Ruben is the founding member and COO of Makers. He was instrumental in growing the company and taking it from just an idea to training over 1,500 people and building relationships with companies like Tesco, Santander, and the FT. He previously built numerous start-ups and is part of the inaugural Entrepreneur First cohort. Below is an adapted transcript of what he said on Tuesday.
Good evening everyone. My name is Ruben.
As you can hear, I’m a typical Londoner. I’m born and bred in Belgium. I’ve been in the UK for the last 12 years, and stayed here because it’s a fantastic country where there’s lots of opportunities . And education is definitely one of them.
So, I’ve spent the last five and a half years working on Makers Academy, which we just rebranded to “Makers”.
We take people who have never written a line of code, from all walks of life, and turn them into professional software engineers.
Tonight, I don’t want to talk about what we do at Makers, but about diversity — or more broadly speaking, inclusivity. This is an essential part of what we do at Makers: we have a mission to transform lives and it has to be the lives of as many people as possible.
Whilst it is important to talk about diversity,it’s not the right conversation to be had. For me, the conversation should be about inclusivity.
Diversity is the outcome of what you get when you have a very inclusive environment. An environment means workforce, culture, brand and everything else in between.
What I’d like to start with is ‘why.’
We meet companies small and large on a day-to-day basis. And they tell us lack of gender diversity in their tech team is a problem, to which we need to ask “why?”.
Asking “why” matters because it allows us to fully understand how committed they are to solving this problem. If there’s no real deeper reason, it may just be a company trying to jump on the trendy bandwagon. We don’t think that’s a great place to start.
And there are obviously dozens of reasons we believe every company should care, whether ethical or commercial, but without having done this introspective piece, it’s rare to see companies actually solving this problem. So we suggest you start by finding the real driving forces as to why it matters for you and your organisation, specifically, so that you’re not paying lip-service. Then once you have this, make sure you get buy-in from C-level, else, from our experience, it’s pretty difficult to impact things at a systemic, organisational level.
If you don’t have a real reason and you don’t have C-level leadership buying into why it matters, not much is going to change.
Once you’ve started asking why, and found your internal driving forces, the next piece of advice is: stop blaming the market. The number one complain I get from companies is that “not enough women are even applying to my software engineering jobs, so how can I change the makeup of my team”. To this I tell them it’s their problem, others are doing better than them because they’ve done things to solve it.
Another way to say this is that companies are the problem, and the solution. At Makers: 35% of the developers that we’ve trained are women. 35% is about 2–3 times industry average for software engineers… we think that sucks. It should actually be 50%. Because 50% of the population is female, so 50% of our developers should be female.
By the way, when we talk about gender stats in technology, we need do be careful because in technology it encompasses a lot of different roles (QA, BA, design, product managers etc.). When you dig deeper, whilst some companies have 30% female in “technology”, the figure looks more like 5–10% when you ask specifically about software engineering.
The really important thing to realise is that you’re part of the problem as well as the solution.
What I care most about when I speak to CIOs or CTOs is to make them realise their lack of diversity is due to systemic inclusivity issues all the way from their brand through to their culture, recruitment processes etc.
I really get sick of the idea that companies blame “the market” as it’s not just partially wrong, but it deresponsibilises companies from realising their part to play in solving it.
All I care about is that we solve the problem, and as always, stories speak better than words so let me share a few:
Ruth was a full-time mum with two young kids when she took our course. Four years later, she’s a product developer at a software consultancy. Deon had a completely different background, with a really successful career at Amazon as a financial analyst, and Nicola was a data journalist for the Sunday Times. We have people from all backgrounds, all ethnicities, on all parts of the gender spectrum and from 18 to 62 year old. We’ve had crane drivers, CS grads as well as successful entrepreneurs, or bar managers.
Yet, if we’ve only trained 1,500 people in the past 5 years, it’s because lots of companies don’t actually care enough about the problem to do something meaningful to solve it.
To solve this problem, you need to start at the bottom, whether in school or at work; if you’re expecting to hire 200 new female experienced Java engineers with 10+ years experience, then you’re doing it wrong. But if you start by hiring female junior software engineers and grow them so they become your future tech leads, that’s a practical way to go about solving it.
So what can do specifically do going forward?
Being inclusive is like a funnel in which you are optimising for getting as many people at the top of the funnel and then you narrow it down until you get the right people. The problem is — most of you do exactly the opposite. You have the opposite of a funnel. You cut people out early in the funnel so they don’t apply.
Note: I didn’t have time to mention this in the talk, but since you’ve answered “why”, you should have a good idea of your needs at this stage!
Brand
The first thing that you do in your funnel is you look at your brand. What are your brand values? What do you care about and not care about? What do you stand for? What do you not stand for?
Understanding your brand, your mission and your purpose matters as this is what people will remember from you. And the values should be reflected everywhere, including how people answer the phone when we call you. And this should define the people you need in your company, and where you should work on your inclusivity strategy.
Marketing
Second thing to look at is how you market your roles and company from an employer point of view. We’re in 2018, you can’t look at recruitment as just a place where random people just come and discover you. You need to actively go and find people. Since your marketing should be good at this, go speak to them and figure out how you can do the same. And then you’ll realise you need to go find the people so they apply to your roles, and go into communities who wouldn’t otherwise hear about it. That’s what active hiring, and actively trying to solve the diversity problem on your hands.
For example, in order for Makers to get more female applicants in the top part of our funnel, we actively go and work with groups like Code First Girls, Codebar or STEMettes. But we also do this with Black Techies, Muslamic Makers and many others.
It takes energy to go there and present the opportunity to people that would not otherwise hear about it. And that’s the essential part of the work you need to do. When companies works with us to hire a diverse workforce, they are also making an effort in partnering with a company that can help them.
Job Description
The third element is about job descriptions. The way you write job descriptions stops people from applying. For example, if you require people to have a number of years experience, or know a specific technology, you’re doing it wrong as per this study from Harvard Business Review and the same applies about requiring a Computer Science degree.
Similarly, if you’re describing a person, rather than a challenge, you’re doing it wrong. The language you use matters. It’s super important you write your job descriptions well as this is the thing people look out for when applying for your company. That’s where, again, we see a lot of companies lose on fabulous candidates because their JDs are poorly written.
Interviews
What does it look like for a black female software engineer to be interviewed by three white males? What does it look like for a single-mum to have to do a 3 day take-at-home tech test? Why are you requiring a timed-tech test if it’s not representative of the environment they’ll be working with?
Be aware of the people that will actually apply and consider all of these things. Asking these questions is the first part of realising you may have a problem.
Culture
Let’s assume you’ve done everything well up until here but your diverse workforce leaves after six weeks into the job. Why? Because they may not feel welcomed. Because actually, it turns out your toilets are gendered toilets and this person is genderqueer. They don’t fit in either of those toilets and you can now ask yourself: why do toilets need to be gendered? These are important questions that we need to be asking ourselves. And culture is not about toilets. It’s about everything that you do in your company that has an impact on the people that work there. Ensure your culture is as inclusive as possible.
Growth
The last one is about growing people. People stay in an environment where they can grow. Do you actually have a good environment to grow people? Do people feel like they can make mistakes? Are people at all levels given time and space to grow? Again, this is about the diversity, because the person with Asperger, or the mum with a very young kid might not be growing in the same pattern as your 18 year old or your career changer.
Hopefully I’ve given you a taster of some of the type of questions that you need to ask yourself. I’m going to leave you with reminding you the fact that everything can change and we’ve done this successfully with companies, and companies around the world are doing this successfully. But it requires a lot of internal work, starting with why, and realizing it’s all about being inclusive, for which your outcome is diversity.
