Founders and hiring managers at technology companies are increasingly recognizing that diversity is essential for producing inclusive, impactful products. As a company, we wanted to do our small part to help companies build more diverse teams.
After weeks of internal discussion and conversations with members of our community, we decided to add a simple diversity form field to our candidate onboarding flow. Once our team has selected a candidate for an upcoming Underdog.io batch (after a review process that involves, among other things, close scrutiny of work history, portfolios, projects, written communication, and any publicly-available code), that candidate can optionally identify as a member of an “underrepresented demographic in tech,” wording that we borrowed from Nicole Sanchez’s wonderful Diversity in Tech FAQ v0.1. To be clear, we don’t use a candidate’s selection to decide whether to share that candidate with our hiring network, and we’ll never edit a candidate’s selection.
For any candidates that choose to identify as members of an underrepresented demographic in tech, we append a small globe icon to that candidate’s profile along with a tooltip explaining what the icon represents.
As we do with most decisions, we’re treating this as an experiment and closely monitoring how it impacts the dynamics of our marketplace. We’re not certain that this is the best way to help our customers build diverse teams, but we hope that it’s a step in the right direction.
For more information about technology, diversity, and diverse hiring, we recommend reading anything that Nicole Sanchez writes or recommends, along with all of the back issues of Model View Culture.
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