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Jun 21, 2021 22 tweets 8 min read Read on X
HOW TO HIRE MORE WOMEN INTO ENGINEERING?

Last week, I started a conversation on how to hire more women engineers. Hundreds of people - tech recruiters, women engineers, CTO’s and founders shared thoughts and experiences.

This thread is a collection of THEIR insights 🧵 Image
1/ De-bias company culture

If your founding team are male, good chance your culture inadvertently becomes optimised to hire for MORE male team mates. Think about your rituals, language, values - audit all of this to ensure every job candidates feels that they can belong Image
2/ Improve Demand Planning

Inclusive hiring needs MORE time. Old KPI’s like ‘TTH’ (time to hire) are killers for diversity goals. Better workforce planning gives you longer runway to build and hire from a more diverse candidate pool. Use a tool like Foresight 👇 Use Foresight Forecast
3/ De-bias language in job ads

Words matter. Using gendered language in your job ads can be a deterrent to viable job applicants. Identify and amend language which excludes the demographic you are hiring for. Extend to outreach messaging, company marketing copy and the rest Use Textio or similar
4/ Stop laundry listing tech items in job ads

Women apply at a lower rate vs men where they do not meet every listed requirement. If your job ad lists superfluous skills, you skew the applicant pool to male. Talk about what needs to be done, not what tech exists in the stack Image
5/ Rethink tenure

‘Must have 10 yrs experience in X’. Think about this: there are less women in tech 10 years ago than there are today. Stipulating long tenure as a requirement again skews applicant pool to male. Think skills rather than time served as the proxy for capability Image
6/ Actively Support Women in Tech communities

Ada Lists, Girls Who Code, Million STEM, - there are plenty of online groups which are aimed to promote women into engineering. Sponsor events, offer coaching / training - whatever is in your capacity as a business to do, do it. See: https://relocate.me/bl...
7/ Elevate women team mates

Representation matters. Candidates make judgements on the info they have access to. Resist tokenisation but ensure women team mates have the opportunity, support and encouragement to take up high profile. positions in representing the company. Image
8/ Negotiate supply-to-hire ratio with Hiring Managers

Getting hiring managers on board is critical to meeting diversity hiring goals. They are the ones who say yes / no to the hire. Yet the biggest mistake is leaving this objective vague. Agree supply-to-hire ratio with HM's Image
9/ Institute female focused employment benefits

Women continue to shoulder the primary responsibility for care giving. Optimise benefits according for this type of worker. You can start, by removing career penalties for anyone not doing default male working patterns Image
10/ Shift to Remote First

Some countries have significantly higher ratio of women in STEM than others i/e India, Eastern and Central Europe vs Western Europe / USA. Access this talent pool by shifting to remote work Image
11/ Actively source those women engineers

Use tools like CSE or Irina Shamaeva’s mega list of boolean search to ID women engineers on search. Use women only networking groups, job matching platforms, coder camps as source sites for candidates Image
12/ Diversify Assessment Methods

Universal assessment may well produce a gender bias outcomes i.e in education, boys vs girls on exam vs case study. Offer choice of assessment type for candidate to select from - take home test, live code review, tech interview and so on. Image
13/ Consider Blind Hiring

Mitigate human bias by pushing the human assessment phase to a later stage in the process. We are much less prone to this bias if we have counteracting evidence beforehand, so let’s produce that evidence before prejudgment Image
14/ Transparency Salary Calculation

Women are LESS likely to negotiate salary, and are MORE likely to be penalised for doing so. Non-transparency with salary implies negotiation, a red flag which may deter otherwise viable candidates. Publicly state how you calculate comp 👇 Image
15/ De-bias the Interview

Mitigate human bias by going with paired interviewers at every stage, each with independently recorded scorecard. It increases overhead but guess what? If you really care about DEIB, its an investment not a cost Image
16/ Build Strong Retention Strategy

Over indexing at the top-of-funnel can mask organisational failure to retain employees. Improve communication and provide ‘career flexibility’ (no single career pathway to success) Move from ‘process orientation’ to ‘people orientation’ Image
17/ Compete to be market leading in Maternity Leave

The price to career that mothers pay has always been way too high. Don’t wait for the government to mandate and then do the minimum - employers must step up post haste and independently of legislation. Image
18/ Flexible by Default

‘Career ladder’ is optimised for always on worker - by default not only a male but implicitly a male with partner at home taking care of household and family. Diversify potential pathways and create multi-track, multi-mode ways to attain career success. Image
19/ Differentiated Employee Referral Programmes

ERP can lead to more bias, as we tend to refer people who are most like us. However, for under represented groups, we can make this work in our favour. Tap network value of women team mates by rolling out ERP to them before genpop Image
20/ Mindset shift from Acquisition to Development

Most of the challenges in hiring come from needing to ‘ready-to-go’ talent. For entrenched challenges - like more women in engineering - we need a mindset shift from acquiring to developing talent. Try recruit+train approach! Image
20 ideas to help hire more women into engineering. Do u have any others??

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THANK YOU!

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More from @HungLee

Sep 21, 2021
Listening to 广州新闻资讯广播 FM96.2 from Guangzhou live on Radio Garden to try and improve my Canto radio.garden/listen/fm96-2/…
listening to Cantonese language pop songs is weird. All the sounds are familiar to the ear, but as my acuity with tonal range and lack of vocabulary means I don't understand a word
I think being able to understand song lyrics in the language being sung is one tier of fluency below being able to tell jokes in said language
Read 5 tweets
Sep 20, 2021
Listening to 講台 talkonly from Hong Kong live on Radio Garden to try and improve my Canto radio.garden/listen/talkonl…
they are talking about tech - sounds like consumer level advice on basic infosec. What do you do when the app wants access to your webcam?
lots of English loan words in there - 'patch', 'application', 'pen test'. Logographic languages have always struggled with the creation of new words - they have to be coined - so adopting English for tech makes sense
Read 7 tweets
Sep 8, 2021
I've finished my sandwich, so how here's the 🧵

The meeting between recruiter + hiring manager is a critical part of the process. I spoke with dozens of recruiters from top class employers and condensed their insight into these 20 tips👇
1. Don't call them ‘intake meetings’

Language matters. ‘Intake’ is a one way download of information when the business needs you to be a two-way partner - the recruiting expert to advise and guide the hiring manager. Call it a recruitment strategy or kick off meeting
2/ Collect ‘Job conditions’ up front

Location, remote vs onsite, comp etc - most of this is not going to change, so why discuss it? Collect this up front to allow more time to agree on the important stuff - relationships, process, strategy. Use @jotform
jotform.com
Read 22 tweets
Sep 8, 2021
Now in Jiangmen: they are talking World Cup qualifiers. Much more my scene. radio.garden/listen/fm104-7…
talking about China's chances after losing 1-0 to Japan last night. They don't fancy their chances against Vietnam, a must win fixture
switched to discussing England vs Poland tonight. They seem to think it is a foregone conclusion, a matter of how many England will score
Read 4 tweets
Sep 8, 2021
Listening to customer service call in radio to try and improve my Canto. The fella seems to be buying some kind of incontinence miracle cure radio.garden/listen/fm96-2/…
totally agree with the hosts - they had to get rid of that last caller. Onto the next guy (they are all guys?), he seems at least coherent, if not continent
brilliant pre-close there by the host. 'Would you like to order one or two?' Er....I will order one for now, thanks. SOLD!
Read 4 tweets
Aug 5, 2021
How to build social capital with software developers (as a tech recruiter)

The gap in respect between the recruiter and tech communities is vast. I spoke with tech recruiters, community builders, software engineers and hiring managers to find out how to close it.

A thread.. 👇 Image
1/ Learn about the tech(!)

No one is expecting coding expertise, but recruiters must at least be familiar with the work, how technologies fit together, what roles in an engineering dept do what and why. Kamrans tech roadmaps, a great place to start 👇github.com/kamranahmedse/… Image
2/ Er….actually do learn to code (a little bit)

Give it a shot, why not? You will learn more about coding by actually trying to do it. Take a Udemy beginners course, crank out some crappy code. The value of the embedded learning will far exceed the cost to gain it Image
Read 22 tweets

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