SEEKING DIVERSE HIRES
Pinterest aims to improve
SAN FRANCISCO — Pinterest is in a race against itself to create a more diverse workforce. By its own accounting, the Internet firm hasn’t made headway on the issue since it launched its efforts in 2013. It’s still mostly a white and Asian male workforce.
Despite being seen as an industry leader for its push for more diversity in tech, the social media firm has hit a wall.
And time isn’t on its side. As Pinterest grows — it now has about 700 employees — each new hire makes less and less of a percentage dent in its workforce composition.
But Pinterest isn’t alone. A lot of Silicon Valley companies are struggling with this issue. They may have failed to get employee buy-in, set clear hiring goals or be more strategic instead of relying on an ad hoc approach. While the pool of potential job candidates has become more diverse, hiring managers still tend to pull from the same set of universities and backgrounds when they make hires.
Pinterest wants 2016 to be different.
It is experimenting with ways to boost the diversity of its pool of candidates and has set aggressive hiring goals. As part of that push, Pinterest recently hired its first diversity director — Candice Morgan, previously senior director and global consultant at Catalyst, the New York-based research nonprofit that promotes women in the workplace.
Does hiring a diversity director mean change is afoot?
Maybe. It will depend on whether she has the CEO’s ear, said Telle Whitney, chief executive and president of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. She pointed to Intel, where Danielle Brown, chief of staff to Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, recently took on another role as the firm’s chief diversity and inclusion officer.
“This isn’t a simple problem,” Whitney said. “You have to have clear goals, and you have to have processes and systems towards those goals. For example, some companies say they have a rule that there needs to be a woman candidate for every significant job. If that’s your policy, you also have to have teeth to make it happen.”
Growing up in the Bronx, in New York, Morgan was one of a handful of black students to attend Stuyvesant High School, taking the train from a black, workingclass neighborhood to a white and upper-class one. The experience, she said, made her aware of “the social hierarchies in the workforce and in the places where people live.”
She has spent her career so far bringing research and strategic advice to male-dominated industries such as construction, oil and gas, and automotive, which are working to make their workforces less homogeneous. In industries with many women at low levels, such as law, Morgan noted that research has helped to pinpoint root causes for why there aren’t many female leaders. Their careers flatline, not because they have babies, a common perception, she said, but because they simply aren’t promoted at key junctures.
Just one week on the job, Morgan, 33, gave me her initial take on Silicon Valley.
Tech struggles, more than other industries, with the idea of itself as a pure meritocracy, observed Morgan, who reports to Pinterest’s head of recruiting. “People like to say that it’s all about the code, when we know that hiring decisions are not,” she said. Tech is also is stuck on the idea of the “cultural fit.”
Bias can slip in if hiring decisions are made on such vague notions as fit,