Diversity hiring — triangle of constraints

This story is not about the importance of diversity & inclusion. Thankfully, I believe we’re past the point where companies around the world realize that having a diverse workforce is not only important for society, it is also their best way of increasing their bottom line.

This story is also not about how to make our interviews more inclusive. I believe there’s a lot to improve there to make sure all candidates receive an equal chance, but that would be a story for another post.

This story is about the bitter truth — when diversity hiring conflicts with other principles and you need to make compromise. It is also about when you definitely shouldn’t.

It all started when I built a new team and was looking to hire its first members. The request from my manager was:

“Hire fast, hire well, hire diverse”

Agility was key, as the team was formed to answer a very pressing pain and business need. ‘Well’ in this context meant strong, experienced individuals, as we entered a technical area that was new to our group. Diversity has always been a core value in our organization.

As candidates’ resumes started flowing into the pipeline, we soon realized we have a challenge — strong, diverse candidates are scarce, by definition, and would take much longer to find. Analyzing this further, I realized we have a Triangle of Constraints situation at hand.

Much like in the project management ToC, you can only control up to two of those KPI’s. Putting more emphasis on one, will result in affecting any of the others.

This realization helped us make more informed decisions on our hiring strategy. Specifically, it meant better handling of the following scenarios:

1. In many cases, organizations are in constant hiring mode — either due to attrition or healthy growth. In these cases, time is a weaker constraint. This is when you look for diverse, experienced professionals. One way to achieve that is to hold a separate pipeline for diverse candidates, where you knowingly accept that it could take longer to hire. Another is to grow a community and make connections with those talents that may find you as the best fit for their next challenge someday.
2. When the team is seasoned and has good foundations to design and deliver high-quality products, experience becomes a weaker constraint for new hires. In this case, you should make a special effort at hiring talented diverse candidates. The talent is there, maybe less mature, maybe less suited to your tech stack, but you should be able to find great diverse hires which will grow to become leading, experienced individuals, without compromising on time-to-hire.
3. In some cases, you’d have genuine urgency to hire strong, experienced professionals. In those cases, finding diverse talent may take a long time and you may decide to compromise on that aspect. Be careful — it’s easiest to think you’re always in this spot. Your job is to make sure this is not the norm.

Hiring diverse talent is hard. It may sometimes hurt the immediate business needs. Being aware of these tradeoffs may help you identify when you can, and should, invest more in it.

We’ve had a successful experience increasing diversity in our group by identifying and leveraging these opportunities, hiring diverse new team members. In a short while, these became some of the leading figures in the organization.

Admittingly, in the above case we opted for quickly hiring experienced candidates, which did not contribute to the group’s diversity. Doing this knowingly, criticizing our processes and making sure a balance between those constraints is kept, we have the tools for making ours a diverse workplace.