Rosenverse

Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.

Log in Create free account

100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.

Treating Diversity & Inclusion in Hiring as a Design Problem

Thursday, December 5, 2019 • Enterprise Community
Share the love for this talk
Treating Diversity & Inclusion in Hiring as a Design Problem
Speakers: Libby Maurer
Link:

Summary

There's no silver bullet to building a diverse and inclusive organization at scale. So how do you know what things to try, and what's working and what isn't? Our UX team used our user research chops to look at this problem in a user-centered way. In this session, we'll share how we married data and qualitative research to identify and fix holes in our recruiting, hiring, and retention practices.

Key Insights

  • Nearly 60% of HubSpot's UX hires came from employee referrals, which reinforces sameness and reduces diversity.

  • Slowing down hiring speed allows for more thoughtful and inclusive candidate sourcing.

  • The leadership team used a technique called 'aided recall' to actively seek candidates from underrepresented groups.

  • Candidate experience mirrors customer experience; mixed signals and disjointed communication hurt confidence, disproportionately affecting women and people of color.

  • Women often only apply if they meet all job requirements, whereas men apply despite partial matches, reflecting a confidence gap.

  • HubSpot implemented interview prep guides and standardized interviewer notes to level the playing field for all candidates.

  • An associate practitioner rotational program was launched to hire and develop junior talent without prior deep experience.

  • Belonging is crucial: it’s more than diversity and inclusion—it impacts retention and individual performance.

  • Unseen diversity traits (neurodiversity, mental health, education) significantly affect employees’ sense of belonging.

  • Including representatives from employee resource groups on interview panels helps candidates feel welcome and opens conversations about diversity.

Notable Quotes

"Maybe I too had joined another tech company that really wasn’t walking the walk when it came to diversity."

"Referrals encourage sameness because we tend to refer people who look and think like us."

"We treated diversity and inclusion like a sprint instead of the marathon that it truly is."

"For women, they often won’t apply unless they meet all the bullet points in a job description."

"This candidate experience was terrible for everybody but especially disadvantaging folks who started with lower confidence."

"If diversity is being asked to the party, inclusion is being asked to dance, and belonging is actually dancing with everyone else."

"We have to slow down hiring to be more thoughtful and deliberate about who we bring on the team."

"We turned design thinking on ourselves to tackle our own hiring challenges—applying tools meant for customers to our own processes."

"Having an employee resource group member on interview panels creates a safe space for candidates to disclose more about themselves."

"Performance reviews at HubSpot are ongoing conversations, not one big yearly event."

Ask the Rosenbot
Vitorio Miliano
Don’t call it AI: Turn words into numbers with quantitative ethnography
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Gold
Jorge Arango
Scale Smart: AI-Powered Content Organization Strategies
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Saara Kamppari-Miller
Theme Three Intro
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Tim Parmee
Changing Our Design Pressure Points
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Bria Alexander
State of DesignOps Panel
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Juhan Sonin
Design Now! The Agenda for Action
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Kristin Wisnewski
Measuring What Matters
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Joe Meersman
Use AI to Drive Outcomes that Go Beyond the Design Sprint
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Stephen Anderson
Puzzled? How to Coordinate Humans for Complex Challenges
2021 • Enterprise Community
Dr. Jamika D. Burge
The Future of Research: Bridging the Gaps
2021 • Advancing Research Community
Kate Towsey
Participant Recruitment and Management Tools
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Gold
Tiffany Cheng
Designing in a Pandemic: Integrating Speed and Rigor
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Paul Pangaro, PhD
Systems Disciplines: Table Stakes for 21st Century Organizations
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Wyatt Hayman
Global Research Panels
2020 • DesignOps Community
JP Allen
Navigating the UX Tools Landscape
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
John Cutler
The Alignment Trap
2023 • Design in Product 2023
Gold

More Videos

Victor Udoewa

"Songs become methodologies—the way you identify who is at the door is through the song they sing."

Victor Udoewa

Beyond Methods and Diversity: The Roots of Inclusion

March 26, 2024

Peter Morville

"We often use radio buttons when check boxes or sliders would reveal the truth."

Peter Morville

The Architecture of Understanding

May 13, 2015

Sam Ladner

"You have to be careful not to be too weird; mental models differ internationally."

Sam Ladner

How Research Can Drive Strategic Foresight

March 9, 2022

Michelle Bejian Lotia

"Over a third of the company signed in shortly after launch, which felt like a great success."

Michelle Bejian Lotia Anne-Marie Morell

Rolling Out a Repository: How Zapier Centralizes Insights from Across their Organization

March 28, 2023

Leisa Reichelt

"When negotiating, bring plan A—show what you need and what good looks like—even if it seems outrageous."

Leisa Reichelt

Opening Keynote: Operating in Context

November 7, 2018

Sarah Gallimore

"We created a Wizard of Oz smoke and mirrors prototype—a simple text message thread between a parent and this service—just to get enough buy-in."

Sarah Gallimore

Inspire Progress with Artifacts from the Future

November 18, 2022

Joerg Beringer

"Our product simply sucks everything out of the open AI system and processes it with a knowledge graph based on ISO standards."

Joerg Beringer Thomas Geis

Scaling User Research with AI: Continuous Discovery of User Needs in Minutes

September 10, 2025

Peter Merholz

"Execution is in service of the user."

Peter Merholz

Customer-Centered Design Organizations

June 8, 2017

Dalia El-Shimy

"Stakeholders aren’t leaving us out on purpose; they make reasonable decisions with imperfect information."

Dalia El-Shimy

So You've Got a Seat at the Table. Now What?

March 31, 2020