On today’s episode of Nurture.Team, the exploration we are going to have is:
The pipeline excuse in building a Diverse team
- What is diversity?
- How to measure it and what’s a realistic timeline/ metric to improvise on it?
- How to deal with “I am not finding candidates for the open roles to build a diverse team” excuse – and how can this be fixed?
- The role of a hiring manager, HR organization and company’s leadership in fixing the pipeline excuse problem.
About the guest speaker
Guest for this episode is Michelle Glauser
Michelle is Founder and CEO of Techtonica
Prior to founding Techtonica, she was a Community Developer at Twilio and held software engineering roles at Zana, Get Satisfaction and various other companies.
About Techtonica:
Techtonica was started to break down the barriers into tech for the people who are most underrepresented in tech and most in danger of displacement by tech. Techtonica is a non-profit that provides tuition-free tech training to low-income women and non-binary adults and places them in positions at sponsoring companies that are ready to support more diverseteams. Support the cause to #BridgeTheTechGap? You can donate by going to https://techtonica.org/donate
My questions:
- How did we mess up so badly in becoming such a non-diverse crowd? What really happened? Also, as a bonus answer, if you can define – “What is diversity?”
- I have been in hiring manager roles and around other hiring managers as well – and have heard a lot of times the following: “We are committed to building a diverse team, but we are not able to find the right talent to build the pipeline”. So, what’s going on here? Are we using the right lens to filter the applicants? Is there a problem in how we are writing our job descriptions? Or are there other biases which we need to pay attention to?
- Alright, so as an organization OR as an HR team or as a hiring manager, I really want to fix the pipeline problem. What can they do in their own capacity? Is there a playbook you could share so that they can follow and improve the situation? Lastly, what metrics they should capture and on what timeline they should try to improve it to make this a realistic achievement?
- I believe that building a diverse team just doesn’t stop at building the pipeline and hiring. What common mistakes – unknowingly – and I want to underline the word unknowing – So, yeah, what common mistakes unknowingly a team makes to worsen the diversity equation and how can they improvise on it?