Hire with conviction: Girl Geek X at Lever
When Sarah wrote the very first code lines for Lever, she had no way of knowing that Lever would one day become named one of best places to work in the Bay Area.
She shared her vision that Lever is more than just a recruiting software company — it’s focused on connecting human potential to meaningful work, and helping companies hire with conviction.
CEO Sarah shared her own lightning talk to really get the Girl Geek X Dinner going. She spoke about what it is like to be a female CEO at a tech company and how she learned to become comfortable and empowered by the title of CEO. Sarah shared three impactful takeaways that she has learned from her experience as CEO:
1. Believe in the people who believe in you!
2. Trust that your community will help you grow past your limitations!
3. Use your platform to help more people be apart of leadership!
Next, there were six empowering Girl Geek X lightning talks that were filled with humor, code & relatable experiences.!
Topic: “Who have felt personally victimized by Git?”
Key takeaway: It’s okay to have some laughs along your career journey. Don’t be afraid to look back and reflect on how far you’ve come!
Mica shared a hilarious recap of her personal experience with Git, sharing how she had to get used to different company approaches.
Have you ever asked yourself questions like: Why is this system super complicated when you’re trying to save work? How does my commit get to master? What’s the difference between merging vs rebasing? (hint: think of merging like blending families with new siblings and rebasing as surprise clone siblings just showing up in your house). Be sure to check out ohshitgit.com for Git solutions.
Topic: “The magic of nurture recommendations”
Key takeaway: Recruiting is still a human process. But a thoughtful technology partner makes the process better for everyone.
We’ve all had the feeling of our resumes going down a “black hole” while applying new jobs. Lever is working on improving that with their Nurture recommendations tool.
While there’s a neat opportunity to incorporate more machine learning and AI into the recruiting process, don’t think about making it all AI — there’s a big chance you’ll just introduce bias and make the recruiting process worse. By choosing to partner tech and humans, you can uncover wonderful candidates already in your database.
Humans know what parameters to consider when searching, but machines can help filter quickly with Elasticsearch — this partnership lets companies bubble up great candidates and get them back in the pipeline quickly.
Topic: “Tech debt & new hires”
Key takeaway: Ramp up new hires to help tackle tech debt. When you do, it helps them understand what they’re working on rather than doing enough to go by. Tech debt is always present and growing, so leverage new hires to help your company keep it under control.
What is tech debt, actually? It’s a metaphor for code that isn’t quite right. It can fall under three areas: bad documentation, bad design, and lack of tests. The talk focused on the bad documentation debt.
When Jen got assigned a project as a new hire without enough documentation, all she could think was “What am I even doing?” In order to tackle the project, she had to investigate what should have been documented in the first place. She was able to add structure, set up information, and testing information. Now, if anyone comes across this project, they have all the info they need to get started.
While documentation takes a long time, it’s a great opportunity for new hires to collaborate with current employees and build something better.
Topic: “Guide to hackathon”
Key takeaway: Plan your hackathon with intention and get people rejuvenated, not overwhelmed. How can you make hackathons better?
1. Set parameters — who’s able to participate (company wide or just for a team?), how long will it last?
2. Clearly define your strategy: set goals, set expectations, and set constraints.
3. Consider renaming the event something different to attract a diverse group (example include lunch group, workshop, makers day, build-a-thon, etc.)
Topic: “The care and keeping of SaaS Enterprise Tools”
Key takeaway: API challenges are more than technical issues — coding is also about understanding people. Software is everywhere and so important in many of the tools we use everyday. So it’s extremely important to make sure you integrate effectively. Some questions to ask yourself before building integrations:
1. Should we even build this integration? Consider if they’re building or if we’re building.
2. Is there documentation? Scope it out before you start.
3. Who can I talk to when things go wrong? Find a technical contact and do a survey that of who you can go to for help.
4. What happens when something breaks? May be obvious but need to ask it. Have a front line support and surface issues to cross functional teams.
Integrations aren’t just about APIs. A lot of risk taking on a new integration. Once you wipe away the risk then you can uncover an ecosystem of people involved and get value from it.
Topic: “Real time collaboration with operational transform”
Key takeaway: Realtime collaboration is powerful; be sure your tech can handle it.
The most well known example of operational transform is Google Docs — you can edit a document in real time, along with other collaborators, and the edits make sense!
This type of platform provides for a responsive user experience. Operational transform let’s you see all changes at the same state because it understands the user intention of the change even if it’s not in the same order.
After the lightning talks, all the speakers came back for a panel, moderated by Gina Hernandez — Here’s the best of that Q&A:
What does Lever do to encourage diversity and inclusion at your customers’ companies?
While demoing solutions, Lever is often asked if their solutions help eliminate unconscious bias. The answer: Yes, we try to remove the bias, but you still need your team to step in and help with the human element of removing biases in the processes in place.
Lever pushes customers to think past the way that they’re currently doing in recruiting by asking why they set certain parameters in previous recruiting efforts and if there’s reasons they should dig beyond those initial hunches.
How do you encourage diversity beyond gender?
It’s really about becoming increasingly inclusive — know what you’re lacking and get systems in place to help you grow more.
Don’t trust comfortable! Growth can be uncomfortable, but you don’t want to stick with what’s familiar and easy.
Having support for employee groups internally is key. Have interviewer training and manager training to reflect the values of the company.
You have to flex the muscle memory of building inclusivity in the work place. You begin building this memory for one part of inclusivity, and then you can use it to build out other areas of inclusivity.
Is there a dream partner / customer that lever doesn’t have yet that would help radically change the world of recruiting?
Finding the right partnership is key. You want to partner with businesses that you can grow together and trust — finding larger companies to help grow with data performance and management. The diversity of industry potential is super exciting!
Do companies want more data around hiring?
Yes, especially larger companies. They want to dig into data. While data is really important, it’s just as important to remember that there will always be a human piece to recruiting. This human piece requires talented individuals to have skills to really figure out what is going on and you can’t fully technologize it… like the need to bring art to something that is a science.
What are the recruiting challenges of the future?
Landscape of hiring and recruiting is changing.
The way people hired before are vastly different than how they need to hire today. Everyone is competing for the same candidates. Firms need to adjust their ways or people won’t apply. In fact, more and more companies can’t reply on applicants coming to them without any nurture.
Now companies are building conversations with potential hires even when they’re in other roles. By building a relationship, candidates will be more likely to reach out and apply, when they’re ready for a new role. People are jumping jobs more frequently, so you need to hire more frequently.
The hiring process, especially at a startup, involved everyone. You bring on people to help hinge your bets on making the business as successful as possible.
Thank you Lever for hosting their first Girl Geek X Dinner! We loved the sweet swag and tacos! We’d also like to share a special thank you to Deniz Gültekin who served as the organizer from Lever. As always, thank you to every single girl geek who attended and made the dinner one to remember! ❤
Misty Ahmadi published this roundup of the event on Girl Geek X.
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