I’ve had the chance to observe a lot of engineering hiring lately and it’s given me a lot of thoughts about diversity hiring.
Much of the screening process to hire for software jobs happens before you actually see an engineer write any code; you look at their resume and decide if they’re worth calling back, you talk to them on the phone and decide if they’re worth sending an at-home screen of some kind, you look at that and decide whether to bring them in for an interview.
Now, obviously you can change around your standards for who you talk to and who you bring on for an on-site interview. There’s always a chance that a candidate will really impress you at the interview, even if they have a mediocre resume and aren’t impressive on a phone screen, but it’s not as likely. Maybe candidates who have pretty limited resumes and aren’t impressive on the phone have only a 5% chance of turning out, once you do an on-site, to be someone you want to hire. While candidates with a great resume who sound amazing on the phone have a 30% chance of turning out to be someone you want to hire.
Your engineering team does not want to interview twenty people to find someone hireable. They like writing software, not interviewing. If they sit through fifteen days of interviews with people who suck and aren’t hireable, they will be miserable. You will end up setting your bar higher, so that you don’t bother bringing people on for an onsite which they have only a 15% chance of passing, and you’ll inevitably pass up some great engineers you would have hired but you’ll also waste a lot less time.
So your engineering team wants more women/people of color/veterans/disabled people/etc. I feel like the narrative I’ve heard around affirmative action has been ‘either you can use it as a tiebreaker (i.e., when you have two equally qualified candidates you pick the candidate with the background you want) or you can pass up qualified candidates to pick less qualified ones or you can give up on diversity hiring altogether’.
And obviously there’s another option: you can be likelier to talk to them in the first place. You can let someone through to have an interview even if you think, based on the phone screen, there’s only a 15% chance that after the interview you’ll want to make them an offer. This does not involve hiring less qualified candidates, just talking to more people in order to miss fewer qualified ones. I think this is the most common actual diversity tradeoff involved in actual hiring, and it’s weird to me that it’s not even mentioned as a form diversity hiring can take when people are talking about the challenges of doing hiring appropriately.
(Incidentally the ‘tiebreaker’ thing is very very rarely what is going on, and pretty much never at a company like Google or Facebook. If Google interviews two great engineers they want, they’ll hire both of them, they don’t have to choose. They’re not trying to fill specific openings, they’re trying to get good engineers and place them on a team that has an opening.)
