Connections are 3 min each.

How strong is your current relationship with the engineering leaders in your organization? Are you both generally excited to work together or do you dread seeing their name in your inbox? The relationship you have with your engineering managers, or lack thereof, is crucial to ensuring your ability to hire a diverse technical team. In this session, you will explore methods to strengthen your relationship with the engineering leaders within your organization and how to build their trust. You will also explore how to properly prepare yourself to begin diversity and inclusion conversations and initiatives with your organization’s engineering leaders.

Mamuna Oladipo, VP of Product, Shopify | Tigran Sloyan, Co-Founder & CEO, CodeSignal

This session is for recruiters looking to understand unconscious bias on a deeper level, the ways in which it shows up in our recruiting processes, and the most efficient ways to mitigate it. We will cover strategies for writing job descriptions, creating hiring committees, screening candidates, conducting interviews, in ways that increase the equity of your final decision and the inclusiveness experienced by your candidates.

Flo Thinh Chialtas, Talent Partner, DCVC | Yoni Lateiner, Head of Talent, NerdWallet

Culture fit is a recruiting mindset that is proactively being replaced with culture add, but do you really understand how to hire for culture add? You will be equipped with tools to shift your mindset from culture fit to culture add as a recruiter and ensure that culture add is not just a change in vocabulary or quota, but an active shift in thought and behavior. The session will cover culture fit bias, positive deviance, recruiting from outside, and the culture add mindset.

Yordanos Asmare, Head of Global Recruiting, Liftoff Mobile | Elliott Garms, Co-Founder, humanpredictions

To nurture cultures of equity, inclusion, and belonging in diverse communities you must help people see and appreciate their commonalities and differences. This begins by people knowing themselves, recognizing their impacts on each other, and having a common language to talk about their various experiences and perspectives. Aptitude in this area is doubly important for those in the recruiting profession as the very nature of the role involves engaging with people at a human level and maintaining empathy while engaging with those same people as rows on a spreadsheet or a name on a resume. Rajiv and Lexi will explore the work of nonprofit Atlas of Care, which has developed a novel approach called Mapping Ourselves. Rather than “big science”, they focus on human-scale personal science. And, rather than emphasizing the individual, on only knowing yourself, they acknowledge our interconnected lives by emphasizing collective self-reflection and seeing the complex interactions that influence wellbeing and belonging. A wide range of people, from social activists, to health professionals, professors, and business leaders, have universally found this powerful. The experience has deepened individual learning and increased social capital. Rajiv and Lexi will describe what Mapping Ourselves is, how it came to be, the impact it has had, and how recruiting leaders can apply this approach to their teams.

Rajiv Mehta, Founder & CEO, Atlas of Care | Lexi Butler, Founder, Sista Circle: Black Women in Tech

The foundation of this session is what we all have in common – the brain. Understanding how it influences our perceptions, thinking and behaviors unifies us as humans and gives us a new, more compassionate lens with which to view ourselves and others. Neuroscientist and brain-based leadership expert Dr Dan Radecki will unpack why D&I training that only treats the symptoms doesn’t work, and why addressing bias and fostering psychological safety at its neurological roots offers exciting possibilities for building authentically inclusive cultures where both visible and invisible diversity are embraced and nurtured.

Dan Radecki, Co-Founder & Chief Scientific Officer, Academy of Brain-based Leadership

The Rooney Rule is an NFL policy that requires every team in the league to interview at least one ethnic minority candidate for a head coach or senior leadership vacancy. How effective do we think it would be to apply this rule in tech recruiting? What if tech companies required at least one ethnic minority be interviewed for all leadership positions, including recruiting roles? Do you think this would be effective? In this session, we will answer the questions above and more. We will explore how effective the Rooney Rule has been in the NFL and what aspects of the rule, if any, can be applied to the tech recruiting industry. We will also dive into how to avoid passive diversity quotas and just ‘checking boxes’ within diversity and inclusion.

Adam Ward, Partner, Growth by Design Talent | Mawulom Nenonene, Talent Consultant, LTSE

Reflection with your team (off platform.)

During the second event of this summit, Addressing Our Systems, we decoded culture fit and analyzed how hiring for culture fit impedes inclusive hiring. Language like this can be revealing of the unconscious biases of your company and recruiting teams. What other language is informed by hiring for culture fit instead of culture add? Are your language choices hindering your inclusive hiring process? We’ll analyze some of the major language missteps used in job postings that reinforce underlying unconscious biases and principles that we can follow to improve our inclusive hiring practices. What language alternatives can we use to improve our hiring metrics? What phrases can we use to be more welcoming to underrepresented groups?

Are you currently tracking D&I metrics within your organization? How meaningful are the metrics you are tracking? We’ll discuss the key metrics and data you should be tracking, how to efficiently capture these metrics, how to interpret them, and strategies for presenting findings to your leadership. We’ll shed light on how to use data to reinforce your inclusive hiring decisions and organizational strategy.

Choose from 3 - 6 tracks.