Part three: Recruitment

Companies will often focus on recruitment first when they're thinking about diversity because it's easier to show short-term progress and it's easier to take action items there. And so it's easy for companies to say, "We're going to go to this new set of universities or go to these conferences or put more resources on recruiting." It's harder to focus on retention and promotion because those things happen over a longer time period, and those are trailing indicators of how inclusive environment truly is. Additionally, you have complications around things like stock grants, where as part of compensation, employees are getting these equity packages that vest over a certain time period, so they may not get any stock unless they stay for at least a year and won't get the full grant unless they stay for four years or five years, depending on the company. And so there may be monetary incentives for people to stick around, even if the company is not the best fit for them or doesn't really set them up to succeed. And I think really focusing on educating your employees, not just on what you're doing, but why you're doing it and how you're doing it. I found that I didn't spend a lot of time on the how question. At first, I was getting questions from employees like, "How is the recruiting process different for people who come from underrepresented groups?" And I was shocked. I was like, "It's not different." There's this idea that you can put your culture in a box, and what you are actually doing is explicitly saying, we do not welcome diversity. So I tell people to think about either culture ad. So ask the question, what new thing does this person bring to the team or what we did last year and think about which is called values fit. So what we know after being in business for over a decade is that our values never change, but our culture is constantly evolving, just like inclusion. And so for us, our values, things like, does someone want to work transparently with empathy for their colleagues and their customers? Those things are critically important, but everything else new that they bring in is also valuable. And so it's changing the framing there. It's also important when you're talking about your culture to be very specific about what you mean. Well, one of the ways I think that companies get help, organizations like Black Girls Code and others is to really create pipeline programs that allow girls to experience this space before they actually have to do an interview. So one of the things that I see that's been important is having opportunities for the girls to do internships, having opportunities for the girls to have mentorship. I think that's important to prepare them for the work that they're going to be doing. Companies should and have changed to really focus on early pipeline engagement. You know, we start as young as seven when we first started the organization back in 2011 and in 2012, companies that wanted to create this diverse pipeline would start like in high school, maybe college even. And we were like, that's too late. So it's been great to see companies slowly but surely shift to a focus on supporting these early engagement programs. And I think the research shows that that's where you can make the most impact. So I think it's either about supporting organizations such as BGC, creating something of your own that really engages young people in schools or after school programs and learning technology, or even really making sure that your employees can actively give back as mentors and volunteers. I think the tech industry has a difficult time because we're still stuck in this process of pattern matching and believing that there's a certain look or a certain background or pedigree that creates the ideal employee for the company, and that vision is not brought. Right. So it doesn't look at folks that come from different cultures. It doesn't look for people that come from different, you know, race or gender. It doesn't even look broad enough in terms of like where they study and where they go to school. So I think it's really about continuing to do the work, whether that be bias training for their employees, whether that means, you know, creating opportunities for employee, you know, affinity groups, whether that's connecting to the community at large and making sure that they play a strong and positive place in the community. I think those are all pieces of the puzzle that allow them to slowly start to change the culture, but it will take a lot of time. I think one of the other mistakes that we made early in diversity and inclusion at Atlassian is that we actually believed that diversity and inclusion was its own function. So meaning that, you know, my team was running programs out of our department for recruiting, for learning, for retention, and we've actually completely changed the model. Now, diversity and inclusion, in fact, doesn't run really any separate programs. Instead, we partner with different centers of excellence or different departments to build balanced learning experiences or balanced recruiting experiences in them. And what we've seen both that it's been able to significantly expand our work outside of what one department could accomplish. It means also that inclusion is being done in the context of other work as opposed to that tack on that it feels like a lot of the time. It's a way to both expand your DNI resources to cover more of the company to be more thorough, but also turns out that it's less work over time, because once the right questions and the right design principles are embedded in what everyone's doing, you don't need a DNI expert there anymore. And so it frees me and my team up to go solve new challenges, but it helps us scale fundamentally. And so think about diversity and inclusion as a part of everyone's job that's enabled by the specialists on your team.