Nudging diversity

Tech leaders have made their commitment to DEI loud and clear at this point. But companies’ progress in hiring engineers of color, women and other underrepresented folks, is still incremental. One excuse leaders give is that underrepresented talent is “hard to find.” Usually, they’re just looking in the wrong places.

LinkedIn released a feature called “Diversity Nudges” for its recruiting platform on Wednesday, challenging the “hard to find” myth. The feature is solely for gender diversity at the moment.

• If a recruiter’s search results skew either too male or female, the nudge feature will recommend ways to broaden the pool of results. For example, adding candidates from a particular location or with a particular skill might increase the percentage of female candidates.
• “It’s not an extra step that we’re asking recruiters to take,” said Jennifer Shappley, VP of global talent acquisition at LinkedIn. “It’s built into the day-to-day activities of a recruiter.”
• The goal is to help recruiters expand their preconceived ideas of what makes a candidate qualified. Shappley noted that women tend to emphasize soft skills and men tend to emphasize technical skills. A nudge might tell recruiters that including soft skills in their search criteria will amass more female candidates. Ideally, that knowledge will stick with them.

The feature is limited to gender for now because LinkedIn’s data can ascertain only whether a profile is female or male. The company doesn’t have enough data yet to identify race, age, sexuality or whether someone is nonbinary.

• Some people tell LinkedIn their gender in an “anonymous manner,” Shappley said, as the information is not public-facing. LinkedIn can also infer gender via pronouns and LinkedIn identity-based groups the person belongs to.

• “Once we have sufficient self-ID data to have accurate sample sizes, we’ll also be able to expand our insights to race, age and more,” a LinkedIn spokesperson told me.

A diversity nudge might seem insignificant, but it’s an important challenge to recruiter bias. It makes it that much harder for leaders to lean on the “they’re hard to find” defense, and is one more way to hold companies accountable to their DEI promises. Recruiters might not be aware that their approach to the day-to-day candidate search is actively impeding their diversity goals. “It is really hard to get people out of the routine that they have become used to,” Shappley said. “Being able to connect folks to that outcome they say they want with their daily behavior is really important.”