Anything For You All: INSTANT MBA: A top LinkedIn exec says a comment from one of his employees taught him a hiring lesson he never forgot

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July 17, 2017

About five years ago, Mike Gamson and the rest of the LinkedIn leadership team were wrapping up a successful corporate event when one of his employees approached him and asked, "Why were all of the presenters on the main stage men?"

"I said two bad things," Gamson told Business Insider. He told her he didn't notice, and then he said it was just because those were all the people who were running LinkedIn's departments.

"And she goes, 'That's my point!'" he said.

As LinkedIn's senior vice president of global solutions, Gamson oversees about half of the professional social network's roughly 10,000 employees. He was also responsible for overseeing the launch of many of LinkedIn's 30 offices throughout the world.

Gamson, who has been at the company for nearly 10 years, said he considered the awkward conversation after that event the catalyst for one of the best lessons of his career: He tended to hire executives who looked, thought, and acted like him.

Silicon Valley has a long history of being white and male — and more recently of tech leaders trying too hard to compensate. (For example, John Zimmer, the cofounder and president of Lyft, recently proclaimed his ride-sharing company was the "woke" alternative to what he deemed was its less progressive competitor, Uber. That was greeted with eye rolls.)

Gamson admits that he and the fellow male leaders on his team started their new initiative basically by congratulating one another on their social awareness.

"The first year of serious intent was pretty much a total failure in terms of changing things — just a group of guys just sitting around saying: 'Aren't we enlightened? We care about this. We're going to try to do something,'" he said. "That didn't work."

Gamson eventually realized it would be smarter to partner with top female employees rather than "woke" guys. So he did that, launched the WiN women's initiative at LinkedIn, and developed a three-tiered approach: rethink talent acquisition, focus on developing talented women already at the company, and implement unconscious-bias training.

LinkedIn NYC 4456 "The main lesson is this," Gamson wrote in a blog post. "If you are a male leader at a fast-growing company and don't deliberately hire for a diverse workforce from the beginning, eventually most of your hires and leaders are going to be much like you. In fact, probably too much like you because the default position of hiring is to tap your friends, and friends of friends who are likely to look, think, act and speak like you, and who often come from similar backgrounds."

He told us that while the issue of fewer women pursuing engineering careers is a complex one connected to the lack of female representation in tech roles at big Silicon Valley companies, he realized that the sections he oversaw — essentially LinkedIn's non-tech departments — did not have such a talent-pool problem.

LinkedIn, like other major tech players, is still largely male and white, but it has been moving the needle on diversity.

According to its 2016 diversity report, the company is 58% male and 42% female. Tech is 80-20 male, but non-tech is 48% male and 52% female. LinkedIn's leadership is 65% male and 35% female.

Since 2014, when WiN began, overall female representation is up 10%, and representation in senior sales leadership is up 44%.

For context, Facebook is 67% male and 33% female, non-tech roles are 47% male and 53% female, and leadership is 73% male and 27% female.

Google is 69% male and 31% female, non-tech roles are 53% male and 47% female, and leadership is 76% male and 24% female.

Gamson said he has learned over the past few years that it's partly a matter of spending more time looking at qualified candidates rather than hiring the first person who seems to fit.

"The first thing was just, I'm OK with instead of taking eight weeks it takes 14 weeks to find the right person — great, no problem," he said. "That was a huge difference-maker."