Interview expert’s tips for how to improve the recruiting and retention of diverse students

— Guest article by Portia Kibble Smith, Diversity and Inclusion Lead for Karat, which helps large tech organizations create interviewing programs that are both inclusive and predictive of on-the-job success.

1. Cast a more inclusive net. Especially for skills-based recruiting, like hiring software engineers, ditch the resume screen that typically filter out candidates who didn’t graduate from a top-10 CS school. Resume screens often reinforce pedigree bias and will limit your diversity to the demographics of whatever school you’re filtering for. Additionally, you can open up your pipeline to more diverse college students and other candidates by starting with a competency-based assessment or coding challenge to identify interview candidates from outside your traditional recruiting networks.
   
2. Make sure you have an inclusive interview loop. Leading industry experts recommend a minimum 30% baseline when it comes to diverse representation on interview panels. Having a diverse group of interviewers, candidates are able to see someone who looks like them and they see it as a place they’ll fit in. It also lets more employees feel like they have input on who is coming into the organization, which helps with retention and loyalty.
   
3. Don’t treat diversity recruiting as a separate program. Companies need to stop treating how they hire Black and Brown engineers like it’s a different process. It can come across as disingenuous. Make sure to put the same effort, care, and strategy that you use to cultivate relationships with professors and students at Stanford into your programs at Howard or Morehouse, and you’ll see the results.