When Sara Fatima was interviewing prospects for a potential direct report, it took her just 12 minutes to single out the candidate who would get that position. As the head of global talent acquisition for the electronic-payments company Verifone, whose workforce spans 56 countries, Fatima has been determined to honor the definition of diversity, which in this case meant taking seriously a mother re-entering the labor market.

“She was in the workforce, then took time off to take care of the family,” Fatima told moderator Lydia Dishman in a recent From Day One webinar. As Fatima explained her thinking: “A mom wears 40 different hats. We don’t get days off, and nobody fills in for you. For someone to have done that over a period of time, and to be able to articulate how they project-managed their life, they can figure out work.”

With this success story, Fatima articulates one of the ways tech companies are making an effort to close the access gap to build a more diverse tech workforce, which, on one hand, means a taking a broader outlook on finding and retaining talent, but on the other hand, struggling with the real challenge of rapidly scaling organizations.

A good first step is publicly acknowledging the targets. “At Lenovo, one of the things we do is set goals, and they’re public, so we have to rise to the occasion,” said Marybeth Caulfield, Lenovo's senior manager for global university and diversity recruiting. “Data drives our decisions. It starts at the top, then it works its way down.”

Another step is to be specific about where the gaps are, since a broad-brush approach won’t work, said Ambra Benjamin, a Facebook alumna who is global head of tech recruiting at the cloud-monitoring company Datadog. Different talent profiles and divisions present different challenges. Corporate HR departments, for example, tend to lack male employees, while sales divisions have been historically white and male. Engineering, of course, needs more female talent. “We try to draw circles around specific gaps, by being more prescriptive,” Benjamin said.

Defining Those Gaps

A lot of companies might complain about being unable to find diverse candidates, but that issue has to be tackled at its roots. “These companies create a box for what they want specifically, what universities they want the candidates to come from, what companies they want to come from,” said Debbie Douglas, the creative talent acquisition director at Paramount. “We’re missing out on a whole gap of amazingly talented people by creating a small box of a profile. Once companies start tearing away at those preconceived ideas, we can absolutely address them from the bottom up. We’re creating those gaps by limiting ourselves.”

A big part of it is education and awareness. “Each one, teach one!,” said Brittiney Jones, a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) consultant at Oracle. “You’re always learning more, and as you’re learning, you’re teaching the next person.” One of Oracle's policies is to partner with HBCUs and Hispanic-Serving Institutions. “One thing I’d want to see more of is to have executives step foot onto these campuses, intermingle with these students to remove biases,” said Jones, noting that a HBCU candidate is usually as qualified as an MIT candidate. “I believe we’re there, but there's still more that needs to be done.”

Then there’s a gap in financial-empowerment information. “If I could give myself advice in my [early] career,” Benjamin said, it would be: “Go to a company that gives you equity. No one told me that. As much as we would all love to have careers in public service, and there’s a lot of idealism, we graduate in a life of loans and debts. A way individuals are giving back, is that they have equity–equity that has grown. They were able to be far more secure than previous generations.”

Exploring the Bountiful Alternative Sources

The pandemic was an accelerator in prompting employers to go beyond the traditional talent funnels. “Covid helped put spotlight over those sources,” said Fatima, noting that diversity is not necessarily limited to heritage and ethnicity. She spotlights diversity in thought, walks of life, and bootcamp programs vs. four-year degrees. “The people from these alternative sourcing channels bring in new perspectives,” she said. “If we get more of the same of what our current population is, then we’re not diversifying, we’re not innovating, which is what we need for an organization to survive.”

Of course, financial reality sometimes gets in the way. Organizations still tend to optimize for speed and the here-and-now when it comes to candidate assessments, which filters out a lot of strong candidates. “It’s a very lazy approach,” said Benjamin. “I understand why, though. We have to optimize time, and sometimes you don’t have time to dive into potential.”

Some employers have found nontraditional archetypes that have a proven track record in certain roles. Amazon, for example, leveraged its post-military hires into project-management and warehouse-management roles, singling out a correlation between background and job types. These formulas, which vary by organization, can give them a competitive edge in the talent market. “What are the archetypes we’re hiring for? We’re making offers no one is making because we have a secret sauce,” said Benjamin.

Added Caulfield: “One of the things I’ve seen over the years through AI and bias assessment: We start to see everything leveled out. Women do better than the men. Yay! If we just hired for that, for leadership capability, then we do start to open the doors.” In terms of skills, it helps define what a candidate has and what they actively want to learn. “At Lenovo, we launched a gig platform where you can sign up for programs all around the world. Our first two sessions were sold out. Those kinds of things motivate people,” Caulfield said.

Assessing the Merits of Technical Interviews

Can a candidate from a nontraditional background pull off a development exercise on a whiteboard? Well, it might not be as relevant anymore.

One thing Oracle’s Jones discovered, for instance, is that some of the curricula that are taught at universities are not aligned with the roles that early-career candidates are applying to. If you’re taught the Python programming language, but you’re applying for a Java-heavy job, there needs to be some accountability on the applicant's part. The solution is readily available: resources on LinkedIn, resumé critiques, and prepping materials that can get the candidate where they need to be. “There’s a lot of ways you can have access to the jobs,” Jones said. “But there’s only so much that a company can do.”

Overall, organizations are trying to be adaptive in giving candidates more alternatives to technical interviews and other potential obstacles. Those might include take-home assignments to turn in by a certain date or pair programming. Truth is, interviewing is imperfect. “If someone can show me the data that a good interview translates to higher performances in the workplace then I will believe you,” said Benjamin. “No one can give me that data.”

On that note, Fatima believes that, irrespective of what you’re hiring for, you can teach technical skills to virtually anyone. “You can put them through a bootcamp. What you can’t teach a person is passion, desire to be successful. That’s the first thing people look for in a candidate: Do they want to be here? And if that is there, what can I as an organization support them with? Everything else can be taught.”

Editor's Note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this webinar, the recruiting-software company Lever.

Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.