Insights

Building a diverse team means including individuals of varying races, gender identity, age, ability, and more. To be inclusive of every candidate, it’s essential to design your hiring process with careful thought and consideration to ensure it is accessible to all candidates.

A candidate’s college major alone won’t indicate if they’re qualified for a role – but it can help streamline the pool of candidates. That’s why we ask the recruiters on our platform if specific majors are relevant to their role, in addition to asking them to weigh the importance of factors like GPA, previous internships, school prestige, and specific skills. The data helps us match their job opportunities with the best student candidates, but it also gives us a look into the most commonly requested – AKA in-demand – college majors.

Find out how today's entry-level candidates are engaging with employers – download our infographic on the top resources candidates use to research companies here.

Find out how today's entry-level candidates are engaging with employers – download our infographic on the top resources candidates use to research companies here.

It’s no secret that the tech sector is lacking diversity. Fewer than 5 percent of employees identify as Black or Latino at top tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and the representation of women of all races and ethnicities hovers between 30-40% at some of the most successful tech companies. While the focus is often on large tech companies and their lack of diversity, the underrepresentation of women and racial minorities is a problem at any company size. As startup founders and heads of talent acquisition grapple with designing an overall hiring process that will lead to more diverse teams, there are actionable and concrete ways to build a more diverse pipeline. One of these ways? Source candidates from coding bootcamps and organizations that are helping to close the diversity gap in tech.

We know that professional development and company culture are extremely important to early-career candidates in their job search. But when it comes to interviewing with specific companies, a company’s mission and values plays the biggest role in sparking candidate interest.

Science, technology, engineering, and math fields are crucial to keeping our world functioning. They’re the basis for developing life-saving drugs and treatments, developing the software programs we depend on every day, solving environmental problems, and much more. However, there’s a large gap between the number of STEM jobs needing to be filled and people available to do them. The United States Department of Labor predicted that nearing 2020, 2.4 million STEM jobs would go unfulfilled, and the demand for qualified candidates to fill these roles is only going to grow. Despite the demand, people of color are vastly underrepresented in these fields. According to data on race and ethnic representation in STEM occupations from Pew Research Center, only 9 percent of STEM workers are Black and 7 percent are Hispanic. Other national data shows that in 2010, American Indians/Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders each made up only 0.2 percent of the STEM workforce.

You write your job description, define your requirements, and post it on a job board. Now, you wait for the applications to roll in. You think your company and the job are pretty great, so it’s only a matter of time before you start receiving applications from the best candidates on the market. Right?

Most founders and hiring managers want to do the right thing when it comes to increasing diversity. Diverse teams have been proven to perform better and the downsides of neglecting diversity in the early stages of startup life are increasingly clear. At the same time, most startups struggle to be proactive when it comes to recruiting diverse technical talent. As you race to build your company, survival instincts and speed often trump a thoughtful long-term approach. It’s easy for a homogenous culture to become the status quo, which makes it difficult for underrepresented candidates to feel like they belong. By the time you become Facebook or Google, compounding takes over and even investing tens of millions of dollars in diversity recruiting efforts can do little to meaningfully move the needle on diversity.