Karat blog

In a recent panel on inclusive interviewing, Tricia Lincoln, made a point to emphasize personal connections when recruiting developer talent. She achieves this by partnering closely with her engineering and DEI teams, and by prioritizing a live technical assessment. “There’s a coldness to taking exams,” said Lincoln. “When you think about how much your first-round […]

When COVID-19 hit earlier this year, huge portions of the economy came to a screeching halt. Some businesses went into preservation mode, stopped hiring, and even laid off huge numbers of workers. One of the groups most heavily impacted by the downturn was students–many of whom saw their engineering internships disappear, losing critical real-world experience […]

In March 2019, Ethos Life was rapidly hiring engineers to accelerate an ambitious product development roadmap. The goal was to deploy new predictive analytics and data technologies to break down the barriers keeping people from getting life insurance coverage. “Ethos is a modern solution for life insurance and we’re leveraging advanced technologies such as machine […]

Diversity, engineering, and talent leaders from Karat, Databricks, and Lowe’s share their core University Recruiting and inclusive interviewing tips for building diverse engineering teams The approach most companies use to hire software engineers is broken. At Karat, we’ve been helping organizations hire the best engineers for their teams for years. But one of the most […]

This article is part of a larger series examining issues of access, bias, and inclusion in tech recruiting and hiring. In previous blog posts, we’ve covered how highlighting strengths is a more predictive and inclusive interviewing approach than identifying weaknesses, we shared data about how code tests undermine diversity initiatives, and we discussed the benefits […]

Last month, we explored some of the perils of automated code tests. The data shows that reliance on absolute completeness and correctness not only blocks great engineers from getting job offers, but it does so in a way that disproportionately harms underrepresented minorities and women. This should be a red flag for every organization that […]

As part of our commitment to the Black community, Karat formally launched a practice interview initiative this month, partnering with organizations like URx to help underrepresented minority students better prepare for careers in technology. This week, Wahab Owolabi, URx founder, and Facebook Diversity Business Partner, joined Karat’s Portia Kibble Smith to talk about misconceptions about […]

Last night I had the privilege of joining leaders from around the Seattle tech community at the 12th annual GeekWire Awards—the first one to ever be conducted virtually. It was great meeting the other nominees in our UX Design of the Year category, and congratulations to the team at Skilljar who won! We were honored […]

We’ve all been talking about fairness and bias a lot these past few months, and the depth at which it’s currently being discussed is long overdue. At Karat, we have been conducting research to identify sources of bias, inconsistency, and other challenges that can creep into technical interviews. This includes the Interview Gap survey that […]