I fully believe that diverse teams are better teams. As a female CEO I thought it would be easier for me to find strong female candidates than other male founders, but historically, we have received 95% male applicants for all job postings which has led to a male-dominated team. …
Diversity should be introduced within the first 10 employees.
At an early stage company, every member of the team has a significant impact on culture. Culture is also self-reinforcing, so if a team is heavily male (or heavily white or heavily straight etc.) team members will recruit their similarly situated friends, most often leading to an increasingly homogeneous pool of applicants. Waiting too long to introduce diversity will only exacerbate the lack thereof as you scale. Break the mold early, and often.
Female applicants respond to the language that you use.
Job postings that talk too much about winning or being subversive can seriously turn off female candidates (for example, our job postings were turning off up to 67% of female candidates). Use Textio(it’s expensive, but the free trial is great) to test your job postings to see if they are hurting more than helping.
Read more at Women 2.0
