[Applause] CRYSTAL: Hello.
My name is Crystal Huff.
My pronouns are she, her, and hers.
Or they, them, theirs.
And I'm here to talk with you about tech hiring which is sometimes or possibly often or maybe
even always, failing us.
But priorities!
You are welcome to look up for my selfie.
I will treasure it always.
How many of you said to yourselves, "That's so frivolous or ridiculous.
She's up there taking a selfie".
I'm going to show a number of selfies or other photos of me in this slide deck, and it is
a little ridiculous.
That doesn't mean that I don't have something to offer you.
In fact, it probably means that I have an entirely different perspective to offer you.
They say that, depending on the study you read, you have anywhere from 30 seconds, or
15 seconds, or even seven seconds, to make an impression on someone.
And I have just used mine to tell you that I'm a ridiculous person!
A very smart person, Meri Williams, you may have heard of her, said, "People have to trust
your intent before they trust your feedback."
I agree, and since I'm giving tech in general feedback, I'm going to tell you a little bit
more about myself so that perhaps you can trust me.
So as Meri mentioned, I have been an activist in Fandom and pro spaces.
This is a photo of me at the women's march in Philadelphia.
My friend is the one wearing the ridiculous unicorn head!
I also run around the world.
I travel internationally for work and for fun.
I have chaired seven science fiction events, including the world's science fiction convention.
This is a photo of me and Margaret Attwood.
Live long, and prosper.
Therefore, I am a source of hilarious stories!
Many of my photos with people and from my travels are taken with an app called Face
You so we can make ridiculous faces essential and, in fact, required.
So, in this talk, I'm going to give you some anecdotes and some data.
I think both are important.
I am going to tell you some stories and I'm going to give you some stats and some ways
of framing things in hiring.
And story time, I was, - I was head of HR for a small start-up, and I was in charge
of the phone screening for a candidate or for a position, and there were some mixed
results with the phone screens.
I require that people talk to me about real things during a phone screen, so I'm notorious
for having a an hour-long phone screen.
I want people to get past the bullshit and tell me something real about themselves before
I'm willing to bring them in and meet the team.
I was greeting people, and I fell in love with one candidate in particular, it's true.
I thought he was amazing, he had excellent skills, I thought he would be a fantastic
addition to our team.
And so he was one of the people who passed the Crystal test, and we brought him in.
He spent a day with the team, the hiring manager in question interviewed him, and, afterwards,
I said really excitedly, "So how did it go!"
My biases were showing but I was hoping we would make an offer to this person.
The hiring manager said, "Oh, it didn't go well.
He didn't dress the part."
I said, "What?"
"What part of this job requires him to wear any particular clothing?
Also, you know, in the phone screen he asked me if I come in, is there a particular dress
code.
I told him we wear jeans and T-shirts, we are a start-up, right?
Is to what is the big deal?
Can't you just discount what he was wearing?
I'm glad we're not talking about a female candidate, right?
Right?
We were talking about my company's first black candidate.
And what I think was going on was that the hiring manager realised that he was talking
to our first black candidate, and he didn't know what to do.
He hadn't really thought about it.
And then I hope the next thought he had was that's a little racist, and so he came up
with a different reason why he was uncomfortable during the entire interview and why he couldn't
hire this person.
If this had happened to me, I would have been a lot more angry and judges about -- judgmental
about this company than this person was because this hiring manager took this candidate aside
afterwards to say, "I'm really sorry I can't offer you the job because you didn't dress
the part."
Yeah.
Welcome to tech.
So, if you take nothing else from this story, please think about what it would be like to
hire the first person into your company who is very different from you.
If you can, and I hope you all can, hire a consultant to do the hiring process well with
you.
So that you have someone to turn to and say, "We need to have a conversation about sexism
and racism in our industry, and we're bad at that because our team is entirely white
dudes."
So can someone help us?
We will pay you for your time because we respect you, right?
Also talk with your colleagues about this issue.
Read up on this.
Talk some more.
Try to bias, yourself positively towards candidates who are coming in and offering you a different
perspective on the industry than you already have because that's valuable.
So when we're talking about these issues, I think that there are a couple of steps going
on, and I want to offer you these steps explicitly so you can try to rejigger them for yourselves.
We are steeped in a racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, classist context.
I don't think this is controversial in this setting, I hope.
I think this is a statement of fact.
And based on that, we have first impressions that are influenced by and reinforced by our
cultural upbringing that we don't even think about.
They're just instant impressions.
They are unconscious and they are often problematic.
Sometimes, we have a first initial response or inclination that comes from that place
of reinforce the kyriarchy, which is the system of intersecting oppressions like racism, transphobia,
racism, sexism, homophobia.
Then we have the considered external response, and what we can do when we are responding
to a situation.
It is under our contribution control even if our emotional reactions aren't.
So, please put more time into the first part and in assessing your thoughts and your options
for actions in order to combat the inherent problems in your background and context.
I like to think of this as thoughts, feelings, and behaviour, three different things that
are under different levels of your ability to control.
You can't necessarily control your feelings, but when you have a feeling, you can think
about it, and then realise, "Oh, I'm thinking about this.
This feeling much being uncomfortable in this interview, that's probably coming from a place
of racism and I should admit that and then try to change my behaviour and what I do based
on it."
Different story: I promised kittens in my talk!
So when working with my team, we had in ad hoc hiring - we had an ad hoc hiring, interviewing
system for a bit.
We needed to hire someone for a position that a friend of the co-founder of the company
applied for.
I knew that this was going to be a big deal whether we hired this person or not.
It was going to matter to everyone, it was going to matter to the co-founders if we hired
this person, and it was going to matter to everyone if we didn't hire this person, right,
because the team was small, and the co-founders were a large portion of it.
We thought what we're going to do is have everyone in the company right now talk to
each of the candidates for this position in order to make a decision.
Which is very well intentioned, and, given the size of the team, I can stand behind that
decision still, but there was something I didn't think about, which is that I hadn't
really prepared my developers to sit down and have an interview with someone who wasn't
going to be developing, and so they sat across the table from this person and at some point,
there was just an awkward silence, and one of my devs piped up, "I'm just going to say
it.
Would you eat a kitten to get this job?"
I'm not sure if the worst part of the story is actually that, because that was so funny,
that conversation was so hilarious and telling the story afterwards was so funny, that became
a question that was in our interview process for quite some time!
[Laughter].
Which is pretty offputting for many people as you might imagine.
And it also has nothing to do with any job at that start-up.
We did not hire people to eat kittens!
So if you take nothing else from this story, please plan your hiring explicitly before
you're in the middle of it.
This is something you can put a lot of time and thought into, or you can look at many
smart people's blog posts and cull from them.
Think about the questions you want to ask candidates.
I didn't realise that this is something I should encourage to do explicitly, but it
is, so think about the questions you want to ask candidates, spend real time with them,
remember unconsciously studies say you make your first impression and usually keep it
after the first 30, or 15 or seven seconds.
So, in order to combat that, you need to spend more time with candidates and actually get
past your initial impression.
Also, don't ask anyone if they will eat a kitten!
So, there are some useful stats from McKinsey that can tell you reasons why it is important
to hire a racially diverse term, to hire a gender-diverse team, to hire people in general
with perspectives that aren't already reflected on the team, because, like NASA, you may find
yourself in a situation where someone who's not entirely able-bodied has the answer for
how to deal with motion, where you have weightlessness, so someone in a wheelchair might solve that
for your company really easily and that perspective is really valued.
Statistics on the US and the UK are not great.
They're not great in terms of representation, particularly in leadership, and when you think
about representation of diversity in your company, if you don't have people in leadership
who don't look exactly like you, then it's harder to tell people, and it's harder to
actually be a company that is inclusive of people with different perspectives.
It's harder to recruit from communities that are not white dudes if your entire company
is white dudes, because your leadership team and the make-up of your company says this
is a company for white dudes.
So, please think about this because there are some takeaways financially is a that I
those companies are more successful.
So I've given tech an F- for hiring.
The good news is that I've given you homework, room for improvement!
I really hope you take it.
It is some feedback that, as feedback should be, you can take or leave.
It is a gift.
I'm happy to talk to you more about it.
I'm the most extroverted person I know, so please feel free to talk to me because I want
to talk to all of you and I will learn many of your names because I'm that extroverted.
Thank you.
Live long and prosper.
[Applause].
MERI: Thanks very much.