use aligns with the values you're operating with. And please make sure to think about what benefits to offer in tandem. Quoting Textio , when you're building a culture of belonging, every word counts.

Example: If you're operating with flexible hours that could appeal to working parents, make that clear in the language you use and share an example from someone's schedule to really showcase the startup is living those values.

Pro-Tip: Watch out for problematic phrases like "winner take all", "the best of the best", "killer", "aggressively", etc.

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Outside of these recommendations for early-stage startups, I'm also a huge advocate of creating an ERG model, launching an apprenticeship program, and partnering with bootcamps but these recommendations are better served to those are later stages when they have more dedicated resources. More to come on those suggestions in future articles.

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