The Benefits of Building Diverse Teams: An Interview with Pip Jamieson
Creative networking platform The Dots is a prime example of an ethical tech company. Here founder Pip Jamieson explains what had made it so successful and how it helps businesses build diverse teams
Previously, The Dots — dubbed ‘the next LinkedIn’ by Forbes — removed the ability for companies to search the platform for talent based on where people went to university. Now the London-based startup has gone a step further and launched a bias blocker tool. Recruiters can toggle it on to hide personal data (such as name, photo, and educational background) from profiles, so people are judged solely on their skills and the quality of their work.
“It came about because one of our clients, AKQA, who have a blind recruitment policy in place, sent us a photo of how they were using Post-It notes to obscure the images of candidates,” explains Pip Jamieson, founder and CEO of The Dots. “They did that, so they wouldn’t bias their hiring decision. It was a bit of a eureka moment for us.”
Helping companies build diverse teams, is at the heart of The Dots, which has attracted more than 300,000 members since Pip launched it from her houseboat in 2014. A remarkable 68 percent of the community is female, 31 percent BAME and 16 percent LGBT. In stark contrast to LinkedIn, which is dominated by male white-collar workers, The Dots caters for what Pip calls “no collar professionals”— essentially creators, freelancers and entrepreneurs who adopt non-linear careers.
Shifting to a skills-based job market
“While I was at MTV, I noticed a very different way of working had started to emerge,” Pip recalls. “Traditionally, people would spend five, 10 or 15 years in one job and work their way up a career ladder. It was very CV-based. But at MTV people were increasingly freelancing, working project by project, and they all seemed to have side hustles going on. Some had their own startup on the side. It was a much more fluid way of working.”
Pip also noticed a mindset shift in the creative industries. Unlike previous generations, people were valuing flexibility and purpose as much as pay, so Pip decided to create a professional networking alternative to help creatives progress in their careers and find inspiration and work.
Projects, not individual profiles, take centre stage on The Dots. When you post a new project, you can tag the full team. “It’s a recognition that creativity is a team sport,” Pip explains. “You could have a rockstar product designer, but if you don’t have a full team around that person bringing the idea to life, it’s never going to happen. We’re like a living Wiki of projects and the teams behind them.”
Also, while job titles are a major focus on LinkedIn, The Dots has taken a much more skills-based approach. “Job titles are so meaningless these days,” Pip points out. “Companies have different names for the same job, and the skills are the same. On The Dots you can call yourself anything, and then we data match. Every time you post a project, you can add new skills, which is also a recognition that there’s an increasingly ‘slashy’ environment. You can be a UX/UI designer but you can also be an entrepreneur and a photographer.”
The danger of unconscious bias
At MTV, Pip also experienced first-hand how homogenous teams can be dangerous for creativity. Roles weren’t being advertised simply because too many people would apply. “So we were calling on our little black book,” Pip remembers. “We were asking for recommendations of friends of friends, but that meant we started building up a homogenous workforce. Everyone went to similar universities, had similar backgrounds and lived in a similar neighbourhood. But creativity is about drawing on diverse experiences and coming up with creative ideas and solutions. If we’re all the same essentially, we all think the same.”
To illustrate the effect unconscious bias can have on products, Pip emphasises that all the new health apps that came out a while ago featured nothing to help women monitor their menstrual cycle, as they had been designed by primarily male teams. And when The Dots recently researched how people search websites, they found that men prefer free text search, while women are more likely to prefer some form of signposting (like a drop-down menu).
“If you don’t have diverse teams, you unconsciously build products for yourself,” Pip explains. “That’s why it’s so important, especially in technology, to build teams that reflect society as a whole, so we counteract the biases each of us have.”
Putting diversity at the heart
The Dots, therefore, doesn’t just do a lot of work to readdress the gender balance. Diversity also incorporates ethnicity, LGBT, disability, neurodiversity (dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADHD, autism etc) and socio-economic movement — hence the bias blocker. Initially, The Dots skewed slightly towards a more male audience, which prompted Pip to implement a curation rule.
“We actually have humans go through the profiles and projects that are being uploaded and choose the ones to feature, boosting them in the algorithm,” Pip clarifies. “For example, over 50 percent of the people on our curation page have to be women and 30 percent BAME. When we introduced that, the demographic of the signups changed overnight. It’s a kind of role modelling — people want to see themselves.”
To celebrate and highlight people’s differences, The Dots also does diversity takeovers. For Black History Month, for instance, the platform only featured black talent and projects created by black talent. Pip herself is very vocal about her dyslexia, which she grew to see as an advantage or ‘superpower’ even, and often points out that 40 percent of self-made millionaires (including Steve Jobs, Richard Branson and Albert Einstein) are dyslexic. Her email signature says ‘delightfully dyslexic, excuse typos!’ because she wants people to know about her limitations. But she also wants to lead by example and raise awareness that dyslexics tend to have high levels of perseverance, intuition, creativity and empathy, in the process aiming to help other people feel empowered about being neurodiverse.
More than 10,000+ clients, including the BBC, Burberry, Google and the Tate, now use The Dots to connect with potential hires. Championing diverse talent and helping companies make unbiased hiring decisions are significant steps towards building inclusive teams. Pip argues that it’s a complex problem that doesn’t stop at the recruitment stage. Diverse teams also reduce churn. According to research from Creative Equals, employees are 45 percent happier and 48 percent more likely to stay in a business if teams are diverse.
The keys to retaining diverse talent
“Getting diverse talent in is one thing,” Pip advises, “but in order to retain this talent, you also have to make sure you create an environment where they can feel comfortable and really flourish. You get the best out of people if they can bring their whole selves to work. A really important layer is understanding that people are different and have different needs. If you’re increasing the amount of people with autism in your business, for example, they might not like an open-plan office.”
While the company culture is undeniably important, Pip recommends hiring for values fit, not culture fit. “I speak to a lot of founders who say they’ve got to hire for culture fit. However, vetting people on if you like them and if you’d want to go to the pub or hang out with them leads to homogenous thinking. You’d hire people like you. Values fit is much deeper. If people don’t share your company’s values, that’s where things start going wrong. Any bad hiring mistake I’ve made in the past was due to a values misfit.”
Consequently, every candidate is interviewed by committee (following Google’s recruitment process) to alleviate the risk of a manager’s unconscious bias. Then Pip personally vets candidates for The Dots’ six core values before progressing on to the next stage, like a tech test if it’s an engineering role. The values include diversity, collaboration, and positivity. “And I don’t mean positivity for positivity sake,” Pip stresses. “It’s about ensuring that I’m hiring a team that’s focused on solutions and not problems.”
The onboarding process includes an induction with Pip to explain the importance of diversity and introduce new hires to its multi-faceted layers. The whole company is built around the power of teams and how teams form an intrinsic part of the creative process. To work out if she’s built a truly inclusive environment, Pip aspires to a key result of 10 out of 10 happiness for her team. “It may sound a bit airy-fairy,” she laughs. “But I found that happiness is intrinsically related to performance. A happy team is a productive team. We’re currently averaging at about 8.2, which is great, because it gives me a really good barometer on trends of problems.”
To measure it, Pip sends around an anonymous survey every quarter and asks three questions: how can we improve the product to make you happier, how can we improve the office, and what would you do as CEO? Recently, as the business scaled, the overriding feedback was that people felt disconnected and didn’t know what everyone was doing anymore. Now every Friday each team presents what they’re up to, and every quarter people move desks to sit next to different colleagues. In the next survey the problem had vanished.
Serving the creative workforce of the future
In 2019, the focus of The Dots will be very much on London. “It’s the biggest creative cluster in the world,” Pip explains. “Over three million people work in that cluster. All the creative industries — tech, film, fashion, advertising, architecture and the arts — are aggregated in one city, which doesn’t happen in many places in the world.”
As 51 percent of The Dots’ community are based outside of London, also on the cards are developing a playbook for international expansion and a more sophisticated approach to data, so the team is exploring machine learning and how they can better serve up people and content to the community. And then it’s time to raise another round of founding. One thing’s for sure, while many of LinkedIn’s white-collar workers face automation, there is no algorithm for creativity. “There are three things machines don’t do very well,” Pip points out. “They don’t have common sense, they don’t have empathy, and they can’t mimic that human capability to be creative. And that’s the community we look after: the more fluid, more creative workforce of the future.”
This article originally appeared in issue 316 of net magazine in 2019 and has been reviewed by Pip Jamieson prior to republication.
