Things I’ve found effective in our latest efforts on diverse hiring without hiring for diversity.
We always want the “best talent” for a particular position. Previously, this implied the candidate most senior/experienced in a particular technology.
Anecdotally, overemphasizing raw technical ability leads to a team of geniuses. If you’re lucky, some possess nontechnical proficiencies too, but instead of leaving that to chance, we changed the bar from a purely high technical standard to emphasize:
Sharing these values and some general interviewing guidelines enabled recruiting to select promising candidates, while I delegated technical interviews to interview leads, each focused on a different section.
From past experience, the most difficult interviewing hurdle was building a sufficiently large and diverse pool as quickly as possible. Small pools are more likely to consist of majority candidates, and minorities in gender, age, culture, and technical backgrounds are difficult to come by.
To maximize our pool, we advertised multiple titles per application. This is effectively candidate SEO.
For example, while hiring for Cloud Platform Engineers we also advertised 3 other titles mapping to the same position: Cloud Infrastructure Engineer, DevOps Engineer, and Site Reliability Engineer.
This yielded a remarkably broad pool of candidates which filled quickly, averaging approximately one application per hour for a week. We leaned heavily on our recruiter, who was excellent about expediting the resulting phone screen flood.
Mentorship was the most important skill for our team. As a mentor, could they teach me a new concept (technical or otherwise)? As mentee, could they receive and integrate new information gracefully?
Over the years I’ve seen these traits tested in two main ways.
In this experiement, the candidate prepared to teach a concept to a new engineer during a live mentoring session (~30 minutes).
In practice, I was the candidate, and I found this difficult to nail. Simultaneously probing a newer engineer’s knowledge limits while tuning concepts to their frame of reference was realistic, but doing that in just 30 minutes was tough. I failed miserably, got hired anyway, and we didn’t seriously try this again.
This required more interviewer experience and preparation: during technical interviews, the interviewer guides the candidate to an edge of their knowledge, and taught (or clarified) a concept. The candidate would of course be expected to do the same: could they explain their ideas well to someone new to them?
This was an effective indicator of a candidate’s “mentorability,” both as mentee and mentor, and elevated the interview from a time sink to a potential learning experience. Both candidate and interviewer could leave more knowledgeable about a technology or concept!