Case Study
Improving Support Org Diversity / Zapier / 2020
At the end of 2019, Zapier hired their first Director of DEI and committed to having a workforce that represented the race breakdown of US citizens. For the Support team, this meant a 150% increase in Black, Asian, and Hispanic/Latinx representation. Given my strong relationships with our recruiting partners and passion for DEI work, my manager asked me to be the main point of contact and drive this initiative for Support.
I knew this project needed diversity in the people working on it, so I approached a female Team Lead who didn't speak English as her first language to partner with me. I was very conscious of my privilege and didn't want to create something that only worked for white cis-men. Together, we established our goal: create a hiring process that allowed any candidate with the right technical aptitude to shine, regardless of background or location.
We rewrote job descriptions to be free from jargon and tested them with colleagues who didn't speak English as their first language. We collaborated with recruiting to improve our sourcing strategy, targeting areas like continental Africa and South America. We created three brand new interviews for each stage of the process, along with new scorecard guidance and interviewer training focused on conducting fair interviews free from unconscious bias.
One change I'm particularly proud of was redesigning the skills interview. The original version asked candidates to share their screen, troubleshoot a faulty workflow live, and write a reply to the customer - all in real-time, which created enormous stress. We stripped this back and instead asked candidates to write a fictional reply and share it via Zoom chat, letting them use tools like Grammarly or spell check - basically anything they'd normally use when writing to customers.
By the end of the year, we'd met our goal of increasing representation by 150%, resulting in a much more diverse and culturally rich Support team. More importantly, we'd created a hiring process that was genuinely accessible and allowed candidates from all backgrounds to demonstrate their abilities authentically.
