Monthly Archives: November 2017

Part 2: How To Not Lose Female Engineering Candidates

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Like I said yesterday, I’m thankful for my smart friends. After Paradigm’s Joelle Emerson provided some feedback on how Take-Home Code Projects might impact gender ratios in hiring pipelines, another amazing woman sent me her perspectives. Kieran Synder is CEO of Textio, an innovative Seattle startup which helps companies understand the language of their job listings. Kieran’s email, which she’s letting me publish here:

“We do a take-home project too, longer than 3-4 hours actually. We have not had women pass at a higher or lower rate than men, nor have we had anyone other than one man decide not to move on in the process after seeing the question. We’ve been doing this for three years – and we do take-home projects of similar character for every role (obviously, for non-engineer roles, the project is something other than coding).
We love this way of interviewing for a whole bunch of reasons.
We think it’s fairer than a whiteboard interview, because it establishes shared context for 1-1 interviews. It lets people work like real developers work, using Google or Stack Overflow or whatever other resources they want. Both people we’ve hired and people we haven’t hired have given us good feedback about it. Many, many people have told us after their interviews that the main reason they come away excited to join Textio is for the chance to work with the people who interviewed them.
I will say there’s an art to writing the questions so they are both constrained and open-ended enough. And it’s important that the group session where people present their work not feel like a firing squad. If there’s anything I wish we could fix, it’s the instant anxiety that some candidates feel walking into a room that includes Jensen and/or me.
The other thing I’d say is that teams telegraph a lot even during initial screening, before the longer take-home is ever introduced. We have a reasonably diverse team and make sure our screening and interview processes reflect this. If women have a bad experience in the screening, they might choose not to move on regardless of the definition of the follow-up task.”
Thanks Kieran!
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They Wanted To Eliminate Gender Bias In Technical Hiring But Ended Up Losing All Their Female Candidates.

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One of our most recent seed investments recently posed a question to me. They had designed a technical hiring process to try and eliminate gender bias but were losing all the women midway through their funnel when a take-home project was introduced. What was going wrong?

I reviewed their current approaches alongside Homebrew’s Head of Talent Beth Scheer and we made a few recommendations, but there was nothing glaringly broken. Attention then turned to the take-home project since that’s where the breakage seemed to be most acute. Was there something about this step that was unintentionally sending the wrong signal to female engineers? This wasn’t my area of expertise but I’m fortunate to have smart friends so I asked Joelle Emerson, founder of Paradigm, a leading consultancy providing training and strategy around inclusion. Her response was, not surprisingly, really great and she agreed to let me publish it below in its entirety. Hopefully this will help other startups too. Thanks Joelle!

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Email From Me to Joelle 

hi! QQ for your expertise. Have you seen any research or have any POV on how giving a take-home coding project during interview process impacts genders differently in the funnel? ie increases/decreases candidate or employer decision to move forward in process, and does it differ based on when in the process it’s introduced?

One of our more technical companies had been using a 3-4 hour coding project post initial interview but pre-team interviews. They were doing for two reasons – first to give the candidate a taste of what they’d be working on, and second, they thought it would be an unbiased way to assess technical expertise (the current team is three men).
They’ve hired a few people with this process so far (all men) but are doing away with the take-home as a default for a variety of reasons. One is that no woman who has been offered the coding project has decided to move forward with it, whereas the male completion rate at that stage is 50%+
I know without seeing the specific language as to how the test is intro’ed, etc you can’t judge this particular situation but i’m curious if there are best practices or research in general about these types of “technical interviews” and gender. Thanks!
From Joelle to Me In Response:

Hi hi! Great question. Take home exercises can be a really helpful complement to interviews. When they’re designed thoughtfully, they can give great signal on how someone would actually approach their work, and can reduce subjectivity and bias in hiring. But whether a take home project is effective or not depends entirely on how it’s designed and framed. Here are a few things, in particular, I’d be on the lookout for given the circumstances you’re describing (where women are less likely to participate in the exercise):

  • How the project is framed: Your instinct on this is spot on. The language around how both how this is introduced, and how the exercise itself is framed, can have a big impact. A few things to look out for:
    • Growth v. fixed mindset language: Is this described as an assessment of ability or approach? It seems like it’s not being framed as a “test,” which is great, but there can be other language that makes this feel like you’re trying to get at someone’s ability as an engineer, which can lead candidates from underrepresented backgrounds to experience stereotype threat, and select out.
    • Vague vs. clear language: Are you specific about exactly what this will entail, and what you want to see from people?
    • Masculine/homogenous vs. inclusive language: I’m guessing you’ve already looked at this, but language that skews masculine (words or phrases like hard core, dominant, competitive, intense etc.) would be unhelpful 🙂
  • What the project actually is: I’m not an engineer, so I probably can’t be super helpful here, but I’d be curious about what you’re actually asking them to do in this project. Does it simulate what real work would look like? (It sounds like that’s the goal, which is great!) Does it bias towards a specific type of engineering style or approach? Is there anything else that might make the project itself less exciting to some people?
  • How long the project takes: People from underrepresented backgrounds in this industry are less likely to be able to invest a ton of time in a something, unpaid. How big a time commitment are you asking people to make?
Finally, it could be good to ask people (of all genders) who’ve declined why they did this. Maybe the early stage of the process didn’t feel great, so they’re not actually interested in the company. Maybe it’s too large a project. There’s almost certainly something you could learn in asking, if you haven’t yet.
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Now, the postscript on my unnamed startup is that they’re a small team which is prioritizing diversity and reaching back out to the female candidates who decided not to go forward in order to offer a path without the take-home project if they’d like to continue discussions. I’m proud of this CEO for being so proactive in iterating and improving!

Update: Textio’s CEO sent me some helpful tips regarding Take Home engineering

How Becoming a Dad Helped Me Become a VC

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“Don’t stop asking me what it’s like to be a mom and an executive, just start asking dads the same question.” I can’t recall the conference or, unfortunately, the specific woman, but I remember being struck by this answer (which was in response to some rote ‘so, what’s it like being a CEO and a mom?’ question). This was before I became a parent myself but it felt right. More honest and open than pretending we’re not impacted, in all sorts of ways, by becoming a parent.

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Our daughter arrived early in 2012 and she was instrumental in my decision to leave Google and start a venture fund with my good friend and former colleague Satya Patel. Homebrew was about living my most authentic life. Google – still a great job and great company – had become a stable but not always enjoyable place for me and I worried that she’d learn the wrong lessons observing me hold on to the status quo. So I leapt. And now she gets to see me building my own business, supporting other men and women trying to build theirs. It’s not about prepping her for YC 2030 but instead giving her confidence to do whatever she wants, even if it doesn’t yet exist!

Which relates to another transformation that I think gives me a better shot of becoming a successful investor. As a dad my goal isn’t to tell her what she should be but help her become the best version of herself. I think of our role as early stage investors in the same way (albeit less paternal obviously, but still with a lot of emotion). We want to back founders who have a strong vision of what their company could be and just help them get there. Ultimately they need to build a startup they’re going to be proud of.

Wondering if other friends in the industry felt becoming a dad changed them professionally, I asked a few people. Here’s how two of them replied:

Jonathan Abrams, CEO Nuzzel

“Being a parent for me has meant no longer being able to brute-force the todo list by working to 2 am, since I might get woken up at 4 am, 5 am, and 6 am.  Instead I’ve had to be more ruthless about prioritization and saying no.  On the other hand, it’s brought perspective.  My kids don’t care at all what TechCrunch or some VC thinks of me.  One thing that has NOT happened:  a single journalist ever asking me how I manage to combine being a startup CEO with being the parent of small children.  I doubt that would be the case if I were a female founder.”

Jason Spinell, Head of Slack’s Corporate Venture Fund

How becoming a dad changed/shaped the approach to my work

Appreciation 
Even the littlest things illicit immense joy for a toddler. Fatherhood has made me stop and not take for granted how lucky I am to engage, learn, and work with amazing people on a daily basis.
Perseverance 
His willingness to continually strive to achieve a task is astonishing. I think about this a lot in regards helping coach founders though all stages/cycles of their businesses.
Beginners mind
For a toddler, everything is new. A great reminder to be a sponge. It’s ok not to know everything.
Time management/What is most important – 
Time is not mine anymore. Have become very intentional around how I spend it.
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Thanks Jonathan and Jason for sharing! And let me also plug Winnie, a great app for modern parents to get advice and find kid-friendly restaurants, parks, etc.