Increasing diversity in tech with behavioral science

Challenge

One of the industry sectors that have been notoriously bad at diversity is tech. Our client, a tech scale-up, was interested in changing that. The company was facing a recruiting round that would essentially double the number of employees. The starting point was not great – by early 2019 the company had zero women. Our task was to design the recruiting process from scratch using behavioral science with the goal of levelling the playing field and increasing diversity.

Intervention

We designed Findify’s recruiting process from scratch, using insights from behavioral science, and looking particularly at interventions that would make the process objective. We looked at everything from the kind of platforms to use for recruiting, the language we use in our job ads, the way we screen CVs, interview and score candidates. We made sure that all candidates are judged by a set of pre-determined criteria that reflect the company’s values and needs, and that all candidates get the same chance to succeed in the process. A full overview of what we did can be found here.

Impact

At the end of the hiring round, 50% of the new hires were women, including 30% of engineering roles. That was well above the targets we set for ourselves. The company now also had a robust recruiting process including objective criteria, scoring scales and interview guides, to use in future recruiting rounds.