Week 4: A LinkedIn message I won't forget

How motivating a candidate to apply to a role helped their confidence and helped them land a better job

What I'm I up to?

With the increase in Rust's popularity, I wanted to learn the language. I'm not working on any project where I need to use a system-building language, but I found out about https://raytracerchallenge.com, an enjoyable way to learn a new one. It right away got me using interesting features like traits and digging into memory management to understand why I couldn't reference a variable twice like so:

let v = build_vector(1.0, 2.0, 3.0);
let v2 = build_vector(2.0, 3.0, 4.0);

assert_eq!(v.cross(v2), build_vector(-1.0, 2.0, -1.0));
assert_eq!(v2.cross(v), build_vector(1.0, -2.0, 1.0)); // This errors out as v2 has already been bonded (moved) when called in v.cross(v2). See https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch04-01-what-is-ownership.htm

I'll continue working on it on this GitHub repo: https://github.com/acadavid/ray_tracer_challenge. I will share the occasional interesting thing I learn!

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A LinkedIn message I won't forget

Last year I was a hiring manager at GitHub, and I wanted to increase the diversity composition of my team. We had the job ad posted on the website careers page, and other well-known job boards. But all the candidates we were getting were male and generally white, which you can imagine, were most of my current team members.

I decided to scope my search to a couple of EU cities (Amsterdam, Berlin, etc) and I reach out to female candidates. To my surprise, most of them were actually interested! But some of them didn't dare to apply. I offered them a 30 mins chat to talk about the role and motivate them to do so, and most of them did.

Fast forward one year, and I get a LinkedIn message from one of the candidates. She went through the process and didn't get the role, but something changed for her. The thought of applying to such a company was not as scary anymore, and she felt she could actually find a better job than her current one. And she did! I recently checked and now she's working for a well-known tech company.

While I was just doing my job, taking the time to motivate candidates to apply for the role was well worth it. We ended up with a more diverse team and the process had an unintended positive impact on someone else. I recommend this direct reach-out approach to all hiring managers, no matter the company.

That said, this can go wrong if you have the wrong interview process in place. I'll talk about that in the next edition!

Until next time!