How You Can Source Diversity

Sourcing for gender diversity doesn’t have to be difficult, but this is an area where the skills of those doing your sourcing can really help drive diversity as a strategic goal. By changing the way we target and pipeline female candidates, we can affect the quality and diversity of the talent within an organisation as a whole.
There are countless techniques you can use to do this, including searching resumes, speaker bios, associations, organizations, social networks, and more. Below I’ve outlined my favorite places to search, and the search strings I use when I source diversity.
 

Sourcing Diversity Resumes

Start your search off by targeting specific diversity groups.
 
To get the full amount of resumes that we need, enter all variations of the word “resume”.
 

Google String:

(inurl:resume OR intitle:resume OR inurl:cv OR intitle:cv OR inurl:vitae OR intitle:vitae) (association=*=swe OR member=*= swe OR “society of women engineers” OR witi OR “women in technology international”) (bscs OR mscs OR “computer science”)
The “fill in the blank” operator ( =*= ) only works on Google. It will connect one word with another within a certain
distance.
 

Sourcing Diversity Profiles

Look for a Diversity Engineering organization and target profiles of members who belong.
 
Use the strings that you learned when searching for professional associations, but leave out the 3rd person masculine gender.
 

Example string with added degree:

(witi OR “women in technology international”) (bio OR profile) (her OR she) (bscs OR mscs OR “computer science”)
The phrase “groups and associations” will help direct you to profiles that have the group on their Linkedin page. The components to the string are: the site operator, diversity organizations, degrees, and words to get rid of.
 

Example Google string:

 
site:linkedin.com (association=*=swe OR member=*=swe OR “society of women engineers” OR witi OR “women in technology international” OR “women in engineering”) (bscs OR mscs OR “computer science”) -inurl:dir -intitle:profiles –
inurl:jobs -inurl:groups
 

Example sting for profiles with a possible DevOps background:

 
site:linkedin.com (association=*=swe OR member=*=swe OR “society of women engineers” OR witi OR “women in technology international” OR “women in engineering”) (python OR perl) (production OR devops OR chef OR puppet OR cfengine) (bscs OR mscs OR “computer science”) -inurl:dir -intitle:profiles -inurl:jobs -inurl:groups
 

Twitter Sourcing

 
Use Twitter pages, feeds, and users to find more candidates. One possible search is to use Followerwonk.
Just enter the organisations you’re looking for:
(society of women engineers) | witi | (women in technology international) | (women in engineering)
Remember that Followerwonk uses the pipe sign | for OR’s and the parenthesis ( ) for quotes.  
 

Twitter Followers

 
Target a diversity organisation on Twitter, and then source their followers.
You can also use a software tool like Twiangulate to search the followers and
refine the results with titles, tweets, or other keywords.