In the North American tech sphere, we’re kind of clueless about hiring. We’re indoctrinated to do or avoid so many things that are directly at odds with our ostensible goals.
We think our rules are to avoid bias, but they don’t. We think we can judge people exclusively on their skills and experience. We can’t. We’ll even let software pick candidates for us to keep our hands clean. But we seem to forget that companies are made up of groups of messy humans, and skills and experience are a small piece of the team experience.
For my company’s recent hiring, we received resumes with photos included, which seems to be common in much of the rest of the world. Many also included details like birth dates, marital status, and secondary school and university marks, among other things.
Given my indoctrination in North American hiring practices, my brain was panicking. We don’t want to know any of these things! Not to mention that our goal is “fit,” and those details don’t help with that.
Except that when we interview and meet with people, perceived fit doesn’t actually have that much to do with the candidate or their personality. “Fit” tends to mean that they seem enough like us to make us feel comfortable fairly quickly. This impression is anything but unbiased.
I am learning that getting an accurate picture of skills and experience actually requires getting to know the person and personality. I am also learning that hiring with a real intent toward improving diversity requires a hard focus on what we normally avoid or on what may not be immediately apparent. It requires asking “why” or “why not” regarding applicants’ opportunities or experience.
Like any skill, it’s getting easier with practice, but it’s brain retraining, and it’s draining initially. At first I also had no idea if I was doing it right.
I am grateful that we’re at the point with my company that we no longer feel like we have to hire the best cookie cutter candidate as quickly as possible.
It also occurred to me that in the same way we perceive similarity as “fit,” we perceive these worn-in hiring habits and as efficiency and productivity. It feels good; it feels like we’re getting the best candidate, when in reality we’re very likely getting the most familiar candidate, the least challenging one.
But hiring shouldn’t be about making me, or you, feel good. Hiring for a team that’s diverse, challenges each other, thinks in a variety of ways, and that is beneficial to more of your customer base requires making the time to deliberately look for and at people in ways that you haven’t before.
Attracting a diverse group of applicants is fairly easy for my company, since we’re fully remote. But in a lot of places and industries, many applicants have been discouraged or shut out for so long that considerable and creative efforts need to be made to even reach these people and convince them to apply, let alone choose among them for hiring.
But just having a diverse applicant pool doesn’t solve anything. We carry biases for almost every scenario. For example, it’s all too easy to mentally equate a support role applicant from India or the Philippines with bad personal experiences with outsourced call centre support.
Now, say you’re from one of those countries. You’re smart and ambitious and would love to help people in a better environment. But there’s a good chance you end up in one of two situations.
Either you’ve had jobs in that field, and they haven’t been “call centre drone” gigs, but it’s hard to make that clear on your resume. Especially if the company hiring isn’t local and won’t understand the nuances of business where you live.
Or the only decent tech-ish jobs available were in contractor call centres, so those are the jobs you’ve had, with the result that your resume gets judged on sight and you don’t get opportunities for something better.
And that’s just one example of potential bias for one potential hiring.
We got better and faster at the new process. 50 resumes, 100, 200 .… Most importantly, it worked. With the exception of one person chosen for an interview (who flaked), we genuinely liked everyone we interviewed. They were smart, ambitious, and had the right feel for working independently and helping people. The majority of the interviewees were people of colour. Having to say no to any of them sucked.
I did say that this process wasn’t about making me feel good. But unburdening myself of a career’s worth of North American corporate cultural habits felt good.
Wanting to know who candidates were by perusing their applications to learn about them felt good, as did knowing what impact a job offer from us would have on their lives, not just that their qualifications checked off some mental list.
It also felt good to remember what it had felt like when we (the hiring team) had escaped the standard corporate world, which had never suited us, for a company and work that very much did. And to offer that opportunity to other corporate misfits.
Selfishly, I also know that there are so many brains out there packed with information I don’t know. And man, do I want access to that. I want people willing to constructively argue with me and tell me when I’m full of it.
This kind of hiring is infectious. I’m more excited for the upcoming start dates. Team members outside of my team are excited for this new blood. We’ve shared some of our process and ideas with our developers for their current hiring.
Obviously, my team has a long way to go before we’re the gold standard for great success at hiring like this, and paragons of diversity. But we’ve had a taste, which has made me even more impatient with the old ways of dealing with the hiring process, or paying mere lip service to diversity goals, or rendering awesome but unusual candidates invisible.
Studies that show the benefits of women in leadership, diverse teams, etc., generally don’t get through to people. We get stuck in our learned patterns. We feel more comfortable with people like ourselves.
But really, among the potential corporate battles in your career, or leadership goals in building your company, what else is as important in the long run?
Tech’s doctrine of moving fast and breaking things is crap. We cling to convenience, familiarity, and privilege like we would drown without it. Tech is already broken.
How about we make our doctrine about demolishing dusty old habits that limit our potential and shut out some of the most interesting people you could be working with.
M-Theory is an opinion column by Melanie Baker. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Communitech. Melle can be reached @melle or me@melle.ca.
Photo by Pixabay on Pexals.
