It’s been found in multiple studies that diverse teams produce more innovative software and products. In fact, Boston Consulting Group found that companies with diverse management teams generated 45% of their revenue from innovative new products while companies without diverse leadership only generated 26% of their revenue from new products.
Creating diverse teams starts with your hiring process.
As humans, we all have biases that can inform our hiring decisions and unfortunately, inadvertently weed out strong candidates. For example, HackerRank research has found that women are closing the gender gap in the computer science field and have the in-demand skills that hiring managers are looking for. But, resumes with female-sounding names are less likely to be hired than resumes with male-sounding names even if their resumes are exactly the same.
The first step to preventing biases from seeping into your hiring process is to stop screening resumes and start with a focus on skills. It shouldn’t matter what degrees a candidate holds or what their gender, nationality, or ethnicity is as long as they have the skills needed to succeed in their jobs.
Introducing the Diversity and Inclusion Center
To further combat biases as well as to ensure that companies are able to hire high-quality and diverse talent pools, HackerRank is excited to announce the Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) Center. The center allows companies to empower hiring teams to make better hiring decisions by eliminating unconscious bias and offer an inclusive interview experience.
With the D&I center, recruiters and hiring managers can:
Root out unconscious bias programmatically
Talent acquisition and engineering leaders can now implement a hiring process where personal candidate information such as name, email, gender, education levels, university, and more can be concealed in candidate reports. These reports show how someone performed in online technical assessments taken on HackerRank’s CodeScreen platform. The hiring team can also hide the same information in the reports they receive on a candidate’s performance during pair programming technical interviews taken on HackerRank’s CodePair platform. Thus, when interviewers or hiring committees review these candidate reports, they will be making decisions based only on skills.
Not only can companies mitigate unconscious bias in report reviews through the D&I Center, they can also remove bias during real-time pair programming sessions in CodePair. The center allows employers to make CodePair sessions anonymous by disabling the video and audio chat functions in the platform and masking the name of the candidate participating in the session.
Provide an inclusive interview experience
With the D&I Center, recruiters and hiring managers can now give candidates extra time to complete their technical assessments. This allows employers to accommodate candidates with different needs. For example, a candidate who has a muscular impairment may need additional time to accommodate slower text input.
Using the Diversity and Inclusion Center to create diverse and inclusive teams
Diversity is key to creating cutting edge products. This means that companies need more employees who historically haven’t been present in technical teams such as veterans, people of color, women, LGBTQ individuals, people with disabilities, parents returning to work, or developers from non-traditional backgrounds. With a skills-based and diverse hiring approach and the D&I Center features, HackerRank enables you and your team to take tangible steps towards building a diverse workforce. You can learn more here:
Maria Chung is the VP of People at HackerRank. She has close to 20 years of experience in the tech industry, leading teams at companies such as Verb Surgical, Quotient Technology, and Yahoo.
