BIZTECH: What else should they be doing?
TEDRICK: They need to rethink their hiring approach. One thing I see very often is people talking about “culture fit” — as in, “I don’t know that this person will fit in with our culture.” And I don’t know that that’s necessarily holding that particular candidate to the same technical metric that you’d hold someone else to. If someone is from a different background or has different life experiences, they may not seem like a good cultural fit. So there’s automatically that bias. We should rethink that as we recruit people.
Then, once you get women and people of color into these workplaces, businesses have to make sure that they’re building an inclusive workspace. That means having difficult conversations about whether different programs are working and making sure that, when you recruit people, their positions are such that they have agency to make decisions and that they feel like they’re contributors. It’s incumbent upon leaders to have those honest conversations and make those continuous improvements as necessary.
BIZTECH: Given the shortage of qualified technology workers generally, shouldn’t businesses be focusing more squarely on this issue?
TEDRICK: Right, it’s bizarre to me. One study by McKinsey in 2018 found that companies that don’t have diversity of race and gender tend to underperform by 29 percent in terms of profitability. So, there’s proof that it’s ridiculous not to strive for diversity, yet some of the things I see and hear in the industry — it really is counterproductive. I think people genuinely want to get there, but there’s more heavy lifting to be done, and sometimes I wonder if businesses and professionals are engaging in those conversations and taking up those actions.