4 Mistakes to Avoid When Reaching Out to Engineering Candidates from Underrepresented Backgrounds
This is Part 5 in a five part series on building diverse software engineering teams. Read Part 4, Read This Before Hiring Another Senior Software Engineer, here. I’m moving off of Medium! For more articles on engineering leadership, follow me on my website.
“Hi Laura. I’m an organizer for $tech_conference, taking place in $location. We’d like to have more women speak at our conference. Are you available to give a talk?”
“Laura, I’m an executive search agent for $agency and my client has a focus on D&I. They would like to increase diversity on their engineering team and are looking for a female VP of Engineering. Are you available for a quick call?”
I didn’t respond to either of those messages, or the dozens of similar ones I’ve received in the last few years. If I had written this blog post already, I would have sent a nice message along with a link.
Messages like this make a couple mistakes when it comes to reaching out to someone from an underrepresented group for a role at your company. If you’ve made these same mistakes — don’t sweat it. People who write messages like this do care about diversity and inclusion, but need some tools to help them. You might not even know you weren’t getting it right.
Here’s a rundown of patterns to avoid when reaching out to underrepresented candidates.
Making their characteristics the focus of the conversation.
If you reach out to a candidate with an opening line like in the messages above, one that sounds something like: “Hey Laura, we are trying to get more women on our engineering team,” your response rates will likely be pretty low. What you’re trying to communicate is a commitment to diversity and inclusion. What the candidate reads is that they’re being considered only because of their gender, race, or other characteristic.
It’s not a great feeling to be tokenized. When I get messages like this, my internal line of questioning goes something like:
- What’s wrong with their current team that there aren’t enough women?
- Have they even taken the time to read through my resume/CV or look at my LinkedIn profile?
- Why do they want to work with me specifically, aside from my gender?
Leading with the opportunity and focusing on the candidates experience is a better approach. This also goes for phrases like “Black candidates are encouraged to apply,” which may seem benign, but raises questions about why you are targeting specific communities.
You might be actively trying to add more diversity to your team. That’s great — but no candidate wants to be distilled down to their characteristics.
Bypassing their accomplishments and skipping personalization.
There’s probably a reason you thought this person would be a great fit for your company. Share it with them! Your potential candidate has spent hours creating a personal website, adding details to their LinkedIn page, or making sure their GitHub profiles reflect their expertise. Include these details in your message to help the candidate understand why the position is relevant to them, and how they could continue their career with your company.
“Hi Kimberly, I’m an engineering manager at $company, where our mission is $mission. I’m looking for strong technical leaders to join our team as senior software engineers right now. I came across your talk at $community_event last week, and I was so impressed with your expertise in React, especially in $expertise. I noticed that you’ve been at $your_company for a few years, and I’d love to have a conversation with you about how working at $company could be your next step. Are you interested in speaking? In the mean time, you can learn a bit more about our company $here and $here.”
I work with dozens of engineering teams who are hiring. Open rates for nurture campaigns are low, and response rates are even lower — anywhere from 0–5%. I’ve run several experiments with a few of my clients to focus on highly personalized messaging. On average, those campaigns had open rates of 40-50%, and a response rate above 20%. These types of messages do take longer to craft. A great talent lead I’ve worked with said he can typically send 6-7 highly personalized reachout messages in an hour (assuming the candidates are already sourced with contact details), so adjust your expectations accordingly if you put this into practice.
Making surface level claims about diversity and inclusion.
Instead of adding a sentence like “our company is committed to diversity and inclusion,” share some examples of inclusive policies that your company has. This might be a broad parental leave policy, healthcare policy with coverage for gender affirming surgery, or a link to your company’s stance on working with entities that have a historical track record of oppressing communities of color. Don’t have any like that to share? Your company might not be as committed to diversity and inclusion as you may think.
Getting the timing of your follow up message wrong.
If you are doing sourcing on LinkedIn and found your leads through a search, assume that dozens of other hiring managers or recruiters also found that person in the same way. They might have an inbox full of generic messages from other recruiting teams who use the “spray and pray” method. Even with a compelling personalized message, they might not have enough data points to give your message a second look. Other times, the timing just might be off.
Finding a balance is tough here. Not following up shows that you care, but not that much. You also want to be careful of following up too quickly, though. That just gets annoying for the candidate. If you are thinking to yourself, “if they wanted to talk with me, they would have replied,” I get it. I hate recruiting spam as much as the next person. But I’ve been surprised by the amount of people who do respond to the second message, either because they recognize that it’s not just another “spray and pray” message, or simply because they would have replied to the first one, but it got lost in the shuffle of things. A polite “thanks but no thanks” is a great reply from a candidate. In a year, things might change.
I’m moving off of Medium! For more articles on engineering leadership, follow me on my website. I also run a weekly newsletter called Management Queries, where I answer one engineering management question a week.
