[brianwawok]

So what if 70% of applicants are not women. Do you turn down better men just do meet a woman quota? That seems the wrong way to get diversity.

If a great man comes along hire him. If a great woman comes along hire her.

If you have a quota of X you are going to hire less qualified people, thus creating a culture of quotas and not performance.

[hibikir]

Quotas aren't necessarily the best ideas, but if 90% of your applicants are men, and men and women have the same pass rates, what you have to work on is resume sourcing. This is especially true in companies that mostly hire referrals: You are mostly hiring people that are like the people you have, so you'll lose diversity on average.

You also have to look at differences in the middle of the pipeline. Imagine you only give a phone screen to 5% of female applicants, but 10% of male applicants. You have to think very hard about why that happens. Maybe your ways of rating resumes have a built in bias.

For instance, imagine that I only interviewed new grads that had at least two internships in large tech companies. A rubric like that looks neutral, but you'll discover that the demographics of CS graduates vs those that have those two internships are very different (far fewer women, and a lot more people that will identify themselves as asian).

[aries1980]

> Quotas aren't necessarily the best ideas, but if 90% of your applicants are men, and men and women have the same pass rates, what you have to work on is resume sourcing.

I agree with your approach, but the gender is not the only diversity metric. If you push this toward ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, introversion, geekness level, you might end up in a difficult situation and your company will look like Noah's ark. Instead, what I would do is to specify the tasks that needs to be carried out and define metric to measure it, then do a blind hiring. Attributes like graduation or work experience is irrelevant if the candidate passed the test. During the probationary period, if the team doesn't like the new members or the other way round, you can let them go.

[aplusbi]

If you try to increase diversity by implementing a quota system you are doing it wrong.

The right way is to look for qualified candidates from multiple backgrounds. For example, plenty of companies recruit from MIT but how many recruit from Spelman College?

[nsavaaytrev]

> If a great man comes along hire him. If a great woman comes along hire him.

Lol.. oops.

[brianwawok]

:(

[lagg]

Sorry man, your post has now been sucked into the toxic pit of horrible people both male and female. Also known as twitter. I tried to set the record straight, but alas I have less followers. You are now a horrible person and your typo is forever enshrined.

https://twitter.com/laggdotme/status/784502966728269824