Hiring (and Retaining) a Diverse Engineering Team - Gergely Orsoz, Sarah Wells, Samuel Adjei, Franziska Hauck, Uma Chingunde, Gabrielle Tang, and Colin Howe

This resource first appeared in issue #104 on 11 Dec 2021 and has tags Hiring: Other, Becoming A Manager: Diversity

Hiring a diverse team, especially in research computing, is not the default. As empirical evidence, I offer… *gestures widely*. Therefore, default processes won’t get you there.

With that the case, and because there’s moral and effectiveness imperatives to making sure you’re not excluding good candidates from opportunities on your team, then you need to change how the processes play out, which means change management. And the thing about change management - like anything in management, really - is that it requires sustained effort and attention to the basics.

In this post, Orsoz hands the keyboard over to six leaders who have built successful and diverse teams. Their stories aren’t easily summarized, and many of them apply to larger organizations than our own (although could easily be adopted by our institutions), but the basic idea of having a goal, making sure the steps you are taking are consistent with that goal, and maintaining that sustained effort are key.