How Atlassian Approaches Diversity and Inclusion with Balance & Belonging

Key Takeaways

[Music] welcome to hackerrank radio i'm gaurav varma svp of customer success here at hackerrank this week we're bringing you a conversation i had with aubry blanche global head of diversity and belonging at atlassian at our flagship event hackerrank maine palo alto aubry and i talked about why organizations should stop thinking about diversity and inclusion and prioritize balance and belonging obri also shares why resumes degree requirements and the concept of a culture fit promote biased hiring aubrey thank you for being here be great if you can introduce yourself tell us a little bit more about you i'm aubrey i'm so excited to be here so i'm the global head of diversity and belonging at atlassian and i'm going to ask all of you for a favor actually we'll talk about it but i'm trying to change my job title and i need your help but my job is really to help atlassian hire the right people and then make sure that they can thrive once they're there the other way i describe my job is you know crushing the karaoke with capitalism i'm really lucky i'm so excited to be here in particular because actually hacker rank was what got me into diversity and inclusion work that's awesome so back when i was at palantir i basically convinced someone to let me run an experiment on engineering recruiting to be like it's busted you're not hiring enough women and they were like no no we're a meritocracy and i did an experiment i was like no and so we ended up overhauling the process and hackerrank actually was really key to work with us to make it so that we removed a lot of bias from that process so that's great so every single one of us there's some form of unconscious bias i think i'm notorious do i do it all the time it's really like how many how many right degree it starts from the resume i see the email address in our ats when it gets sent to me and i'm trying to decipher like my own email address you can infer a fair bit from it right mail indian origin i don't think you'll get the hair part of it but everything else you'll get and then one you know tends to then let me go google this individual you go on linkedin there's a picture it creeps in you know regardless of how hard you try to make a conscious effort not to it does and how do you protect yourself against that i think what you do is you have to do really smart systems design so the fact is you know that you could throw resumes on the floor and pick up half of them and interview those candidates and you'd have the same success in job performance as if you scanned resumes literally the number one thing about resumes that predicts whether someone gets an on-site is typos on it so like resumes are useless i genuinely think so but i think that's it you have to design your processes to limit the potential expression of your bias because we're human our brains physiologically can't not be biased we've learned a lot of rules about people so if you can get rid of resumes awesome if you can use tools genuinely like hacker rank to do any kind of skills testing as opposed to deciding something else or if you're not at the point where your organization can get rid of resumes we have to do a little more stakeholder management thinking about ways to read them that are more structured don't look for experience working at google why because they've had historically highly discriminatory hiring processes right i don't want to call out just google like the entire industry google just has a lot of employees and so if you're looking for signs that someone has had a lot of money go hire someone from stanford go hire someone who went to google or facebook i did go to stanford so and there are a lot of smart people there but there are a lot of people that are just rich there too and and i think that's important to know so when you're looking at a resume especially for a university student is that student have a 2.8 gpa but did they work an extra job because they had to support family at home because students of color are significantly more likely to have to be like that and when you have a 3.7 resume cut off all you're actually selecting for is family wealth and whiteness for the most part because of the way those things move together in our society so i think we can make those intentional choices and i think it goes back to a larger point which is i'm not actually a recruiter so to do this work well you have to have incredible partnership with the recruiting team i'm really lucky that we have an awesome one but we've worked really hard where possible get rid of degree requirements why because you can code without one or you can code with a degree in philosophy i code and i have a degree in journalism make sure you're taking into account people's whole life story i'd rather hire the student with a 2.5 who had two extra jobs than an internship at a fancy company why they're gonna get done right they know how to solve problems so that's it i think you can also make sure that you're killing the concept of culture fit all that is is an intractable morass of unconscious bias right so at atlassian we talk about values alignment and this isn't just some like you know rebranding term we actually went out did focus groups with our employees identified the specific behaviors that are associated with each of those values and we now run a highly structured interview that looks for those types of behaviors in their past work you have to have benedict lasting for at least a year especially nominated and go through extra training to even do that interview if there's one thing you can do because all culture fit means is you're just like me and when we have an industry that's imbalanced in the way that it is that just repeats those things and so it's not that interviewing for people who are going to work well in your environment is bad that's actually really great right but you want to be very intentional and specific about what things you're looking for versus what you're not otherwise it just becomes who road crew with the interview at princeton that little quip actually comes from a study that showed that in finance if you played the same sport as your interviewer you are four times more likely to get another interview and write like something like crew or whatever there's very strong socio-economic components to what types of sports you tend to play yeah i think mine does bring some diversity into the super question over here sorry there are no rules right yeah yeah absolutely would you be discriminating against a hard-working child from a rich family who happens to be in stanford no not if you have a conscious set of criteria but why are you going to give the stanford kid an extra look over a kid who went to arizona state yeah so i'm not saying don't hire people from stanford i'm just saying don't give them an extra advantage that the people from other schools don't get could have a very hard working child yeah it just happens to be in stanford for example absolutely and so if you're doing the skills test for that then they would get the same assessment but i know at companies i've seen where they literally have separate interview processes if you went to a poor school like stanford versus mit and so that's what i'm saying is the fact is the students at stanford regardless of their wealth or how hard they've worked i can tell you i did not come from a family with 10 million dollars in the bank and so yes what i'm saying is don't give the kids from stanford extra benefits over students who went to other schools because that's actually what the practice is in the current state not at every company and not in the same way but yeah the idea is you should have the same skills tests for everyone and then you hire whoever meets the bar fairness it's also legal it's like legal ethical insight yeah but what's that little board is the processes as they're generally practiced now are highly inequitable and so we're doing is correcting for that you mentioned this earlier about title you don't like your title so you don't you're not a big fan of the term diversity tell us a little bit more about that not a fan is like a really light way to describe that okay i didn't have any benchmarking data on attitudes and behaviors towards diversity and inclusion in tech i was like are people excited are they engaged no one had this data so i went out and collected it in an international survey and our team we actually decided to release all that because we're like oh it's useful to us it'll be useful to you and what we found last year i put some like secret trick questions in the survey and one of the questions i asked last year was which of these groups are a part of diversity here's a fun part i put all the groups men women non-binary people white people black people asian people whatever so the word diversity is overwhelmingly associated only with white women and black americans even in australia australians were more likely to say that african americans were diverse than indigenous australians like that's weird and so my my argument is that the word diversity is actually highly problematic not aligned to the goals that we have and getting in the way of creating equity for white women and black americans in the first place so what we should be talking about is building balanced teams first of all who's gonna die on the hill of building an imbalance team like absolutely none of your edge managers right it doesn't make sense but the reason it also helps is because it allows greater space for other types of identities so we can hold for example intersectionality inside balance so we can actually think about women of color who face significantly more barriers to advancement than white women do we can also have space for that straight white cisgender man who grew up in a trailer park who historically has heard that oh he's just privileged when in fact a lot of the barriers that he faced are similar to some of his peers who come from other low-income backgrounds who may or may not be from other marginalized groups and the third reason i think it's actually really helpful is because i have found that internally at atlassian switching to this language has helped us have more direct conversations about race than i've ever seen so the fact is like white fragility is real and the word diversity is so tied up with blackness specifically that before you even start to have a productive conversation people emotionally shut down right so balance the word literally just people have less hang-ups about it and so we're able to actually get into the question of oh hey you know we've all seen like the hiring manager who's like i really care about diversity and you're like you have hired six white women which is great but like what about everybody else not to negan white women like right we know that they also deserve more opportunity than they're often given and so i think then you go to the question of okay great your team is balanced in terms of gender in what other ways do we need to work on balance and then we get to a constructive conversation about this category and what are we going to do about it and like i said for us it has been completely transformative because people start bringing in aspects of their identity autism parenting status military status struggling with addiction and mental illness death of a spouse these are things that people talk about and write about internally at work and even at our customer summits and i think it's because we've created space for them so my boss won't let me change my job title to head of balance and belonging until i make balance happen like fetch so i'm hoping that you will help me i only ever use the word diverse when it is very clear that i'm also including people from majority groups white people are a part of diversity otherwise we're contributing to the idea of people of color and women and anyone who it doesn't fit that majority being the other and we shouldn't accept that there's one default for people we're all the default so that's it i'm a secret latina right you didn't know because my name i'm like the people who the linkedin parsers miss but i think that's it is when you say balance there it goes back to this we all have different perspectives that we bring to the team but those are fundamentally informed by our identities and life experiences you can't just say diversity of thought that comes from diversity of life experience it's the reason that algorithms nowadays don't work for people of color because the people in the room building them don't even know to ask the questions not because they're evil not because they're stupid but because their life experience has not given them that knowledge giving them an hour training is not going to solve it you just need to teach them how to work well with people from different backgrounds that's super profound you've done a lot of research in one of the the reports that you had state of diversity which we'll now call state of balance report i'm trying yeah this year we're trying to make it happen that's awesome you found that 80 of people think dni which we're not going to call balance is important but that doesn't necessarily translate to action right this is a big one especially here in the valley the report found that the number of formal dni has shrunk since 2017. why do you think that is and how did we solve for it yeah so we sort of quantified this existence of diversity fatigue and i think that's what's driving it so we found that there was a 10 percentage point drop in companies who had a formal dni program but like a 10 jump in companies that said they cared about dni and the thing i offer to you is i would prefer if your company is not putting actual time and money into it just say that you don't care no one's going to judge that but what you're doing is you're creating a space where candidates can't find a place where they're going to be safe and where they're going to thrive and so i think that's what's happening is at the corporate level it's 2013 was sort of when this next big wave tracy ciao asked where the numbers and you've seen a lot of companies pour a lot of money into branding and into pr but not into the structural change and so i think recruiters are really the front line of creating that change which is why are we doing a team fit interview why aren't we looking for people who add something to the team why aren't we selecting for skills instead of pedigree those little choices create more fairness because i think also the way that and i'll put this on me and my peers the way that we've talked about this work has been really wrong so we talk about it a lot at the company level right it's like oh we have 30 this but like your average middle manager doesn't know what the hell they can do to impact that number right or you're like empower women and they're like do i go by deodorant what am i supposed to be doing and i joke but it's true instead of being like you should value diversity i say well could you institute a no interruptions rule in your meeting why well because it turns out that women people of color and people from east asian countries are significantly more likely to be interrupted while speaking in meetings so you're going to get the good ideas on the table now does that feel like a diversity thing no it's also just a good way to it's an effective meeting right but but i think that's it is you have to get really tactical because folks don't know what to do to impact the whole culture which is they can't they can impact the culture of their teams and we need to talk about balance building balanced teams because your average hiring manager knows how to do something about their team and if every person made their team a little bit more balanced a little bit more having a culture of belonging the entire company culture would shift but it's not because you're asking people to act there and i think that's it give people tactics right things like i'm doing a talk with our security team today who's growing a lot and they said well what can we do to make sure we go in a more balanced way and i was like well here's all of the things our recruiting team is doing from a structural and a process level i was like what about referrals and they're like well our referrals aren't very balanced and i was like well so you five and it happened to be a group of men who were sitting to my right and i said how many of you have been to women in cyber security meetups and they were like uh none of us i was like well why not you want to go hire women the women in cyber security go to those meetups go meet them and then give them jobs and they were like oh yeah we can totally do that and again it wasn't it was just like oh it was not a tactic that had ever occurred so i would say there's that is give people one job and something to do because often they will try to do your job they're like can i help you source and you're like no we have awesome sources what i need is for you to go build a reputation as someone who's going to support people because the candidate is going to come in and say well what have you done to help build a team where i'm going to thrive and the hiring manager is going to be like oh we have a diversity program no one's going to believe that hiring manager to me a great answer for candidate and i can tell you because we got to hire this one i talked to her after she joined she was like you know the hiring manager on the team i'm the first woman on my team and i talked to the hiring manager about it and i said what are you doing to make the team more inclusive and he said well i've been working with recruiting to find more women but we've also been trying to have no interruptions rules in the meetings and this is something i feel really awkward talking about but i'm trying to be more proactive that was his whole answer like he did this one tiny thing and i feel awkward and she was like i'll go work for this person wow so i think that's what it is is don't make these big pledges about like we care about diversity everyone says that it's about how can you do a small thing that's totally within your power and you should also feel awesome about yourself about that creates a little bit of change and then when that becomes like your habit and you don't even notice pick a new thing and do that thing that's great i've always felt like and rewake and i've talked about this one when i started to is it was one of the questions i asked him is core values your posters about it everywhere and he goes no and i'm going i'm going to come join this company right because we tend to have make a lot of noise about these things put posters up and it's on our website and everything but do you really mean it right like do we really embody these is really important yeah one i think that's what it's about is like break it down in a trunk you don't have to move the whole mountain none of us can do that alone this is a gnarly structural issue that we all put little bits into creating it and so it's going to take us all just slowly moving and undoing that but to me that's more optimistic right like you absolutely can do something that's great this is really great we're just more uncomfortable when we're around people not like ourselves and so i think there might be some of that driving it too that's awesome so aubry i can have you here all day thank you so much thank you thank you for tuning in if you have any questions tweet us at hackerrank