Square One: Inclusive Hiring Practices

Hired and Women Who Code understand that building a more inclusive tech industry starts with recruitment and hiring. Even the most well-meaning individuals can unknowingly derail a corporate commitment to diversity by introducing biases into the hiring and interview processes. Often overlooked, unconscious biases can guide decision-making and uphold a homogeneous status quo. 

We spoke with Hired’s SVP of People, Kelli Dragovich, about what companies can do to attract diverse tech talent and to eliminate bias from the interview process. “Companies can’t sit back and wait to receive resumes from talented and diverse candidates,” Kelli said. “They need to evaluate their talent pipeline and actively engage with minority communities.”

Using gender-neutral, inclusive language in job descriptions is just one small way to create a more inclusive company culture. Underrepresented candidates can be turned off from the loaded language in a job posting; traditionally masculine descriptors including “aggressive” and “go-getter”, for example, may discourage female candidates from applying to positions that they are well-suited for. 

Implementing objective and scorecard-based interview processes can also help keep unconscious bias from rearing its ugly head. An interviewer's evaluation of a candidate can easily be clouded by unconscious prejudice, especially when asking open-ended questions. Decision-makers should identify acceptable responses to a set list of questions to ensure that candidates' responses are comparable.

Hired offers companies on their platform a bias elimination tool that allows them to choose whether or not to see candidate photos and names to help them remove hidden biases from their recruiting process. We hope more companies across industries follow suit – sharing information, raising awareness and taking action to counteract biases in the hiring process.

Together with Hired, we hope to enrich the tech talent pipeline and help connect talented women engineers with the companies they’ll love.