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Diversifying our Candidate Pool

There are a number of admirable efforts for diversifying the workforce. This guide is specifically focused on diversifying our applicant pool for jobs within Digital.

Our Goals

  • consistency
  • transparency
  • learning and improving

Consistency

We want to make sure each and every hiring manager has a playbook they can use that builds off of the success and efforts of others. It can be hard to know where to start and what’s available.

Transparency

This should be transparent to the whole organization and open to others to be able to contribute. The network of relationships brought to the table through our whole organization is almost certainly more diverse than that of a few leaders.

Learning and Improving

We want to continue to learn about how effective each of these channels are and adapt our future approaches with the most effective options.

Landscape

Quite a bit has changed since we started these efforts. Efficacy of job boards seems to have waned significantly. WomenWhoCode a long running company in this space closed doors. The Pragmatic Engineer board run by Gergely Orosz, shutting down. This being said we may still find opportunities through direct engagement, for example the Slack workspaces serving various communities.

Jack Henry Talent Acquisition

Our JH recruitment team works with hiring managers to offer options for us to reach a few job boards focused on diversity and underrepresented classes. JH Talent Acquisition budgets for and fields the costs for the following sites.

For ^ these JH TA rotates with our recruiting team for ALL open positions and we have one TA team member that is the POC. There are usually 2 postings slots on EACH above)

In addition there are a few other partnerships that JH Talent Acquisition drives as the point of contact and are listed below.

  • Circa – ALL OPEN POSITIONS are posted here and is the primary Diversity Outreach Vendor for Jack Henry.

Digital Hiring Managers

We can be addative to this process exactly because each hiring manager is specifically tuned into their own job posting and their team’s needs. Being more directly engaged allows us to decrease the time from application to response. Who better to engage with these job boards and communities than those that know the technical domain or are working in the teams that need the talent.

As long as we are forecasting the costs and in the hiring process directing the applicants to apply through the official Jack Henry job portal then we have great flexibility and latitude.

To that end we can directly engage with and use any of these channels for publishing to diverse and underrepresented groups. We don’t have a lot of data yet on these, but will be adding feedback on their effectiveness as we try them out.

include.io is a job board facilitated by lesbians who tech, meant to include all
blacktechpipeline.com connecting Black technologists to great companies
Diversify Tech is a collection of resources for underrepresented people in tech
Techqueria Org is focused on LatinX communities POCIT is focused on persons of color in tech Tech Ladies is focused on women in tech

What to consider

  • Minimum requirements: If you remove minimum requirements from the post you’ll be more likely to encounter more people that otherwise would self filter themselves out of jobs they are absolutely qualified for. The dilemna of being your own worst critic.

  • Re-careering: Maybe it’s someone coming into tech from another field of expertise. They may know how to work as a team, demonstrate a high level of ownership and responsibility, but just need a place to break into the tech field. Our apprenticeship programs are a great entry point for this, but maybe it’s worth considering these candidates.

  • aptitude vs specific experience: Can we observe broad awareness across a number of areas with at least one area in particular where they have deep experience? It may not matter particularly what that area is or if it directly applies to our tech stack, but does it indicate the ability to learn/gain high proficiency in an area.

  • List the salary ranges! That’s as simple as it needs to be.

  • Where financially possible post across the same boards or on a rotation and stick to it.

  • Ask your JHA recruiter not to pre-screen through avature. Ask them to send all candidates through to you.

  • Engage the whole Digital org to post to their communities. A simple post into #team-digital with the basic details of what they can post or how to link to the official posting is a great way to allow our teammates more involvement into the process while leveraging a wider community of relationships.

Tactical

  • If you’re posting to slack communitiies here’s a template to use to make it snazzy. This would need customized to suite your needs
:wave:  Hey, looking to add a Senior Engineer to our infrastructure team at Banno. We are a fin-tech startup that joined forces with Jack Henry because we believe that the world is a better place with community banks and credit unions. To that end we strive to make solutions that empower community financial institutions to make digital banking personal by equipping them to compete in today's complex and technologically diverse market.
:round_pushpin: REMOTE (local offices available across the US if desired post covid)
:heavy_dollar_sign: Salary/Benefits: 75K-150K, company matching 401k, employee stock purchase program(buy stock under current market),
:floppy_disk: Tech stack: Kubernetes, Terraform, Kafka, Istio, GO
:technologist: US residents only
:hourglass:  Timezone: EST through PST
https://jackhenry.avature.net/careers/JobDetail/Staff-Engineer-Infrastructure/9301

  • You will need to save receipts and fill out your own expense reports. You’ll need to change the expense type to recruiting and list them as office or operating costs

  • Many job boards or communities may ask questions about what Jack Henry has done to promote diversity.

 Jack Henry has five diversity and inclusion committees focused on race, LGBTQ+, women in the workforce, military veterans, and remote workers. Our CEO Dave Foss has signed the CEO Action for Diversity and Inclusion Pledge shows Jack Henry’s commitment to cultivating a workplace that supports open dialogue on diversity and inclusion. With this pledge we join more than 1,400 chief executives and presidents who have made a pledge to act on supporting a more inclusive workplace for employees, communities and society at large. 

https://www.jackhenry.com/more-from-jha/media-releases/pages/david-foss,-jack-henry-ceo,-signs-action-for-diversity-and-inclusion-pledge.aspx