DEI Hiring

Figuring out the ins and outs of as broad a subject as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) can be tough. You could be chasing the wrong goals too. And as someone who has worked at places that had zero education and sensitization on this subject, I know firsthand the hit their workplace culture would take.

I am passionate about creating awareness around diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is why I am very vocal about my learnings on this journey. While there never is a one-size-fits-all solution to any problem, there are some actionable hiring tips to ensure that DE&I at the workplace is a priority and also that it is done right.

Here’s my take on how best to embrace your journey with open arms. #DEI 101, let’s go!

7 step framework for DE&I at the workplace

• Breaking the stereotype for diversity equity and inclusion in the workplace

Going back to the basics, diversity refers to building a multicultural workplace with people and minorities from different backgrounds. You foster inclusion by making people feel like they belong and that they can bring their whole self to work. Simply put, diversity is the mix. Inclusion is making that mix work.

Equity recognizes that the needs of different people are different and focuses on providing opportunities and resources for equal participation without bias, harassment, or discrimination of any kind.

In 2021, it is high time we break the stereotype that hiring for diversity where there is a visible representation of minority groups will naturally ensure that inclusion will follow. My personal learning – don’t run behind the mix. Make your workplace culture inclusive for the people inside your organization. It’s basically about providing a space of ‘psychological safety’ for people. Diversity of thought will organically follow.

• Embedding inclusion into the DNA of your company

The first step in your DEI journey is to understand if your company needs it or not. And then go on to the ‘how’ of it. Some food for thought –

1. Why are you doing this: What makes you want to be diverse & inclusive?
2. Inclusion is personal: What does I&D mean personally to you, as a company?
3. Analyze your I&D growth so far: Where do you stand today?
4. The desired goal of your strategy: Where do you want to be? Visualize the end outcome & state.
5. Final question: Ah, do you still want to do it?

Recommended read: Talking #BlackLinkedIn and DEI with Patricia Gatlin

I think the message that I’m trying to leave you with, is that it’s important to spend time on exactly why you want to do this. And to check in with the above questions and see if you still want to do this. If you’re choosing to be inclusive, then make it impactful, genuinely, not just for the sake of it. Otherwise, don’t waste your time.

• HackerEarth’s DE&I strategy is a must-have. Not a to-do

At HackerEarth, we believe inclusion is personal and start the dialogue from there. It’s not something we do as a one-off on special days – we invest in giving our people the correct language to use; we ask them to call out behaviors that are not ok, and educate and sensitize others towards these behaviors. We believe in educating people on ally-ship and support – and not educating them only on the marginalized groups.

In this company, inclusion is everyone’s responsibility – not just a mandate for HRs, or the top management. With my experience, I can tell you that it is possible to build such inclusive workplaces, but it needs heart. And a lot of effort. And nope, there is no one size that fits all.

Recommended read: How To Build Safe And ‘PROUD’ Workplaces – A Personal Story

• Measuring your DE&I efforts at the workplace

Targets and metrics for your DEI journey can make for great indicators of progress if used wisely. The minute you look upon them as your be-all and end-all, your journey can become severely crippled.

I’ve personally seen metrics limit people from creating a larger impact. People get hung up only on meeting those numbers. What you end up doing then – creating a diverse team, on the short term and miss creating an inclusive culture, for the long term.

• Key to an inclusive leadership

What is the role of a CEO and any company’s management team on this journey? They play a significant role in making their employees feel like they belong. That they are respected and treated fairly.

According to the Harvard Business Review, a leader’s awareness of personal and organizational biases is the most important trait in generating a sense of inclusiveness in the workplace. Read more about the signature traits of inclusive leadership and how leaders can put these traits into practice in this insightful article.

I’ve been a firm believer of not holding only the ‘leaders’ responsible for anything and everything in a company. I strongly believe that inclusion is something that will fall flat if the CEO/leaders/ of a company do not visibly and authentically commit to and be a role model for their employee to follow suit.

HackerEarth has an inherently non-judgemental culture, which appears as if it is entirely natural without too much work going into it. That is not the case of course. Inclusion is at the heart of everything we do as a company; we have expanded our umbrella over time to touch upon topics that most of us were taught to shy away from.

It is not a one-time activity to do and then dust your hands off but more of a process that needs to be carefully woven into the threads of your company.

What is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the workplace?

Diversity in the workplace

Diversity in the workplace refers to the presence of individuals from various backgrounds, demographics, and perspectives within an organization. It encompasses differences in race, gender, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, abilities, and more. Diversity recognizes that each employee brings unique experiences and talents to the table, enriching the collective knowledge and creativity of the workforce.

Equity in the workplace

Equity in the workplace is the commitment to fairness and impartiality in all employment practices. It ensures that everyone has equal access to opportunities and resources, regardless of their background or circumstances. Equity strives to rectify historical and systemic disparities by addressing biases and leveling the playing field, ultimately fostering a more just and inclusive work environment.

Inclusion in the workplace

Inclusion is the active effort to create a work culture where all employees feel valued, respected, and empowered to contribute their best. It goes beyond mere diversity by fostering an environment where diverse perspectives are not only welcomed but also integrated into decision-making processes and daily operations. Inclusion is essential for harnessing the full potential of a diverse workforce and promoting a sense of belonging among employees.

This is one of the reasons why I decided to keep an open dialogue going to exchange thoughts, opinions, and ideas from different perspectives on my LinkedIn channel. Now that you have an initial framework for your DE&I strategy to work with, let’s talk about positive discrimination next. Watch this space for the second part of this blog series.

Hire IQ by HackerEarth is a new initiative in which we speak with recruiters, talent acquisition managers, and hiring managers from across the globe, and ask them pertinent questions on the issues that ail the tech recruiting world. For this first edition, we spoke with Charles Rue, Head of Talent Acquisition (EMEA), at IHS Markit. Diversity and inclusion are topics close to Charles’ and his work is a reflection of his efforts to make the tech world a bigger better place for coders of all backgrounds. So, it was a given that the topic of choice for this conversation would be related to DE&I.

Read on!

HackerEarth: Please tell us a bit about yourself and your journey in the hiring world.

Charles: After a previous life in management consulting, I started my career in recruitment in Japan, which is a great training ground for a recruiter as it is a market where professionals tend to be loyal to their employer, and are therefore extremely difficult to dislodge, especially for roles at foreign firms. After heading the Financial Services practice there for nine years, I relocated to Hong Kong where I successively set up a new desk for an executive search firm, opened the local office for a global recruitment firm specialized in Financial Services, and finally joined the recruitment function of a large global bank via their RPO partner. There, I gained considerable experience in large scale, complex recruitment campaigns, in areas such as Retail and Corporate Banking, Asset Management, Insurance and the full spectrum of Digital Transformation.

This last experience gave me the opportunity to later on join IHS Markit, a world leader in critical information, analytics and solutions, and head their EMEA recruitment function.

HackerEarth: As a talent acquisition leader, when did you start to understand the importance of creating diverse teams? Are there any real-life examples you can share with us?

Charles: At an early stage in my career, I was aware that diverse teams can tackle challenges much more effectively due to the richness of perspectives, especially in complex, changing environments. The real battle was convincing my clients when I was working on the agency side because their candidate assessment methods were not robustly documented or consistent. Assessment bias was rife, and what was expected from external recruitment agencies was essentially reinforcement, where interviewers and decision makers with already developed opinions were selectively incorporating information that supported their own views. Later, when I was in-house, it was easier to influence stakeholders.

I recall a specific example where our recruitment teams focused on restoring the gender balance of a financial services sales team. During the following year, work environment indicators went up, positive client feedback was more numerous, collaboration increased, and revenue went up. That small-scale example helped develop awareness among the leadership team.

HackerEarth: IHS Markit has been in the industry for a long while. Could you shed some light on how the hiring policies have changed/evolved at the company vis-a-vis DE&I?

Charles: Openness has been at the center of IHS Markit company culture. While Diversity, Equity and Inclusion have underpinned our corporate strategy and the way we want to hire and develop our people, we certainly have developed a more structured approach in recent years. For example, we have enhanced our list of D&I partners to help us better understand and connect with under-represented candidate pools.

Our recruiting tool combines artificial intelligence and neuroscience to assist in removing unconscious bias during screening. On top of that, we have developed our own internal interviewing framework called the IHS Markit Way to help ensure consistent interview questions and that everyone is being assessed against the same unbiased criteria by a diverse panel. Finally, on the Early Careers front, we have added D&I organizations SEO London and Wall Street Bound as our main candidate sourcing partners during our 2020-2021 Intern and Graduate recruiting campaign.

Also Read: How To Increase Your Diversity Hiring ROI

HackerEarth: What do you think are the top 3 mistakes that companies new to diversity hiring make when formulating policies?

Charles: There are quite a few pitfalls when looking at improving diversity in the workforce. The first one is not getting genuine support from the top leadership team. That’s paramount. Hiring Managers will sense quickly if the company’s diversity goals are hollow or if there are real consequences for not supporting diversity in every hiring decision. Leaders must be 100% committed to the company’s diversity objectives, and keep communicating about their commitment internally and externally.

The second pitfall is missing the data. Diversity data is the very first step before a situation can be understood, and corresponding diversity goals can be set. Not collecting the right data, and compiling the data in effective dashboards is like shooting in the dark. It will frustrate teams and slow down adoption. A third pitfall is not asking help from diversity professionals. I think it is a common mistake as most HR and Recruitment functions tend to think that tweaking policies and buying assessment tools will single-handedly drive a more diverse workforce.

This approach is totally missing the cornerstone of an effective diversity strategy: diversity attraction, which can be translated into ‘how to transform a company to make it really inclusive?’, and ‘how to connect with underrepresented populations, and develop the right role proposition that will lead to an application?’ This is where specialized organizations can provide guidance on inclusiveness, and also leverage their extensive network within underrepresented populations.

HackerEarth: A question that we love asking everybody: Skills vs. Diversity – which one would you choose and why?

Charles: I genuinely don’t think we should have to make this choice. We should aim for both. If we can’t find both in a given market, companies should then go for diversity and then develop programs that will create skills internally. This is what we are doing at IHS Markit through our Early Careers recruitment programs.

We partner with specialized organizations and make sure our hiring outcomes fully support our diversity goals. Candidates for Internships and Graduate positions are assessed using consistent methods, against four role profiles. We select candidates who exhibit specific attributes and show growth potential. Our cohorts are nurtured so that required skills can be grown, while all the time we never had to negotiate on diversity.

HackerEarth: Have you come across D&I initiatives from various companies that have wowed you, and why do you think they work? (Examples can be AirBnB’s WeAccept campaign, or Salesforce’s equality groups).

Charles: BlackRock has created many positive D&I initiatives including the organization of their MOSAIC employee network, or the use of a Rare Contextual Recruitment System for early career recruitment in the United Kingdom. The latter recognizes that not every candidate’s achievements look the same on paper. Using the Rare Contextual Recruitment System allows BlackRock to see beyond an online application to better understand the circumstances in which each applicant’s achievements have been gained.

From BlackRock’s perspective, this process enables the firm to identify the best talent from all backgrounds. Deutsche Bank also has done interesting things in the area of gender diversity. Deutsche has won an award for its global sponsorship program ATLAS, which helps women progress to senior positions.

HackerEarth: Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Twitter decided to start publishing an annual diversity hiring report in 2014. That was the first time that tech companies publicly acknowledged the diversity gap in their workplaces and vowed to change hiring practices.

Seven years later, there is only a marginal increase in diversity numbers at these companies. In your opinion, what are these companies:

1. Doing well
2. Doing wrong and how can they better it

Charles: Clearly the situation has not improved much. I’ve read recently that the proportion of US technical employees (coders, engineers, and data scientists) at some of these firms who are black or Latinx hasn’t risen since 2014. It seems however that the proportion of women has progressed, though no company is close to parity yet.

On the ‘plus’ side, all of these firms have made large investments into various education programs to encourage more women and minorities to consider tech, to help address a legacy of underrepresentation. On the ‘minus’ side however, all of these firms are growing, and are in need of much more under-represented candidates than they used to be, while attrition for these very same under-represented populations is clearly much higher than average.

Basically, despite all their investments, tech companies still haven’t addressed biases in their cultures, promotion criteria, and the broader issue of inclusion and belonging. These items will need to be on their agenda if they want to make an impact on their own D&I goals.

Further Reading

If you like this post, then try our 'Ten-step Guide To Diversity Hiring'

HackerEarth: There is a lot of talk about data-driven recruiting. When it comes to diversity hiring, what are the metrics you think talent acquisition managers should live or die by?

Charles: Purely from a talent acquisition perspective, there should really be three diversity metrics:

• the first one measuring whether proportions of job applicants are reflective of the local population’s diversity mix (gender, ethnicity, socio-economic background, sexual orientation, etc.),
• the second measuring whether the same diversity mix is eventually hired locally,
• and the third measuring whether retention levels are consistent across populations, including women, minorities or under-represented ethnicities.

All three metrics should be measured at country level, across role levels, and department, so that data aggregation does not hide a local diversity issue. These three metrics will uncover attraction gaps and hiring/promotion bias, and should lead to a more accountable diversity strategy.

HackerEarth: Let’s end this with a tip (or two) for recruiters/talent acquisition managers who would like to amp up diversity hiring in their companies..

Charles: First, talk to your firm’s top leadership team and secure their commitment to taking responsibility for building an inclusive hiring process. Leaders should communicate their commitment to the principles of Diversity to the rest of the firm.

Second, work with your HR Analytics team and start measuring team diversity ratios before setting achievable targets.

Third, take concrete action by writing inclusive Job Adverts (the Gender Decoder tool is free!), advertising job adverts on diversity friendly job boards, actively reaching out on LinkedIn to underrepresented candidates, and by assessing candidates using objective and consistent methods.

Fourth, talk to professional D&I organizations that will help you refine and structure your approach. They have seen it all, and will help save a lot of time.

About Charles Rue:

Charles brings with him a decade and a half of recruitment experience at notable companies like HSBC, Eames

Consulting, and the Michael Page Group. He has been with IHS Markit since 2019 and is a champion of diversity and inclusion in the tech space.

Charles has more than 16 years of recruitment experience in the EMEA and APAC region, developing an expertise in volume (Experienced and Graduate) and senior to executive level permanent hiring in the Banking, Data, Digital, Insurance, Fintech, Asset Management and Payment Solutions sectors. Prior to joining IHS Markit, Charles was responsible for the delivery of large recruitment volumes for HSBC in Hong Kong.

Charles has been involved in a broad range of recruitment performance improvement projects and D&I initiatives in various setups, from external recruitment agencies, to RPO and in-house environments.

If you are a recruiter or a hiring manager, the first thought that pops into your head when you think ‘tech hiring’ would most likely be ‘it’s complicated,’ just like the movie! What if we were to tell you that it doesn’t have to be?

Our aim of making tech hiring simple, fair, and unprejudiced began over eight years ago. Since then, we have been adding carefully designed products for each phase of the hiring lifecycle to our kitty and rounded off by launching HackerEarth for Enterprises earlier this year.

Your one-stop-shop for all things hiring is finally here.

The ‘suite’ spot of tech hiring

To make the lives of both sides of the hiring equation easy, namely, recruiters and developers, we present to you HackerEarth for Enterprises – a complete suite of products right from attracting, sourcing, interviewing to upskilling.

It’s the tech industry’s first comprehensive platform of its kind to unite every step of the employee lifecycle. Our solutions are built by developers for developers so we get a ringside view of all the possible challenges that a developer may face during the hiring process.

Let me take you through how our products benefit each step of the tech hiring employee lifecycle.

The tech behind hiring great tech teams

#1 Hackathons

The first phase of the hiring process begins with sourcing and attracting the right candidates when a job role opens up.

With our 6 million strong developer community, we put organizations in the path of one of the largest qualified candidate pools out there. Our customized virtual hackathons are well-suited to engaging the developer community as well as strengthen your employer brand. We are fully capable of conducting and managing hackathons at scale to drive business impact.

Our hiring challenges are better-equipped to standardize sourcing and finding the right developer according to your hiring needs. Tech companies like Microsoft, IBM, Amazon Alexa have utilized our hiring challenges to attract and source the best candidates for their teams.

#2 HackerEarth Assessments

With your shortlisted candidates, you now have to check for their skills. See if what they mentioned on their resumes pans out in a live coding assessment. The coding test tool should also be easy to use, offer objective evaluation, and provide detailed reports.

Check, check and check. HackerEarth Assessments offers all this and more. Our rich library of 13,000+ questions across 80+ skills enables you to create highly accurate coding assessments with very minimal technical knowledge. Our platform lets you create your own assessment for any role or skill in under 5 minutes, and you can even add your custom questions if you like!

Since our platform can seamlessly integrate with popular ATSs like LinkedIn Talent Hub, Lever, Workable, JazzHR, and more, you can sync all your candidate data with your ATS. You can directly invite candidates to take the assessment you created on our platform, see at what stage each candidate is in throughout the hiring process, and avail performance reports, all from your ATS – without switching between multiple applications.

Our advanced proctoring measures with the option to customize the stringency, insight-rich reports on each candidate’s performance, and built-in PII (Personal Identifiable Information) feature that eliminates bias from the process offer an objective, accurate, and unprejudiced screening process.

Recommended Read: Why Organizations Should Not Stop Skill Assessments Post Hiring

#3 FaceCode

Tech interviews get a bad rap from developers all around the world. Be it because of the complicated, archaic interview processes, or using whiteboards or even pen/paper. We wanted to create an interview experience that can blow away even the most critical of developers and that is how FaceCode, our intelligent remote interviewing tool came to life!

We released the updated version of our coding interview platform – FaceCode 2.0 – earlier this year in March. Following the release, we have seen a considerable spike (57%) in the number of users on our platform.

FaceCode allows you to easily invite candidates and conduct coding interviews, using a real-time, collaborative code editor with a built-in compiler. Say goodbye to whiteboards!

Enter pair programming with a panel of up to 5 interviewers who can conduct live interviews. Our tool also offers objective and standardized evaluation parameters to ensure that every candidate is evaluated based on the same parameters.

Lack of feedback post-interview is a major thorn in candidates’ side, as stated by 40% of the respondents of HackerEarth’s Developer Survey 2021. With FaceCode, that is no longer a problem. Our platform provides automated summarized reports at the end of each interview populated with AI-based behavioral insights. Isn’t that neat?

Recommended Read: Ultimate Playbook for Better Tech Hiring

#4 HackerEarth’s L&D platform and Internal Hackathons

To be future-ready is to be conscious of the steps you take in the present. Hiring your selected candidate, onboarding them, and assigning them responsibilities is not the end of the journey. As a company focused on driving innovation continuously, you have to start with your employees. Nurture them, engage them, and give them ample opportunities to learn at every stage of their career.

HackerEarth’s L&D platform helps employees to assess themselves and identify skill gaps. Once these are defined, you can then curate individual learning pathways that will help your team upskill, grow and be ready for future challenges in the ‘present’.

Ensuring your team is sufficiently engaged given that everybody is working remotely is of superior importance. Our internal hackathons bring different teams together to enhance cross-team collaboration and participate in real-world challenges to brush up on their skills.

Building future-ready tech teams begins here

Hiring in tech, especially in the aftermath of a pandemic, has become extremely competitive. To keep up with the rapidly changing trends and landscape, you need to make your hiring process seamless, empathetic, and flexible for your candidates – to attract the most qualified talent.

At HackerEarth, that is what we deliver on a silver platter! A robust, easy-to-use, remote-ready platform that caters to your every hiring need along with providing a positive interview experience for your developers.

Are you ready to begin building your dream tech team? Go on then, take HackerEarth for Enterprises for a quick spin to know more.