Hi, I've taken over from Tom for hiring at Matasano. There's a couple of things that you need for "diverse" recruiting (e.g. hiring women in tech):
1) A way of evaluating candidates that avoids mirrortocracy style institutional -isms like sexism and ageism.
2) A way of convincing people who have bounced off the field due to -isms to even try.
BTW, Tom was great at Matasano on #1, and only moderately successful at #2. We get tons of people who aren't in the industry, but they tend to self-select to be young men. For an individual company, #2 is way harder. It's "easy" to fix yourself, but hard to fight the larger culture.
Starfighter looks to me like something that supports #1 directly (by allowing objective metrics), and enables #2. It's a way for people who aren't welcome into a field to dip their toe in without some roomful of young white men asking them illegal questions about their child-rearing plans. On the other hand, there's still tremendous pressure pushing people away, and it's a deep problem. Still, part of the puzzle and I (personally) highly endorse.
As to the numbers, I've been meaning to dig into the data, but Matasano's hiring as fast as we need to, so it's been hard to motivate myself to do so. Maybe once graduation season ends...
BTW, Tom was great at Matasano on #1, and only moderately successful at #2. We get tons of people who aren't in the industry, but they tend to self-select to be young men. For an individual company, #2 is way harder. It's "easy" to fix yourself, but hard to fight the larger culture.
Starfighter looks to me like something that supports #1 directly (by allowing objective metrics), and enables #2. It's a way for people who aren't welcome into a field to dip their toe in without some roomful of young white men asking them illegal questions about their child-rearing plans. On the other hand, there's still tremendous pressure pushing people away, and it's a deep problem. Still, part of the puzzle and I (personally) highly endorse.
As to the numbers, I've been meaning to dig into the data, but Matasano's hiring as fast as we need to, so it's been hard to motivate myself to do so. Maybe once graduation season ends...