Recruiting to inclusivity - in tech

Print by Mariann Hardey. No Cogs Can Turn. March 2020.

My work with various Government think tanks, tech start-ups, organisations and the Government's own Digital Services is where I advocate for the step-change to enable inclusivity in tech. These include activities where I provide training / workshops / presentations / other things to get people talking and the attention and buy-in of senior management. 


While there's an acknowledgement of 'the problem', and my work goes some way to reframe the labelling of 'women in tech' at the heart of the 'the problem', professionals, industry and policy continue to restrict how to implement change. 


So if you are recruiting into a tech role and you want to be 'inclusive', what can you do? Well, there is a lot, and this post will take you through some of the changes needed.

• One of the most effective strategies is to review the language used in the job role description and responsibilities. 

to give some context read the Forbes article on "How to take gender out of job ads."
Textio is an online tool that analyses job descriptions (US-based) and suggests improvements to make the language more appealing to all applicants. 
Similarly, Gender Decoder for Job Ads highlights gendered wording. It identifies if a post is masculine- or feminine-coded < again, we are dealing with broad brush strokes here, but useful to 'have the conversation' that gender bias in language and role descriptions exist.

• Next, scheduling interviews to allow candidates with any caring role to indicate a preferred time to attend. 

I worked with a company that organised a 'day creche' whose objective it was explicitly to recruit women into roles with accelerated training programme attached. The main issue was not getting applications from women who wanted to go into senior/management roles. The solution was to recruit to junior positions with a 'five-year' accelerator plan attached to get those candidates into senior positions. The pay off here was not only better diversity at the recruitment level, but much better staff retention. 

• Another tact is to target the job specification to appeal to candidates who had 'taken a career break'. 

This worked with the language employed in the job ad (specifically asking for experience outside the sector and identifying support for candidates who had taken a career break). At the same time, the job ads were promoted through recruitment agencies AND seeded into community tech groups supporting diversity, e.g. tech women groups, LGBTQ+, and tech mother/father/parent groups. 

• A strange one is the use of a recruitment video. So along with the job spec, a video to share the organisations culture of work, the work environment, and show current workers. 

This was most successful with candidates with a disability whose feedback stated video content alongside text helped them to engage with the recruitment process in a less stressful and beneficial way. (depends on the level of investment in recruitment methods). In my research, this was an excellent strategy for targeting new parents who had the time to watch a video and then felt they could invest in writing / reviewing CV's and cover letters and felt this was better than studying lots of /pdf files to find out about the position;

• One further method was to offer an online 'task' for candidates to complete when/if successful candidates could then submit a full application. 

This is, in my experiene, a 'marmite' method. From my research (mainly women) spoke about being initially put off or were worried they failed. However, after being successful (they all were) in completing the tasks, they felt more committed/ interested in/ and invested in the position and confident about putting in a full application. This also gave candidates and recruiters something to talk about in the interview. One strategy employed was not to retain the candidates who had 'failed' the task and to review why they had failed. Then to invite them to complete the task again and to take them further on in the process. What is happening here is the organisation is investing at the pre-interview stage to support the candidates. If this is to work correctly, there would need to be careful wording to alleviate anxiety about this part of the process and to encourage candidates to apply. It could work well. 

Depending on how your organisation works with recruitment (internal and external) - a summary of strategies that have been effective include:

• working with HR from the beginning to review/revise the job template;
• focus-groups to review previous/current job ads to acknowledge what can/should be changed (play around with the Gender Decoder for Job Ads); 
• revising the adage of 'what the candidate can do for the organisation', and focusing on how the organisation can support/develop the candidate (this was a beneficial change intact with companies I've worked with (including the civil service, though they are very stuck to traditional workflows and ways of working); 
• being open about remote and flexible working; 
• focusing on the culture of work / presencing in the office environment - usually, something that comes up at the interview, but could be included in the 'about the organisation' part of the job description, so you are actively pulling people in; 
• providing examples of training and support (if this is available); 
• being aware of job roles/ responsibilities tied to language and making this as neutral/active as possible < almost impossible to neutralise as language is gendered(!) completely; 
• child-care/creche offered to interview candidates, appropriate timings, or using 'live' video interviews (as a phase I) to support those with caring roles; 
• stating the organisation's inclusive agenda - so revising 'diversity' to 'inclusivity'. In tech roles, the acknowledgement here is the step change to an inclusive work environment. Rather than recruiting to 'diversity' for the sake of it, we revise the recruitment process to be as inclusive as possible. The tone of this is quite tricky to get right - and I still working on how organisations can appropriately implement this). You also need to make sure current workers and senior management are on board with the narrative and aware of the agenda in the first place. In essence, often these are overlooked or dismissed as 'just part of HR'. And we're back to the change in culture needed - especially in tech. 

Alongside the tech industry, I am going through a similar process of recruitment to three new positions to a three-year tech project. In this process, my hands are tied (a lot) by formal HR methods. For example, I can tweak the job description template, but this needs senior management approval. I cannot change the layout of the template. And, what I want to do is change some of the language used: switch 'ideal candidate' to 'ideally suited to'. I'd then like to go straight into how the roles will help develop the skills of the individual before the role responsibilities - in effect, reversing the layout of the current job template.

I am continuing to think about new ways to support an inclusive recruitment process, some of these are easy-to-change things, others require buy-in from management and change how we think about recruitment.

All do-able. These take time and the right people to 'say yes'.  There's a lot of material out there - which is good!