There has been a lot of conversation in the tech community about how to build a pipeline of computer scientists for the next generation, bring awareness to groups that aren’t current represented and improve diversity numbers.
While there’s been a lot of work and initiatives that have cropped up over the years, there’s still a lot to be done.
Whether you believe in diversity or are skeptical about it, at some point your organization is going to want to scale its recruiting efforts.
In today’s episode, Jessica McKellar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_McKellar) and I are going to skip past the usual complaints, and get down and dirty into what is and isn’t working and why.
Jessica is currently an engineering manager at Dropbox (https://www.dropbox.com/) and was previously the Director of the Python Software Foundation (https://www.python.org/psf/). Jessica has also co-authored two books about computer programming (Twisted Network Programming Essentials - https://www.amazon.com/Twisted-Network-Programming-Essentials-Event-driven-ebook/dp/B00BT0IEJE/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1481592423&sr=1-1&keywords=jessica+mckellar and Introduction to Python - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/110000448.do), and was previously an early engineer at Ksplice (http://www.ksplice.com/) and founded Zulip (https://zulip.org/) which was eventually acquired by Dropbox.
Given how challenging the recruiting environment is in tech, you’ll want to watch this episode and learn from Jessica:
-Why interviews are a terrible proxy for determining if a technical candidate will be successful in your organization
- How to perform an audit to measure who you’re attracting, how effective you are at retaining them, and how to scale your efforts as your organization grows
- The steps people often overlook that prevent them from building sustainable engineering organizations
This was our final episode for season two of FemgineerTV. You can watch previous episodes from this season on our YouTube Channel, and be sure to subscribe to our channel to receive episode for season three starting in January 2017.
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FemgineerTV is produced as a partnership between Femgineer (http://femgineer.com/) and Pivotal Tracker (http://www.pivotaltracker.com/). San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA (http://www.startmotionmedia.com/design/).