How to build a (real) diverse team

@accurx started 2019 with 20% gender diversity. They ended the year with 50%. Here's how:

• Reduce required experience in job ad
• Do 2+ rounds of interviews w/diverse hiring panel
• Be transparent
• Get out there, do outreach

(thread)

1/ Reduce required experience in job ad.

Evidence says men will apply if they meet 3 out of 10 criteria and women if they meet like 9 out of 10 criteria.

Lowering criteria means a larger pipeline of candidates.

Here's Jacob:

"We lowered the job requirements on a lot of the job adverts, but we kept the same bar when reviewing applications.... So by lowering the bar we tried to make sure our whole funnel was diverse rather than doing anything different about how we select people."

2/ Check wording in job ad

"We put all of our job adverts through a gender decoder to make sure that they didn’t have language or wording that was particularly appealing or not to certain genders."

3/ Do 2+ rounds of interviews w/diverse hiring panel:

"We made sure our candidates never had just one face-to-face interview so if they were particularly nervous on one day they had another chance, and that they were never interviewed entirely by one gender but a mixed panel."

4/ Be transparent.

"We published our employee handbook and tried to be really really transparent about our culture and how we support personal development and just like the day to day, week to week, month to month running of the team."

5/ Get out there and do outreach.

"Some of our team started teaching at @CodeFirstGirls, a great coding bootcamp for women"

Building a diverse team – of gender, race, but most importantly of opinion – is the only way when you are in healthcare, building for the definition of diversity.

You can read the full conversation here. https://editions.seedtable.com/accurx-interview/