How to attract a diverse range of job applicants

Recorded February 24th 2021 – watch the full episode on YouTube.

How do you ensure you get a wide and diverse range of applicants coming forward for a job?

Jordanna Kwok: This is the most difficult thing: if you ask anyone recruiting in tech, trying to make sure that our pipeline has representation, as to especially gender, ethnicity, and so on. And so, one thing that we have is an applicant pipeline. That by itself is not sufficient. And I think all tech companies, anyone hiring will probably say the same thing.

"The most difficult thing I think if you ask anyone recruiting in tech, it is trying to make sure that our pipeline has representation, as to especially gender, ethnicity, and so on."

And so as a hiring manager you really need to supplement that and work with your recruiting partners to source, reach out, and do events – whatever it might be to really diversify that pipeline, so it's not just applicants. It's more networking or events, you might run a women in tech event for example, and try to make new connections there and get people interested in the opportunities that are on the team. So, it's not easy, for sure, but it is something that we try to do just to make sure that we're not just looking at applicants.

Paul Hudson: Well, presumably it helps that they have a female manager, they'll be working for you presumably. And so they know, "she's happy there, she's been there seven plus years, that's a great sign all by itself", and I know at least one other woman on your team so that must help, immediate representation, folks they can trust and get going with presumably?

"In terms of what we look for, we are certainly looking for, in the technical space, the baseline skills. And that's what we ask."

Jordanna Kwok: Yeah, for sure. Having the representation on the team certainly helps. One other thing that we do is really try to make the interview process really inclusive. So, we put a lot of effort to kind of standardize and make sure that bias doesn't creep in, that's the other thing. If you have a really skewed interview process, it doesn't matter what the top of the funnel looks like, you're going to filter out a lot of diverse candidates potentially if it is biased. So, there's a lot that goes into it that at least at Netflix that we spend time on and making sure that it is kind of as inclusive as possible.

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