How to Increase Female Tech Applicants by 26% in 4 Days

The TodayTix recruitment team did a 4 day push to increase underrepresented groups in our tech candidate pipeline — the results were impressive!

Anyone who says they can’t get women and underrepresented groups into a tech pipeline isn’t trying hard enough. Or hasn’t tried at all. I and employee experience counterpart Ryan Key noticed a clear deficit in the number of female, black, Latinx, veteran status, and disabled tech candidates. We went on a mission to push for these underrepresented groups in a short period of time.

To note. We started tracking our demographic information through GreenHouse.io on the morning of April 18th. We closed the role on April 22nd but continued to track demographic data as applicants filled out the form after their initial application.

Over 4 days, these graphs show how our applicant demographics changed:

To improve those numbers we:

• asked Tiffany Yu, founder of Diversability, to create a community posting about the role(s)
• set up a job posting with Diversify Tech (by founder Veni Kunche)

Our 2nd posting on Diversify Tech — some interesting notes about our current tech and product team

• contacted Altara Weiland, Business Development at Thinkful, for her suggestions on top tier candidates
• posted the role(s) at NYU, Columbia, and the Handshake Career Network
• shared the role through Power to Fly’s network of women and had our Director of Vertical Expansion, Rachel Birnbaum, and Director of Geographic Expansion, Kiki Dolan, talk about our growth at a women’s career networking event
• I also posted on LinkedIn with an ask: Please tag, share, and encourage underrepresented groups to apply to our tech internship. That if TodayTix has a mission to make theater and the arts accessible to all, then the people designing and building our product needed to represent our possible audience.
• In house referrals: People Ops continually integrates tech and non-tech team members into the recruitment process — having buy in from all employees is key to hiring success

Lesson learned?

• It isn’t a one step and done process. Getting more underrepresented groups in your pipeline is an ongoing process, just like getting any other qualified candidate into your pipeline.
• There are plenty of women in technical roles. It is important to make sure they don’t feel alone in messaging and during interviews.
• Even on a low $200 budget, we were able to affect dramatic change in a short period of time. This type of outreach should have a much bigger impact for organizations (or recruitment campaigns) with bigger budget.
• Certain categories (American Indian or Alaskan Native, Native Hawaii or Pacific Islander, two or more races, veterans, and those with disabilities.) did not experience large/any change. In the future I’d want to implement the help of other resources such as Jopwell to help with these targeted demographics and do more posting within veteran and disability oriented communities.

Here is additional information on our numbers and demographics.