Pretty much any tech company that is large enough to have 5 or 6 people on a team should be looking toward paid internships. It is a way to get labor for dirt cheap, help students get their five years of work experience for an entry level position, and do extended interviews for new hires.
And the key with that is to not just advertise at your alma mater. Go out of your way to advertise to women in engineering groups and black friendly mailing lists and so forth. It gives you a MUCH better applicant pool and, if you are genuinely hiring/selecting “the best of the best”, you naturally become more diverse (because people are people).
Which has knock on effects back at the universities because professors are very much selecting grad students based on how likely they are to get a summer internship (and thus cost much less per year). If they know that only their white male students will be able to get an internship? They get more white males. If they suddenly realize ethnicity and gender don’t matter? They too begin selecting the best of the best which, again, naturally gets diversity closer to the national averages rather than the “STEM average”.
Pretty much any tech company that is large enough to have 5 or 6 people on a team should be looking toward paid internships. It is a way to get labor for dirt cheap, help students get their five years of work experience for an entry level position, and do extended interviews for new hires.
And the key with that is to not just advertise at your alma mater. Go out of your way to advertise to women in engineering groups and black friendly mailing lists and so forth. It gives you a MUCH better applicant pool and, if you are genuinely hiring/selecting “the best of the best”, you naturally become more diverse (because people are people).
Which has knock on effects back at the universities because professors are very much selecting grad students based on how likely they are to get a summer internship (and thus cost much less per year). If they know that only their white male students will be able to get an internship? They get more white males. If they suddenly realize ethnicity and gender don’t matter? They too begin selecting the best of the best which, again, naturally gets diversity closer to the national averages rather than the “STEM average”.