Closing the tech industry’s yawning skills gap is a top priority for IT leaders. Here’s how building diversity-focused hiring practices can help solve it and attract the skilled AWS professionals your business needs.
We’re already seeing the impact of unfilled roles on the industry, with many businesses struggling to achieve meaningful transformation and remain competitive in an increasingly digital-first world. The shortage of tech professionals is a complex problem, with no silver bullet solution.
However, given that just 19% of tech roles in the UK are held by women and only 17% of all tech leadership positions in the US are held by people from ethnic minorities, attracting people from underrepresented groups into the tech workforce seems like the right place to start.
Not only is sourcing new AWS talent from a diverse range of backgrounds vital for the sustainability of the cloud sector—actively ensuring that the opportunities on offer are accessible to everyone is simply the right thing to do. The cloud space is all about innovation, and you can’t innovate without a diversity of ideas, experience, and knowledge. If you’re ready to take steps to make your AWS team more diverse and inclusive, you’re heading in the right direction. The key thing to remember as you start this rewarding journey is that if you want to think outside the box, you need to hire outside it too.
Here are a few ways you can do your part in boosting diversity and inclusion in tech by shaking up your recruitment strategies.
Here are some initiaves you can take to boost diversity on your AWS team
1. Look for talent in new places
If you’re struggling to find and hire diverse tech talent, you could be searching in the wrong places. It’s difficult enough to find candidates with AWS skills, and using the same recruitment channels you always have may just buck the outdated stereotype of what a tech professional looks like.
There are countless organizations out there, including Colorintech and Women in Tech, dedicated to helping people from underrepresented communities start a career in tech and the cloud. If you’re not sure where to start, find out directly from them what you can do to support them, and how you can connect with candidates that would be a great fit for your team, bringing not only tech skills but also new, fresh perspectives to the table.
Another long-term strategy of sourcing new talent is partnering with educational institutions (and particularly those with female- or minority-heavy student bodies) to fortify your future pipeline. Cloud technology has developed so quickly that, despite the world and their grandmother having a Netflix account, many parents and teachers just don’t know enough about the range of opportunities in tech to encourage youngsters to consider it. Educating young people on the various types of careers available in tech, while simultaneously working to ensure that the tech space is somewhere that everyone can feel safe and valued, is a step that we simply must take if we want to avoid a greater staffing crisis in the future.
2. Champion flexible and remote working
Remote work creates more opportunities for people from all walks of life. Today, remote and flexible working is no longer a perk—it’s something that most employees have come to expect and value. And with the burden of unpaid care and domestic labor still being disproportionately shouldered by women (a situation only made worse by the pandemic), offering candidates flexibility around when and from where they work can make an especially big difference to working mothers and carers.
A recent flexible working survey reveals that, while 84% of male full-time employees either work flexibly already, or say they want to, the number rises to 91% for women.
It’s not just women that benefit from more flexibility. Consider that people from ethnic minority backgrounds are still disproportionately affected by poverty; not everyone can afford to move to Silicon Valley or NYC to start or grow their careers. Offering remote working is therefore a great way to open roles that were previously inaccessible to people from these groups. Remote working also opens doors for professionals with disabilities and neurodiversities who may find it difficult to commute to or work in an office.
If you wish to fully embrace diversity and inclusivity, you can go beyond offering remote roles. Actively encourage employees to utilize these opportunities and ensure they’re not marginalized for their preferences, consciously or otherwise (through ‘proximity bias’ for example), for doing so.
3. Revisit your hiring practices
Even with the best intentions, your job ads could be unwittingly putting off a wider range of candidates from applying. For instance, using masculine-coded language in ads can give some great hires a bad vibe, so steer away from any phraseology that could leave the applicants with the impression that your culture is homogeneous and uninviting.
Masculine-coded language in job ads includes words like ‘individual’, ‘challenging,’ and ‘driven’. To widen the net and attract more women, try replacing these words with feminine-coded terminology instead, including ‘together’, ‘collaborate’, ‘responsibility,’ and ‘share’.
Also, aim to hire for characteristics like enthusiasm, adaptability, and willingness to learn over granular hard skills. Not only will this land you professionals who are able to develop their skills to keep pace with a rapidly changing landscape—it will help attract a much more diverse talent pool.
Studies also show that women are less likely to apply for a job if they think they don’t meet 100% of the specification. So, the fewer requirements you have on the job spec, the more candidates you’ll attract. Think about what kind of skills and experience is absolutely essential for the job, and trim out anything that isn’t. Is a university degree really necessary for your role, for example?
And, once those applications start rolling in, use blind recruitment to filter out any unconscious bias.
4. Walk the Diversity and Inclusion walk
According to a survey of AWS professionals around the world (carried out for the Jefferson Frank Careers and Hiring Guide: AWS Edition) just 60% of male respondents believe their employer pays men and women equally; the figure for female respondents was 56%.
Many companies tend to release data on their workforce demographics, but being transparent about the numbers is one thing while taking meaningful action to solve any diversity issues that still prevail is something else entirely.
Take Facebook, for example: in the eight years that it’s been reporting on its D&I stats, the number of Black professionals working its tech roles in the US has climbed from 1% to 2.1%. That’s despite the Black community accounting for over 14% of the country’s population. Committing to measuring and releasing D&I metrics is a start, and while it’s true that you can’t track what you don’t measure, the point is not the tracking itself; the point is making progress.
Another way to show your seriousness about inclusion in the workplace is to be open about salaries upfront. Showcasing that you’re paying a fair salary on your job ad will help attract candidates.
Again, it’s all about removing potential barriers, as not revealing the salary on an offer could be seen as a red flag by many candidates.
5. Invest in upskilling
Supporting the diverse talent you have already will not only help great professionals develop their careers, but it’ll also draw more diverse professionals to your business. Visibility creates perpetual motion when it comes to diversifying your tech staff. As you build a leadership team that’s reflective of the workforce, more professionals will have a relatable touch-point and know that your organization is an inclusive environment in which they can achieve similar things.
There are plenty of actions you can take to create talent through internal retraining and upskilling, as well as on-boarding budding technologists who’ll grow with your organization. Create new routes into tech roles through paid internships, graduate work placements, and cross-training schemes.
And if you don’t have the resources or in-house knowledge to develop your own upskilling programs, partner with a specialist firm that can supply you with budding AWS talent and take care of all their training for you! At Revolent, our mission is to solve the AWS talent shortage by providing innovative and cost-effective talent creation solutions. But we’re also fully committed to tackling cloud tech’s diversity and inclusion challenge. We believe that great minds don’t think alike; that’s why we aim to develop AWS talent from underrepresented communities, bringing fresh perspectives and a diversity of experiences to your AWS team.
