Diversity in Tech Recruiting: A New Lens

How what started as a recruiting initiative gave us a new perspective on diversity in engineering.

By Charlotte Davies, Engineer, and Matthew Sinclair, Partner and VP Engineering, BCG Digital Ventures

It’s no secret that tech has a diversity problem. Although companies have made a concerted effort to hire more women and people from diverse backgrounds, tech is still lacking in diversity. Diversity applies to race and gender, but also to background and experience.

At DV, we’ve never been comfortable with this situation. Aside from the obvious considerations around equality, we know that diverse teams are generally more creative. Additionally, we build products and businesses to serve diverse demographics, and so having a diverse team enables us to see issues and solutions that would not be apparent to a non-diverse team.

In light of this, we wanted to do the obvious thing: Recruit engineers from diverse backgrounds. Our efforts taught us a lot about the issues around diversity in engineering, and also about ourselves as an engineering team.

Code First: Girls

We teamed up with Code First: Girls, an initiative that works with companies directly to help increase the number of women in tech. The plan was for our engineering team to run a full series of workshops for free to women, with the end goal of expanding and diversifying our recruiting efforts. Our engineers volunteered to work with the group to introduce them to the principles of coding.

We started the program in October 2018, and since then we’ve run three courses and taught 65 girls to code. The courses have grown in popularity, with the one we just finished our most well-attended yet.

Despite the popularity of the courses, we haven’t yet achieved our original goal of hiring more women through them (although we have welcomed more women to our cohort from other sources.) But this in itself has taught us how achieving diversity in recruiting actually works: It’s not enough to just gesture towards hiring more people from diverse backgrounds, the problems are far more deep-rooted, and there’s far more work to be done.

Creating new funnels

Engineering recruiting usually happens in a few ways. There are recruiters (internal and external) who actively match engineers with companies, there are engineers who apply to job vacancies directly, there are referrals, and, for more junior engineers, there are coding schools that set up new graduates with jobs. Let’s call these funnels.

The problem with all of these funnels is that they themselves do not necessarily favour diversity. As current engineering teams are in most cases male, the engineers that team members refer tend to match their own demographic. Engineers sourced by recruiters will, by and large, match existing demographics. The students at coding schools often self-select and, as engineering has historically been a field lacking in diversity, it’s likely that they’ll also not be diverse, following a career path that has been well established for their demographic.

“I think it’s important for girls to know that it’s never too late to learn how to code. You don’t have to have coded for your whole life to be able to make it your career.”

— Seynab Abdirahman, CF:G student

As a result, simply using these funnels but with the intention to hire more women and people of colour is not effective; the numbers are stacked against you. In the words of DV Venture CTO Matt Brown, “There’s a huge amount of untapped potential, ideas and approaches that we’re simply not taking advantage of due to the lack of diversity in tech.”

This brings us back to our Code First: Girls course. Although we didn’t achieve our recruiting goals, what we did do is open up a new funnel, one which, with time and cultivation, will open up a new avenue for engineers from diverse backgrounds. By creating new funnels and doing the work to encourage people who might not otherwise enter a standard funnel to explore engineering as a career path, we increase the number of engineers outside the standard, restricted demographic and boost our hiring chances and those of everyone else. As one of our students, Seynab Abdirahman, reflected, “The more we do, the more I realise I’d love to be a Software Engineer. It’s what I was looking for which I didn’t know I was looking for.”

Growing Enthusiasm

One welcome outcome we hadn’t factored in was the engagement of our own team. We wanted to help the women who joined the course by teaching them new skills, empowering them to try something new, and boost their confidence. All of this we did. But we didn’t anticipate how much we’d get out of it ourselves.

All in all, 80% of our cohort has been involved in teaching, as well as plenty of non-engineers. When we started, there was a slight sense of teaching as an obligation, but the initiative has grown to be something that makes us feel good about the work we’re doing to actively improve things and challenge the status quo. We’ve heard from many of our engineers how they’ve appreciated having the opportunity to interact with different groups of people, and how this in turn has given them a boost in empathy and creativity. “I get energy out of helping people who are hungry to learn,” said Matt Brown.

“I love sharing with people what we do here, particularly with people who perhaps haven’t heard much about this industry or what we can achieve. So the experience of working with Code First: Girls has been so rewarding.”
Tom Dickinson, UX Designer, BCGDV

Another frequent comment is how it’s given them a new perspective and allowed them to understand the issues in concrete terms, while also enabling them to help; “These sessions are important to me as it is my opportunity to also kickstart a passion in these young professional women, and make my dent into promoting diversity in tech,” said Alex Benoit, DV Lead Engineer.

There’s still a lot of work to be done to diversify the industry, and so much more we can do to improve our own situation. But by embracing new hiring funnels and actively seeking to introduce those who might never have considered a career in technology to the industry, we’re confident we’ve discovered useful new tools to make technology more diverse.

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