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by npelly 3339 days ago
I've never seen suggestions that Facebook has a lower hiring bar for females, and i'd be really surprised if this was the case.

The playbook is to aggressively attract female (and other diversity) candidates into the top of the hiring funnel, but keep the hiring bar equal.

Source - I used to be a hiring manager at a similar large-cap tech company.

2 comments

Wasn't specifically talking about facebook, more of a generic situation here. You can't attract good female talents, if you don't have female devs in your company. Also in the market there are a lot of junior candidates (and a lot of them coming from a different background and just trying to land a job that will allow them to live in san francisco). It is easy to blame sexism (riding the wave now) when it may just be that some code isn't good... At least according to this article the bias has more to do with the experience of some coder.

https://news.fastcompany.com/at-facebook-women-coders-are-ju...

This kinds really messes with candidates brains in a way. A descent coder I know gets a billion interview requests in linkedin but after completing a number of loops she got all rejects. She now firmly believes she doesn't get accepted coz she's not a male.

There's only so many rejects you can get before you say "fuck it! I'm gonna choose another career path, this was a waste of time, money and energy"

It's hard to keep the bar equal when some candidates are treated as higher value, especially considering if you're putting women at the top of your funnel you can be sure Google is too.
It's not that hard.

Hiring managers / hiring committees for technical positions at the big-5 are made up of peer engineers and managers (not recruiters or executives). So they hire the best person for the job because they're likely to be working alongside.

I haven't come across situations where there are direct diversity incentives at the point where the hiring decision is made. Sure, there's probably indirect incentives, but I don't think they're as strong as your suggesting.

And engineers are free of bias? You know the candidate is a desirable hire and will receive competing offers because of their gender (rightly or wrongly).