Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Signals

As an outspoken, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) advocate, I often get asked what signals I look for in a company that indicate to me that they care about DEI. This post lists some signs I look for when I’m interviewing. If you’re also job searching, I hope this post helps provide some specific questions you can ask during your interviews.

Job posts

A job post is often the first place I start interacting with a company so these have a huge impact on how I view a company. In the past, I have decided not to apply to companies based on language used in their job postings.

• Salary Bands: I will always give preference to companies that publicly list their salary bands in job postings. This is becoming even more important given that certain locations, e.g. Colorado and New York City, are going to require that salary bands be listed. I don’t want to work for a company that says they’ll just stop hiring in those locations.
• Degree requirements: I am firmly against degree requirements for jobs. Some of the best data scientists I know have no degrees or non-STEM degrees. I think they can provide some signal to the hiring manager, but they should not be required.
• Remote-friendly roles for everyone: Although this is less common now, historically some companies have only allowed remote work for certain roles or levels. I want to work at a company that allows everyone who can work remotely to do so. To suss this out, I look at job postings for other departments when I’m researching a company.

Interview process

Interviews are a great place to ask questions about many of the other items in this post, but the process itself can also give you some insights into the company.

I searched “interview” and somehow this came up. Too good not to use.

• Process: The first thing I consider is whether there is a well-defined interview process that’s applied to all candidates. This lets me know that they care about evaluating everyone in the same way. However, if I’m the first data science hire, it’s possible that I will be the one putting together the process in the future.
• Candidate demographics: Many companies talk about improving their interview funnels to ensure that they are interviewing and hiring folks from underrepresented groups in tech. If they aren’t collecting demographic data from all candidates, including referrals, they won’t be able to effectively measure their funnel. I know companies sometimes don’t want to scare away referred candidates, but an optional demographic survey is not too much of an ask.
• Take homes: As someone who has been a hiring manager for data scientists, I understand that a take home exercise is sometimes the strongest signal into how good a candidate is. If there is a take home, I like to see if the company is respectful of my time; anything over 4–5 hours is way too much. However, not everyone can commit any time so I check to see if a company provides another option (e.g. live coding) for those who can’t. Finally in an ideal case, the company actually pays for candidates to do the take homes.
• Pronouns: One small check for places that are likely to be good places to work for trans and nonbinary folks is whether the company asks for my pronouns (and uses them) and whether my interviewers introduce themselves with pronouns.

Time Off

Given how overworked workers are in the US are, it probably comes as no surprise that how a company handles time off can tell you a lot about what they value.

I haven’t camped in years, but I’d like to believe that I will camp at some point in the future.

• Vacation/PTO: the first thing I check is how much vacation they offer their employees. At this point in my career, 4 weeks is my minimum. If a company says they have unlimited PTO, I immediately ask if they measure how much PTO their employees take. Measurement is usually a good sign that the company takes PTO seriously.
• Sick time: If a company offers sick time separate from vacation, they immediately get a boost in my company rankings. I hate when a company has combined buckets; it incentivizes people to work when they’re sick so they can take vacation. Often when I ask about what happens if you get sick and don’t have PTO, the company tells me, “well, we’ll make an exception if you get sick”. That is an immediate red flag to me (see Policies section below).
• Parental Leave: This leave is often a good signal about whether the company cares about work/life balance. In addition to the actual amount, ask if the leave applies to both the parent giving birth and the other parent as well as what leave is available in the case of adoptions.
• Gender neutral parental leave: I put this in a separate bullet point because it’s one of the things that matters the most to me. People of any gender can give birth, and not all parents identify as moms or dads. Places that still use the terms “maternity leave” or “paternity leave” immediately make me nervous. When I bring this up in interviews, sometimes a company will say that they will figure it out when the situation actually comes up, which is not a great solution.

Policies

During my interviews, I often focus a lot on policies so I can learn more about how everyone at the company (or within a department) is treated; not just those who will be on my team.

• Career Ladders / Promotions: It’s a really good sign to me when a company has clearly defined career ladders and promotion processes. Although many start-ups won’t have these in place, I want to know that they’ve at least thought about these processes and considered how to prevent promotion by favoritism.
• Demographics: Companies that measure their employee demographics and share them have more of my trust. If they can’t answer any questions about how many people of a specific group work at the company or were promoted, then I wonder if they are hiding something. The numbers don’t need to be perfect, but I want to work somewhere that is clearly trying to improve representation across different identities.
• Policies exist: This may seem like a low bar, but companies that have set policies for various situations are better options than ones that don’t. I really don’t trust companies that tell me they do policy by exception. If their policy is that they’ll make exceptions where they need to, then they don’t actually have a policy. “Policy by exception” greatly favors outspoken people, those that have managers looking out for them, more senior people, etc. I am a big believer in working for companies that treat all employees well, not just the loudest ones.

This is a non-exhaustive list of the types of things I look for in companies. I know I’m unlikely to find a place that meets everything on the list, but how they answer the questions also provides a lot of signal. I look for companies that acknowledge their current shortcomings and discuss their future plan to fix any of these issues.