I completely agree it's extra hard if you have no women onboard already--that's why I'm trying to source female engineers now, while the team has only one full-time engineer. The Etsy example of turning around a non-diverse culture is great, but waiting that long will cost 10x as much. Unfortunately, it seems that how it needs to be done, since sourcing at such an early stage is so difficult.
re: 1 -- I agree. I've found I won't have trouble sourcing entry level. The code schools and bootcamps seem to be making a lot of progress on gender diversity. I think in the long run when my company can afford to focus more on growth and leadership development I will pursue this route. Right now, however, I have a very solid pipeline of diverse and experienced engineers willing to join the team--just no experienced women.
In case anybody has stumbled on this short thread while experiencing similar issues: I've had pretty good success with LinkedIn connection requests. I think it helps that I'm crafting the invite to be personal and that I'm a founder and not a recruiter.
The biggest struggle was finding the candidates in the first place. LinkedIn limited the number of search results you can get for free and "premium" subscriptions didn't seem worthwhile.
Instead, I used Google-fu "site:linkedin.com/in" and some boolean search around the technology I was looking for and my location. The key that got female candidates was including "Grace Hopper" or "Anita Borg". Nearly 100% of the search results were experienced women.
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I completely agree it's extra hard if you have no women onboard already--that's why I'm trying to source female engineers now, while the team has only one full-time engineer. The Etsy example of turning around a non-diverse culture is great, but waiting that long will cost 10x as much. Unfortunately, it seems that how it needs to be done, since sourcing at such an early stage is so difficult.
re: 1 -- I agree. I've found I won't have trouble sourcing entry level. The code schools and bootcamps seem to be making a lot of progress on gender diversity. I think in the long run when my company can afford to focus more on growth and leadership development I will pursue this route. Right now, however, I have a very solid pipeline of diverse and experienced engineers willing to join the team--just no experienced women.
In case anybody has stumbled on this short thread while experiencing similar issues: I've had pretty good success with LinkedIn connection requests. I think it helps that I'm crafting the invite to be personal and that I'm a founder and not a recruiter.
The biggest struggle was finding the candidates in the first place. LinkedIn limited the number of search results you can get for free and "premium" subscriptions didn't seem worthwhile.
Instead, I used Google-fu "site:linkedin.com/in" and some boolean search around the technology I was looking for and my location. The key that got female candidates was including "Grace Hopper" or "Anita Borg". Nearly 100% of the search results were experienced women.