Diversity Hiring

Building Diverse and Inclusive Teams

Diversity and inclusion are essential for individual and organizational success, but how do we build a diverse and inclusive team? A holistic approach is needed, from defining and implementing culture to employee lifecycle, hiring, onboarding, fair compensation, feedback, and measuring progress. Additionally, intersectionality should be taken into account, and everyone should be better allies for underrepresented groups.

A Plan For Creating a More Inclusive Culture

This article discusses a program set up by the author to improve diversity and inclusion in their company. The program consists of micro-actions (15 minute activities) and macro-actions (1-3 hour activities) to demonstrate an attempt at making a more diverse and inclusive culture. The author has seen some micro-wins, such as sourcing female candidates and attending events, and has learned that this approach helps to keep diversity and inclusion at the top of everyone's minds.

An Amicable Firing

A manager gave an engineer feedback, discussed issues in one-on-one's, and gave her specific tasks to work on, but she still didn't meet the expected standard. A formal performance improvement plan was put in place, with goals and measurements, and the manager met with her for 3-4 hours a week to coach her. Despite improvements, sustained improvements were not seen, so the manager increased the urgency of feedback. It was realized the role was not a good fit for her, so the manager communicated that she should be let go and she was understanding.

How I failed at my startup

Eguruvu was a company founded with the goal of helping students better prepare for college preparatory tests. The founders ran into several missteps in execution due to personal bias and lack of market research. They attempted to sell the product to private boards & institutions and government agencies, but ran into operational challenges and lack of commitment to adopt the new system from administrative staff. The lack of experience in selling and go-to-market cost them the company. The two main takeaways from this experience were to never do it alone and to roll out and develop products incrementally.

Rapidly Scaling Your Engineering Department

The company experienced a rapid growth in its engineering department, from 20 to 120 people, and had to find ways to manage the influx of new hires. The manager took it upon himself to spend time speaking with each team, setting up new processes and communication expectations to shape the culture in an effective way. The lesson learned was that when entering such situations, a hiring plan should be accompanied by a culture plan to ensure new hires are integrated into the team and can work productively while meeting all of the team's expectations. Performance management also became more important.

Effective Hiring Practices: Asking the Right Questions

Finding the right talent for a job requires asking the right questions and conducting interviews in a way that makes candidates feel comfortable. It is important to look for a technical fit, but also a match in values and learning potential. To gain insight during interviews, it is recommended to take several unorthodox approaches, such as identifying and double-downing on risky matters, prompting candidates with open-ended topics, focusing on fewer topics in detail, asking how they would hire for the role, and encouraging them to come up with a question. Additionally, feedback should be asked for in order to improve the interview process.