Photo-sharing social network Pinterest recently announced that it plans to diversify its workforce. The company added that its plan include hiring more women and workers coming from minority backgrounds.
Pinterest co-found Evan Sharp made the announcement on July 28 via the company's official blog saying, "Today we're doing something unprecedented - we're going on record with our hiring goals for 2016. We're also sharing details about the new programs and improvements we have planned."
Sharp added that in the past year, Pinterest was able to grow its female employee population. He claimed that currently 42 percent of the company's workforce are female, an increase of two percent. Additionally, the number of female engineering interns rose to 36 percent from 32 percent. Hired women engineers directly from school increased to 33 percent from 28 percent.
Despite the significant increase in numbers in order to achieve its aim for a more diversified workforce, Pinterest said that it has to intensification its effort in hiring employees coming from underrepresented backgrounds.
The company publicly announced its goal for 2016. These include increasing the hiring rate of full time female engineers to 30 percent and increasing the hiring rate of engineers coming with underrepresented ethnic backgrounds to eight percent. The company is also aiming to reach a 12 percent hiring rate of non-engineering employees coming from underrepresented ethnic backgrounds.
In order to achieve its goal, Pinterest is tapping the services of Paradigm. It is a group that works closely with other companies in order to help them hire and retain a more diverse group of employees, according to USA Today. Paradigm has worked with Pinterest's top executives in order to impart strategies that will combat biases pertaining to a person's demographics.