While the representation of women in our technical teams is increasing, we want to experiment with new hiring strategies that help us make further progress toward our representation goals. One we are particularly excited about is an “Interviewing Event” to engage more women engineers in our candidate pipeline, which — with no reduction in technical requirements on candidates — has almost doubled our normal interview conversion rate (the percentage of applicants who received job offers after the final interview stage). The goal is to reduce the high level of stress associated with technical interviews, especially for underrepresented groups, and enable candidates to perform at their best. Instead of using the traditional interviewing structure with an individual-focused approach, candidates were brought together as a cohort, and went through the interview day as a group. Some candidates described it like “coding with a friend.” They also got the opportunity to hear Snap team members talk about our values and culture. Each attendee had the option to complete a full 1:1 technical interview over the course of the event. 

This non-traditional interviewing approach helped remove bias from the process while also connecting candidates with one another and a greater number of current Snap team members, who don’t typically have time to meet such a high volume of individual candidates. It freed up Snap’s current women engineers, who are often asked to take time out from their day jobs to meet individual candidates. Even candidates who did not receive a job offer were instantly connected with a networking group of other aspiring engineers. And the group approach made the hiring process significantly more efficient: engineering hours spent interviewing and debriefing were reduced by 40%.