New York

October 15–17, 2025

Berlin

November 3–4, 2025

Fixing ‘neutral’ hiring policies to stop excluding the best candidates

Assess candidates on potential and not on their past experience.

Moderated by Jason Wong

Speakers: Preetha Appan Jason Brewer Shannon Hogue-Brown

June 24, 2021

There’s more to engineering than a Computer Science degree.

In trying to develop better hiring practices, we can easily make the mistake of equating a neutral process with an inclusive one. And while neutral sounds like a success, it fails to account for the fact that not everyone coming into the tech world has been given the same opportunities.

In this panel, our group of expert leaders discuss how to use intentional processes that make sure that you do not overlook candidates from different backgrounds with different journeys into the tech industry.

Key Takeaways

  • Learn how the access gap manifests in our hiring processes. 
  • Build a diverse engineering team with folks from non-traditional backgrounds, including those without CS degrees.
  • Reframe your recruitment process to be more equitable for underrepresented engineers.
  • Design new hiring processes that look at assessing candidates on potential, to find those ‘hidden-gem’ team members.

 

In partnership with Karat

Karat helps companies hire software engineers by designing and conducting technical interview programs that improve hiring signals, mitigate bias, and reduce the interviewing time burden on engineering teams.