This month, Blendoor founder and TechCo’s 2015 Startup of the Year winner, Stephanie Lampkin, launched a new rating system, BlendScore, that measures how well a tech company is recruiting, compensating, retaining, and promoting women and underrepresented minorities. Using what the team is calling the Blendoor Bias Index (BBI), surveyed responses, and publicly available data, BlendScore will create an unconscious bias credit score of sorts for each company.
According to Lampkin, their data and analysis points to the biggest stakeholders for improving diversity within an organization comes down to those in middle management positions. As primary people managers, middle management typically brings in new team members, which is why Blendoor feels they have the greatest impact on who enters and exits a company.
Both for internal and external transparency, it’s the team’s hope that by putting diversity and inclusion at the forefront with the BBI rating system that it will encourage organizations to form relevant goals and incentivize hiring managers to adopt equitable hiring, promotion, compensation, and communication practices.
“BlendScore will be for companies what the LEED rating is for buildings and the US News World Report is for colleges & universities,” said Lampkin. “Tech companies have been reporting their EEO-1 data/diversity statistics for almost 3 years now and the fact that they are almost identical to each other and have remained relatively unchanged has led to band-aid solutions and PR. My thesis is behavior change and prioritization will happen through data, transparency, and accountability; we’re ready to peel back the onion.”
Among their surveyed and collected data, some of the results are based on questions in their methodology such as:
- Do you incentivize for diverse referrals?
- Do you have a head of diversity recruiting?
- Do you sponsor internal diversity events/conferences?
- What percent of your people managers are diverse?
- Do you have an internal team/group focused on social impact for diversity?
Launched in beta, BlendScore has a rating for 138 tech companies that segments them down based on retention statistics, demographics of their leadership team, recruiting approaches, bias, and social impact initiatives. In the future, additional organizations will be able to participate in the scoring system and program.
Read more about diversity and inclusion here on Tech.Co