Engineering better hiring practices

Diverse inclusive teams matter. Maintaining and growing your team is a key challenge. But in a highly competitive landscape, where top talent is seemingly a scarce resource, how do you attract, but also keep hold of and develop great team members?

Engineers love the certainty of automated tests or data types. In an agile climate, engineers iterate on prototypes with technical spikes, and incorporate user feedback continuously into our products. If we are lucky, the engineering team can work to reduce technical debt. All these principles share the wish to continually improve our work processes. How many of these ideas do we apply to the hiring process for engineering teams?

We have all been on the other side of the table. A laundry list of required technologies and practices, white boarding code, logic puzzles, folks "hiring for culture fit". Do these practices really ensure the best possible hires, and ultimately the best performing teams? Or are we cargo-culting our way to teams of people who look unsurprisingly similar? Can we engineer better hiring processes and policies to produce better teams?

Without a variety of voices contributing ideas, the workplace becomes a homogenized environment where potential brilliance may never be achieved. Diversity should rightly be seen as a benefit to growth, not an obstruction to avoid.

Mark S. Luckie

Benefits of diverse teams

There is a correlation between diversity, financial performance and value creation that has been confirmed again and again. Here are a few more benefits.

• Increased profitability. There is statistically significant relationship between a more diverse leadership team and better financial performance.
• Larger talent pool Organisations that embrace diversity hiring benefit from a larger talent pool, people they reach, and people they attract.
• Competitive advantage. Diverse companies are better able to win top talent, and improve their customer orientation, employee satisfaction, and decision making.
• Better performance. Diverse teams outperform homogeneous ones, especially when solving complex problems.
• Increased work satisfaction and loyalty. In diverse teams, people's job satisfaction and loyalty increases as they feel appreciated regardless of their background. In a supportive environment, people are more productive, and are inclined to stay in their role longer.
• Enhanced innovative and creative thinking. The combination of different backgrounds and experiences tends to inspire fresh ideas that are accessible to more. A diverse team is more empathetic and accommodating to a larger group of possible clients and their needs

It’s time to step up and do more. It’s not good enough to say we value diversity.

Brian Krzanich , CEO at Intel

Hire for diversity and manage for inclusion

Hiring is something that every manager does, but have you ever consciously thought about how to hire people better? If you hire using the same methods year after year, you will employ the same type of employees, year after year.

In order to guarantee continued access to the best talent, companies need to ensure sourcing and hiring practices do not inadvertently weed out talented candidates from underrepresented backgrounds.

An increasingly globalised workforce means that people of different backgrounds must work together. A focus on inclusion is now a necessity for smooth business operations and employee retention.

Competition for talent reaches extraordinary levels, and even darlings of the industry face serious questions and significant impacts due to their treatment of the people who work for them. Let's re-imagine what we can do better and come out with a checklist for things you can implement today.

Workshop structure

The workshop will have less than ten people so we can really explore the material. Through a series of presentations, group discussions, and scenario-based sessions, you will work with others, share experiences, and learn together.

Like all our events, this workshop is covered by our code of conduct and joining us assumes your agreement to be bound by the code.

Getting to know you

Before the workshop, we will schedule 30 minutes to learn more about you, your organisation, and your team. We will also add you to a Slack to get to know the other attendees, and for us to announce any updates or answer any of your questions.

Curriculum

• Scale teams in the digital economy
• Build culture as you grow
• Diverse teams and the gender gap
• Career ladders
• Inclusive job postings
• Manage unconscious biases
• Hiring processes
• Interview processes
• Apprenticeships and internships programs
• Onboarding practices
• Retaining talent

Follow-through

We will schedule a group check-in with you 4–6 weeks later to see how you have been, and answer any questions or concerns you may have after practicing these new skills for a little while.

Logistics

When:

9.30–11.30am, March 22–25 GMT+11

Format:

Online with

• A 30-minute individual chat
• A two-hour session each day
• A follow up Q&A group chat

Cost:

Early Bird: $1,200 AUD plus GST

Regular: $1,600 AUD plus GST

Tickets:

Available now

Join us, because thoughtful engineering practices lead to quality, stability, and effectiveness.