Diversity brings with it a variety of benefits, providing a broad mix of perspectives, skills, experiences and ideas.

But it’s no secret that traditional hiring methods haven’t exactly been fair and equitable, meaning that workforces across industries often aren’t reflective of the diverse nature of the world we live in.

Encouragingly, though, more enterprises are adapting their hiring practices and standards to embrace diversity, while also streamlining and hastening what has often been a cumbersome, stressful — and overly complicated — process.

At least, these are key takeaways of the new report 2023 Tech Hiring Trends by Harris Poll and interviewing company Karat.

“The biggest thing is looking for talent in places you haven’t been,” said Jason Wodicka (they/them), principal engineering advocate at Karat. And, in the end, “equitable hiring processes are more efficient hiring processes.”

How top-performing engineering leaders get it done

Karat’s third hiring report surveyed more than 300 technical leaders at top global companies and identified a cohort of what they call “Top Performing Engineering Leaders” that provide best-practice benchmarks. These companies were selected because they have high confidence in meeting U.S. hiring targets for software engineers and high satisfaction in hiring outcomes.

Notably, these top-performing companies do the following:

• Cast a wider net
• Give opportunity to more (and more diverse) candidates
• Emphasize tech generalists over highly specialized roles
• Move quickly when hiring so the process doesn’t get stymied and candidates frustrated
• Have structured, efficient processes in place
• Prefer job matching and testing tools over the age-old referral method
• Feel supported by internal resources in their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs

As Karat cofounder and president Jeffrey Spector described it, they “hire fast, hire fair and give more candidates an opportunity to show what they can do.”

Those moving speedily and efficiently are able to significantly cut the total posting-to-hiring time to 17 days (compared to 31 days in the case of the report’s “Lower Performing Engineering Leaders”).

Top performers also view engineers as helping to drive a company’s success and consider them more valuable than capital. In fact, more than half of tech leaders surveyed said strong engineers were worth at least three times their total compensation.

“A strong software engineer who can demonstrate a good approach to solving problems is going to be someone I can insert into a lot of roles as the needs of our business shift,” Sagnik Nandy, president and chief development officer at Okta, commented in the report.

Upending the age-old referral method

Per the findings, reliance on sourcing agencies among top performers has dropped to 40%, and there has also been a steep decline over the last year in the use of sourcing tools such as LinkedIn Recruiter (from 75% to 58%).

Similarly, referrals — a foundational practice in recruiting often thought of as “tried and true” — seem to be falling out of favor. Less than half (42%) of engineering leaders identified referrals as their primary source of candidates.

Karat’s Wodicka pointed out that “the tech industry has run on referred talent for years” and that this upending of traditional practices is an encouraging sign when it comes to diverse and inclusive hiring.

“The maxim in the industry is that good engineers know good engineers,” Wodicka said. While certainly true, they acknowledged, a good engineer that is not currently employed may not be known by one who is.

Also, referrals only extend a network out one degree and are typically reflective of the existing demographics of a company — whereas the pool of directly applying candidates are likely more diverse. Similarly, applicants undergo more scrutiny than referrals, meaning the latter’s strengths and shortcomings may not become evident until after they have been hired, said Wodicka.

“When somebody says they want your job, listen to them,” they said. “The most successful hiring managers are giving more people a shot.”

Skills, not pedigree

Another issue in the industry — and at large — is “pedigree bias,” or when people are judged based on where they went to school and whether they worked for big-name companies, as opposed to what they can do.

As Wodicka noted, there are numerous schools — community colleges, state universities, technical institutions — that aren’t “name brand” but that offer people great educations and, more importantly, hands-on training.

To this point, successful organizations are looking outside their typical talent pools — to lesser-pedigreed schools, or programs such as Girls Who Code — and are “recruiting for potential,” said Wodicka.

These top leaders are more than twice as likely (62%) to name DEI as a strong priority at their organizations and are also highly likely (64%) to have the internal resources in place to diversify their teams and hire people from diverse backgrounds (91%).

Wodicka emphasized that “people stuff isn't magical” and that it takes work to get hiring right.

“I want people to understand that the things they have historically been doing aren’t fair and aren’t effective,” they said, describing existing processes as “naive.”

Tech generalists in demand

While data analysts, cloud architects and data engineers are the three most in-demand roles right now, top-performing companies are moving more toward tech generalists.

Nearly half (45%) are seeking out software generalists and one-third are looking for full-stack developers. This is as opposed to looking at specific areas of a tech stack (such as a database administrator mostly versed in PostgreSQL).

David Lau, VP of software engineering at Tesla, explains in the report that his company challenges candidates with open-ended problems that don’t have a “single, clear solution.”

Instead of a checkbox of specific skills — such as certain programming languages, databases or caching systems — they look for strong fundamentals “that equip a candidate to face entire classes of problems they’ve never seen before.”

As he put it, “the real world is messy, and real-life engineering problems rarely have specific solutions, so we need to assess candidates’ ability to navigate uncertainty, ambiguity and complex multidimensional trade spaces.”

Wodicka agreed that adaptability is key in the fast-moving field of IT, “where new tech is being born around us.” Just look at the incredible momentum of generative artificial intelligence (genAI), which barely anyone except experts knew about just 10 months ago.

“We don’t know today what skills we are going to need in 18 months,” said Wodicka. The field is fast moving and, ultimately, nascent. “We’re not a mature field, we’re in our wild teenage years.”

Which the most successful organizations recognize, as well, as they turn inward to evaluate their processes and tools to continually evolve and determine what works and what doesn’t, per the report findings.

In tech, “evaluating what we do is core to so many of our processes,” said Wodicka.

Intelligent tools to identify ideal matches

As top organizations look to optimize and diversify their hiring practices, they are turning more to job matching and testing tools (42% versus 30% in the case of lower performers).

An example of one such platform is Karat Qualify, an adaptive skill assessment for hiring software engineers that Karat launched in August.

In applying the tool, hiring teams first select an assessment topic from a library of 20-plus prebuilt topic areas, according to the company. Candidates then receive an invitation to take an on-demand, 15-question assessment. As they go through the exercise, the tool chooses follow-up questions and content based on their answers.

Similar platforms come from Codility, CodeSignal, HackerRank and HireVue, among others.

As Wodicka explained, these types of assessments allow candidates to showcase what they can do — as opposed to a recruiter simply ticking off boxes — ultimately leading to more equitable and inclusive hiring.

“One of the biggest steps to inclusivity is fairness,” they said. “Letting people show their skills is much more fair than looking at where they’ve worked before.”