Summary: At a recent Acquia all-company meeting, I was glad to hear that half of the current group of Acquia U students and 7 out of 12 of the latest "BDR" hires in Sales were women. Acquia's CEO, Tom Erickson added that this was the result of some "objective, data-driven" hiring practices. I had to know more. I got Acquia Senior Manager of Business Development and Sales, Chris Hemberger on the line to talk about all of this. "BDR" stands for "Business Development Representative"; this is an entry-level position in Acquia and other companies' Sales departments. These are the young people who are going to advance and shape companies' successes in years to come. Chris explained that tech companies' sales departments, even Acquia's in the past, are quite male dominated. The good news is that things have really changed at Acquia in this regard. If more objective hiring processes lead to more balanced hiring, I'm more hopeful for the future of our industry, too. Data-driven hiring drives balance and business success Acquia is succeeding as a business and doing so while objectively hiring as diverse teams as it can manage. I feel this is great news for others wanting to follow similar practices. Chris compares our success to other places he has worked: "If you look at how the team is composed overall now, we're very close to a 50/50 split if we're talking about gender diversity. I would say this is vastly different from other tech business development teams that I have been a part of. We're pretty happy about that. The best we can do is get as close to objective and as close to hiring the best for every seat on our team as possible. We think we've gotten close to that by being a little bit more data-driven; by giving different exercises and different things to do throughout their interview process." "I know that some other similar organizations that have similar processes that are data-driven--not just focused on the 1:1 interviews--have wound up with much more of an even gender split on their teams. Their net results are also close to a 50/50 gender split. I do think that if you put a really objective process in place, that the world of tech sales comes closer to a 50/50 gender split than what we actually see happening in the market." More diversity gives more perspectives Chris describes a common state of affairs in the tech industry, "You see some pretty consistent trends on the tech and sales sides of the building in tech companies. I've definitely seen that. At [Chris's previous company], my team was 100% male. Most of the sales teams I've been a part of here at Acquia have been 100% male. That does seem to permeate even companies like Acquia that have awesome cultures to be a part of. It's an issue and worth combatting, worth talking about." I brought up the fact that I think that most work in technology is about solving hard problems, making the world a better place in some way ... at least most of us would like to think so. I contend that the more different backgrounds you have in a team--orientations, range of ages--as well as an even gender split, varied geographic and cultural origins, and so on, the better. The richer the mix, the more perspectives you have and the better the solutions will be that your team will come up with. When asked about what the negative effects of too little diversity can be, Chris preferred to highlight the positive, agreeing with me that, "Diversity, in every way that you define the word, help breed diverse perspectives and allows people to collaborate at a deeper level." "If you have ten people on the sales team and they all come from the same place and think the same way, then you have ten people but one perspective. If you have ten people from different backgrounds, that have different thoughts about how things work, you end up having a much richer collaboration and I think you can come to ideas and thoughts that you would not have been able to...
