I wrote this in an email today to my recruiting team, but I think it is important to share here too. Hopefully other companies will learn from it.
We strongly believe in our skills test based recruiting and hiring methods… it is the fairest possible system where we hire the best candidate available to us regardless of whether or not they could afford to go to college, or which college they could attend, or their previous work experience (or lack thereof in some cases), their location in the world, or any other factor that is not directly related to who will do the best work for us day to day. Making decisions based on sexism or racism, even if it is “reverse” of the traditional direction, would undermine our world class team. Please note that our most senior team members are quite diverse. This had nothing to do with their diversity, and everything to do with their very high levels of competence and ability. It is super important that our recruiting team fully buy into this, as I want to make completely certain that no factor (especially illegal sex / race / age based discrimination) outside of the ability to do the job ever creeps into our process or decision making. We are one of the top handful of companies in our industry out of 70,000+ competitors in SEO alone listed on Clutch because we look past all the baggage other companies allow to distract them. We hire employees in Nigeria when everyone else is afraid of that country due to the reputation for scams, one of our top Digital Strategists is in his 60’s and our DS team lead is in his 50’s despite other tech companies often overlooking or discriminating against older folks, and last I checked roughly 2/3’s of our whole team is from a huge array of nations and backgrounds outside of the US. We can’t always afford to compete salary-wise with the likes of Google, Facebook, and Apple for tech talent, so we have to be very open minded about finding superstars wherever they may be. Many of our top stars are people that no one else would give a chance to due to their background or other factors irrelevant to their actual work abilities. When we find superstars, we advance them much more quickly than they would anywhere else with promotions, salary raises, and other benefits.