Diversity & Inclusion at Spoiler Alert: Our 2018 Journey

How we committed to D&I and achieved 90% year-over-year headcount growth

As we jump into 2019, I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting on how we’ve grown as a business over the last year. Growth in customer base, product capabilities, and market awareness of food waste as one of the leading contributors to climate change.

As the leader of our company (and by necessity in an early-stage startup: head of people ops, office manager, and employee handbook author), the most rewarding growth for me has been that of our team, having gone from 10 full-time employees (FTEs) at the start of 2018 to 19 FTEs at the start of 2019.

For some added context, we’re a 3-year old, Boston-based technology startup working in the fields of food, supply chain, and sustainability. Impact is one of our core values, and the environmental and social outcomes of our work are key drivers of everything we do. Motivated by a desire to create a stronger and more resilient team, we made a concerted effort in Q1 2018 to do something we find many companies don’t prioritize until much later on in their journeys. That is, to ensure we had the processes and values in place that enable us to attract a more diverse workforce and foster a more inclusive work environment.

This post is intended to capture a portion of that journey, as well as to share some learnings for other companies at our stage and founders who are pursuing similar growth objectives.

First off, the data

Before we run through our diversity and inclusion (D&I) efforts in 2018, I thought it’d be helpful to highlight what D&I looks like at Spoiler Alert, now versus a year ago:

• Gender Identity: 63% male, 37% female today (compared to 70% and 30%, respectively, at the start of 2018)
• Race: 74% white, 26% people of color (compared to 90% and 10%)
• Age: 21% under 30, 58% in 30s, 21% over 40 (compared to 30%, 60% and 10%)
• Parents: 32% have kids (compared to 10%)
• Immigrants: 32% were born outside the United States (compared to 10%)

While this is by no means intended to be a comprehensive list of all diversity measures, it’s a good representation of who we are and where we’ve come from. How did we get here?

Promoting D&I in the workplace

Our first priority was to ensure we were doing everything we could internally to foster an inclusive work environment. Here are 4 initiatives we implemented this past year:

• Started a D&I committee: We launched a committee — championed by the founders and chaired by the CEO — to meet monthly and spearhead company building, community engagement, and recruiting efforts focused on D&I. This committee was responsible for developing our diversity statement and charter, launching a #diversity Slack channel, ensuring many of our social events are family-friendly, and identifying new recruiting channels for us to pursue.
• Defined an attractive parental leave program: We finally got around to writing a thorough employee handbook and included a parental leave policy that we felt was healthy, competitive, and appropriate given our stage of company: eight weeks of paid maternity or paternity leave, and four additional weeks of unpaid leave should it be desired. We welcomed 3 babies to the Spoiler Alert family in 2018 (including my cofounder Emily’s son below).

• Committed to a flexible schedule policy: We doubled down on enabling work-from-home capabilities and flex scheduling, encouraging employees to work the hours and from the location that makes them most productive. G Suite for collaboration, Slack for communication, and Dashlane for security have been great enablers, particularly for parents and remote workers. We emphasized these commitments during our hiring process and a founder-delivered onboarding session on Day One for all new hires.
• Offered inclusive health benefits: We worked with our health insurance provider to ensure we have a PPO option that is inclusive of health services for transgender employees (something we were disappointed to learn isn’t always a given).

Incorporating D&I into recruiting efforts

Recruiting is hard enough as is, particularly in a very competitive Boston/tech job market. Here are 4 ways in which we went about building a more diverse pipeline of candidates while almost doubling headcount:

• Augmented recruiting channels: Diverse hires stem from a more diverse pipeline. In addition to our normal recruiting channels, our team leveraged a number of recruiting platforms and job boards that specifically target under-represented groups in the Boston tech scene, including PowerToFly, Women Who Code, She Geeks Out, and People of Color in Tech. We’ve also built and/or maintained good relationships with a number of boot camp and skill development programs (we love the team at Resilient Coders, and two of our engineers are alums of General Assembly and Startup Institute).
• Enhanced our Careers page: There’s a lot of literature (check out Entelo) on how the language and/or tone of a job posting can have adverse effects on candidates’ interest in a company or role. We developed our own diversity statement to highlight what D&I means at Spoiler Alert, added it to our Careers pages, and incorporated equal employment opportunity (EEO) statements into every job posting.

• Communicated values to recruiters: Like many startups, we work with contracted recruiters from time to time. Communicating the importance of D&I to a recruiter can set the right expectations from the start of a relationship. We make it particularly easy for them by capturing our company’s values and D&I commitment clearly on our Careers page.
• Revised our interview guide: We revamped our interview guide (both questions and evaluation criteria) to mitigate unconscious bias and highlight values alignment. For example, interview questions about willingness to stay late at the office (intended to suss out work ethic) or free time activities (intended to uncover candidates that value continuous learning) are biased against parents who have childcare commitments after work and whose hobbies become those of their kids. Instead, we ask questions about times in which candidates balanced a number of commitments and how they’ve gotten involved in their respective communities.

The results? Of our last 10 hires, 40% have been women, 40% are individuals of color, 50% have kids, 50% were born outside of the United States, and 40% are over the age of 40. Our engineers are also now 50–50 male/female.

D&I priorities in 2019

We came a long way on the D&I front in 2018, and we’re eager to keep that going in 2019. Here are some of the initiatives we’ll be prioritizing in the New Year:

• Conduct an employee climate survey to highlight areas for improvement and ensure we are fostering a welcoming, transparent, and fair work environment
• Participate in more community events to highlight the importance of workplace D&I and enhance our reputation and network in the Boston ecosystem
• Define a variety of career paths to enable more flexible work schedules and remote arrangements
• Create more space for new employee training and skill development so as to allow us to target and grow career switchers and less experienced hires

Diversity and inclusion are core components of how we work and the company we want to build, and we feel that these commitments — coupled with a strong mission and ability to transform food supply chains — are critical drivers to employee satisfaction and retention. This hasn’t been, by any means, an easy process to get up and running, but we find (or rather, hope to find!) it’s easier to start earlier and lay the foundation now rather than course correct later.

For those interested in these topics and who share similar commitments, keep an eye out for future employee spotlights and blog posts from our team in 2019. For other founders out there, I hope that this was helpful, and I’d love to hear what D&I means to you. Drop me a note anytime at ricky@spoileralert.com. Cheers to a successful 2019.