LinkedIn looks to diversify workforce

New six-month REACH targets underrepresented minority groups, women

Lyn Muldrow wants to work at a major Silicon Valley tech firm, but landing a job has been tough without a computer science degree from a prestigious university.

“Most of the responses I did receive was that they loved me as a person and I was probably an amazing culture fit, but I simply did not have enough experience,” said Muldrow, a 32-year-old Oakland web developer who learned some of her computer skills through a coding boot camp.

But a new apprenticeship program that LinkedIn’s engineering team started piloting this month is giving people like Muldrow — a black lesbian woman — and others from underrepresented minority groups an opportunity to get a foot in the door.

Called REACH, the paid sixmonth program is recruiting software engineers from nontraditional career paths such as those who are self-taught, re-entering the workforce or who learned programming through a boot camp. Participants, who work on a project throughout the apprenticeship, are matched with a mentor and could be offered a full-time job at Microsoft-owned LinkedIn after the program ends.

Muldrow was one of 29 apprentices hired for the program out of 761 applicants. More than half of the apprentices are women, and more than a third are underrepresented minorities, according to LinkedIn.

“The thing I really enjoyed about the people I worked with has rarely been the educational path they took. It was always the passion they brought to the job, the grit and determination they had to get stuff done and the potential and ability to learn,” said Mohak Shroff, the LinkedIn vice president of product engineering who helped launch REACH.

That’s exactly what the tech firm was looking for as it narrowed down the candidates for the new program. Instead of requiring a resume, the company asked applicants to share their personal story, how and why they got into programming and to submit work they’ve done. Applicants were then asked to complete a software engineering project at home and discuss their work during an in-person interview.

A typical interview for an engineer job at LinkedIn places more emphasis on an applicant’s technical skills and understanding.

“We definitely bring people in who are smart and really capable, but we’re limiting the pool,” Shroff said.

As Silicon Valley tech firms try to diversify their engineering workforce, which is made up of mostly white and Asian men, companies like LinkedIn are rethinking how they hire.

Startup Pinterest also started an apprenticeship program last year for engineers with nontraditional backgrounds, but with three participants, it’s smaller than the one LinkedIn launched.

Diversity advocates say apprenticeship programs could be one way for tech companies to increase the amount of underrepresented minorities and women in engineering.

LinkedIn still has a lot of work to do. In 2016, LinkedIn’s global tech workforce was 80 percent male. Nationwide, about 35 percent of LinkedIn’s tech workforce was white and 59 percent was Asian.

“Tech companies say they’re innovative but keep going to the same places for talent,” said Orson Aguilar, president of the Greenlining Institute, which advocates for racial and economic justice.

Joelle Emerson, CEO of diversity consulting firm Paradigm, said mentoring is a key part of the success of apprenticeship programs that LinkedIn and Pinterest launched.

“You can’t just throw people in who haven’t been in a job like this and say, ‘Good luck,’” she said. “You have to really think about the projects they’ll be working on and about growth opportunities.”

But apprenticeship programs shouldn’t replace the work tech firms should be doing to improve their hiring practices, she said.

“The potential pitfall is people who do have the right background to start as a full-time engineer would now be rooted into an apprenticeship instead,” she said. “It will be really important for these companies who are rolling out these programs to use them to bring in people from totally different educational or work backgrounds rather than using it as a second tier for engineer hiring.”

LinkedIn, which nearly doubled the amount of people in the program because of the high demand, is hoping to apply what it learns to its hiring practices.

“In the future, how can we not have a separate program to do this? How can we make it part of our regular hiring process? This is still early days, and we’re in the process of learning right now,” said Shalini Agarwal, LinkedIn’s director of engineering and product and head of the REACH program.

Muldrow, who is working on LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator during the program, hopes she gets a full-time job after the apprenticeship ends. If she doesn’t, though, that’s not going to stop her from pursuing a career in tech.

“No matter how many doors are shut in my face, I will continue on and be passionate about what I want to do because I have the ability to do it,” she said.