Interviewing company Karat announced five sizable corporations have joined its Brilliant Black Minds movement to aid in its goal of doubling the number of Black software engineers in the United States. The partners include Prime Video, Citi, Duolingo, Indeed, and Flatiron Health – the first organizations to join the initiative.

“Following its launch in 2021, Karat’s Brilliant Black Minds program received an investment from tennis champion, Serena Williams, to scale and accelerate its work to close the Interview Access Gap that disproportionately impacts Black software engineers,” the release stated. 

This year, Karat released a hiring trends report revealing diversity to be a major hiring differentiator for tech leaders – with top performing engineering leaders being twice as likely to emphasize diversity as compared to lower performers. And yet Karat's recent release added – be it cloud or cybersecurity – only 5% of all software engineers in the U.S. are Black. 

Brilliant Black Minds’ goal is to add over 100,000 Black engineers to tech within the next decade, according to Jeffrey Spector, co-founder and president at Karat, and he hopes adding these strong partners will allow them to add engineers more quickly into the space.

The program currently supports general software developer and backend roles, focusing on leveraging data structures and algorithms, but it will soon expand to cover front-end and mobile in the near future, according to Spector.

“We have an incredible team,” Spector told SDxCentral. “Specifically, Brilliant Black Minds was the brainchild of Portia Kibble-Smith, Karat’s director of global diversity partnerships. It’s really a passion project for her as someone who had dedicated their entire career towards getting people jobs in tech.”

The team has also welcomed former Google engineer Anthony Mays as a senior advisor, and Dr. Katherine Picho-Kiroga from Howard University as the interview equity advisor. “It’s her role to audit both the program and Karat’s overall interviews to identify and eliminate any potential opportunities for bias.”

Spector says the program’s work lies in using the organization's technology and structure to create “safeguards” that enable candidates to demonstrate their true abilities.

A study from the Interview Access Gap report revealed less than half of Black computer science students and recent grads had experienced a technical interview. “We launched Brilliant Black Minds to close that interview access gap because the students who had experienced three or more practice interviews were six times more likely to land a job in tech,” Spector said.

The program consists of implementing the competency assessments from Karat’s clients across the tech industry into their training. “Interview Engineers” give the candidates live feedback within the training, where participants then enter an array of sessions and workshops ranging from interview problem solving to data structures and algorithms.

Spector noted that “they also include soft skills and support around overcoming imposter syndrome and basic contract negotiation.”

Another key area of the work comes from the end of the interviewer, according to Spector. Interview questions need to be vetted, unvarying, and connected to the competencies needed within each position. “Random questions create the potential for bias.”

Karat looks to offer structured approaches to remove areas where it's easiest to inject bias, and Spector claims there are a number of upfront ways to do this on an organizational level. “The first is to create structured scoring rubrics for every interview. You should have very clear parameters for what ‘good’ looks like in an answer. They need to be observation-based, not judgment based,” he said. 

This means interviewers need to be trained to score and note interviews in a consistent and comparable way, rather than subjective remarks about a candidate’s qualities that can lead to biased hiring loops. 

Spector added that companies should record and review all interviews for bias. “Bias isn’t always malicious,” he said.

“It can be an interviewer giving an extra hint to someone they like. On the surface that seems nice. But that’s where personal bias can creep in and give people from similar backgrounds or alumni from the same schools a leg up.”