One Engineer, an API, and an MVP: Or how I spent one hour improving hiring data at my company.

About This Talk

The fact that tech is struggling to hire or retain employees from diverse backgrounds has been written about and discussed thoroughly, particularly in the last few years. The economic, societal, and moral benefits of diversity are also well documented. Why is it hard, then, for well-intentioned organizations to shift their demographics? There are a number of reasons, but one that doesn’t appear to have been thoroughly discussed already is the challenge of gathering and responding to data about diversity within a company’s hiring pool and existing employees. One hack day, I was involved in too many projects and had only a token amount of time to devote to the one I was most interested in; seeing if we could determine whether we had sufficient diversity for any given role to start interviewing candidates, or if we needed to spend more efforts sourcing diverse candidates for the pool. I accomplished an MVP in approximately an hour, once I had an api key and permissions. It doesn’t necessarily require a huge effort to make a big difference.

In this talk, I’ll walk through the MVP indicating, for each role, whether there was “sufficient diversity”. I’ll also address gotchas, limitations, and What Now.