Check your job ads
Reading all the tweets and posts about International Womens’ Day on Monday reminded me of how, in 2019, I was frustrated by Snap’s gender balance.
We were a new company, and had the opportunity to try to establish the cultures and behaviours we wanted from the very beginning.
One of these objectives was around gender balance.
Yet in the three years the company had existed, we’d only ever had one female director, one female senior manager, two female middle managers and no female software developers.
Now building a gender-balanced team in a business that exists at the cross-section of software-development and transport is tough. They are notoriously two of the most male-dominated sectors in the entire economy.
(The All Party Parliamentary Group published its report into gender experience in transport on Monday and it was not good reading.)
But I still felt like we must be doing something wrong, so I started to take some advice.
What I learned was really interesting; not least because some of the solutions were absurdly simple.
Here are two simple tips I learned which you may find useful. Forgive me if you already knew this, and I’m simply late to the party…
Short job ads.
Given you’re a reader of Freewheeling, you’ll know that I have no issue writing lots of words. So my job ads tended to be comprehensive; a pretty detailed description of the role, the responsibilities that come with it and the kind of person we’d like to apply.
In my head, that made sense: the more information people have about the role, the better they can decide if it is right for them, and the less we’ll waste everyone’s time.
But it turns out that this is a very bad way to encourage more female applicants. Hewlett Packard researched this, and found that men are willing to apply for a job if they feel they can meet 60% of the person spec. By contrast, women are more likely to feel they must tick every single box to apply.
So the more criteria you list, the more hurdles you’re creating for your female applicants to jump over - whereas men will simply walk round the side.
2. Be careful with superlatives
When recruiting, it’s critical to have high standards. But be careful how you communicate these standards. The more terms you use to describe high standards in the advert, the more opportunities you create for women to decide that you’re not describing them - while an identically qualified man is more likely to believe that you absolutely are describing them!
If you want an ‘outstanding’ software developer, a mediocre man is likely to decide that you probably mean them whereas a genuinely outstanding women is more likely to decide you don’t.
Like the point above, this is obviously about norms and averages and doesn’t describe every single man or woman.
What I learned was that ideal job advert should be pretty short, focused on values and not too prescriptive. That doesn’t mean you should compromise on standards in your candidates, just that you need to create a space for qualified women to apply alongside over-confident men.
Unfortunately, I only learned these lessons in 2019 and Covid hit in 2020, so I didn’t have much chance to implement them. But if you’ve already adopted these principles (or any others), would love to know how you’ve got on.
