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Comment by ashray | Hacker News Reader

We (www.gapjumpers.me) are trying to solve the gender diversity issue in tech by using blind auditions as a first filter. Our data shows that blind auditions result in greater diversity numbers.

By using a technical challenge as the first step and fast forwarding people to an advanced interview stage, we're eliminating candidate reluctance and increasing transparency (the candidate interacts directly with the hiring manager through our platform).

In our experience, telling the candidate "Show us your skills, impress us, and you'll get an interview" is better than "Tune up your resume to pass every possible filter". Showing your skills early on also removes a lot of stress from the candidate and gives you something solid to talk about during the interview.

Edit:Our homepage shows some numbers and case studies are available on request: http://www.gapjumpers.me/#genderResults

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Do you have any numbers you can share? Do your results look significantly different from the background population?

Hi Kalium,

for numbers, please have a look here at what our data is showing to date:

www.gapjumpers.me/#genderResults

Uhm. I was hoping for something much more comprehensible and comprehensive than a series of blurbs and unlabeled pie charts. A statistical comparison of your cohort compared to the background population and relative performance is what interests me.

I want to know how your program does compared to a hypothetical ideal gender-bias-free hiring system. If what you present there is truly all that your data shows, I have some grave concerns about your company.

I wonder if you could also make the matching part of the process blind as well? That is, the article mentions that women might be less likely to apply to places like Fog Creek - but if you matched applicants to employers blindly both ways (blindly to them, of course, you the matcher would not be blind), so the applicants didn't know who they were interviewing for during the interview? Then developers with lower self-esteem but great skills might end up interviewing for high-end places, and not even be stressed during the interview, because they don't know who it's with.

As long as I'd be able to submit a list of companies that I did not want to work with ahead of time.

This is an interesting approach. We will probably try it in the future but at the moment feedback says that candidates almost always want more information (more about the company, more about the people they'd be working with, more about the kind of work they'd be doing). But I definitely agree on how it might take the stress out of the process.

The only issue is that hiring and getting hired requires significant commitment on both ends and long term anonymity might not work really well under those conditions.

I'd find this very interesting myself, although I'd have concerns about potential employers in some ways. As long as I was able to provide a list of employers I DON'T want to work for up front and have those auto-filtered from my blind interviews I'd be totally open to trying out this process through a recruitment firm. I personally tend to pick my employers broadly on three questions: 1) Are they doing something that's actually innovative? 2) Do they behave ethically in the marketplace towards their employers, vendors, and customers? 3) Is the position located somewhere that I'd be okay with living?

If the answer to any of those is "no", I won't even bother applying/interviewing and I automatically turn down recruiters from that company. #2 in particular is a big one, there are way too many businesses in the world from startups to big corps that behave unethically, and I refuse to be a part of it.

Being able to work with a recruiting platform where I can detail these qualifications up-front and trust that they'll be respected would give me the piece of mind to put myself in a situation where I'd be matched to an employer based on their needs and my qualifications without concern that I'd be getting screwed somehow.

Interesting that you mention gender diversity but there's no mention about racial diversity.

Our profile capture does not require applicants to include their demographic information, hence the only way we've been able to easily split by gender is by identifying their profile images and names.

Of course, outcomes have shown that racial diversity is also helped along. Our hypothesis is that if you work to remove bias through process there should be a measurable (even if it's small) change in diversity metrics.

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