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In recent years, conversations around how to integrate diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) principles into the workplace have grown exponentially. The consensus? It’s hard work, and there’s no silver bullet—but it’s vital for creating healthy, productive, and engaged workforces.
Today’s startup ecosystem is far from representative of today’s consumer populations: VC-backed startup teams are disproportionately men (89.3%), white (71.6%), based in Silicon Valley (35.3%), and Ivy League educated (13.7%), according to data from Diversity VC. While there’s work to be done on the investor side, founding teams can also help create a more representative tech ecosystem by institutionalizing DEIB early on—and unlike larger companies that struggle to tackle institutionalized diversity challenges, startups can set the right course early and grow their efforts as they scale.
At M13, we believe it is critical for startups to embrace DEIB as early as possible. More diversity at companies leads to broader perspectives, increased innovation, expanded market share, improved product development, and access to a wider pool of talent. The business case is clear: increased gender and ethnic diversity are correlated with increased likelihood of financial outperformance, per McKinsey, and today, 100% of Fortune 100 companies have publicly committed to DEIB initiatives.
Below, we lay out the strategic steps startups can take to build DEIB principles into their hiring and culture. While we don’t expect every company to start doing everything immediately, we believe the culmination of these efforts will create a positive flywheel effect within your organization—and prioritizing DEIB today will yield the benefits of a more diverse organization faster and more effectively.
It's not about adding diversity for the sake of diversity, it's about subtracting homogeneity for the sake of realism.
Mary Robinette Kowal, author
Before hiring: Building a foundation
Facilitating diverse and inclusive hiring begins long before your team actually needs to hire. In short: you can’t neglect thinking about diversity and inclusion and then expect a broad range of candidates to magically appear when you publish a job posting; you need to put in the effort ahead of time. Early focus on building a diverse network and connecting with a broad community will help you cultivate a more diverse talent community to tap into when the time comes.
When it is time to hire, you want candidates to feel a sense of psychological safety when entering your workplace and meeting the team. This needs to be in place before you ever post a job description, or you’re setting candidates—and yourself—up for a sub-par experience.
To hire in alignment with DEIB principles, your team needs to know what those principles are. This means that your founding team needs to get together to clarify what DEIB means to your company and how each person can be clear on and accountable for upholding these values.
A productive conversation begins with acknowledging that bias exists and has a clear impact on the hiring process (such as judging candidates based on assumptions drawn from their name or alma mater). Awareness of these biases is not enough; the important part is knowing how to combat them. Consider unconscious bias training (at M13, we hold this annually), which can help your team better understand:
Dedicating time and resources to team education will pay dividends in building a strong company culture.
What does it look like to center people at the margins? If you decide to redesign your talent or hiring systems to center single moms, you’re going to hire differently. If you start redesigning your promotion system to include people who don’t have a business degree, you’re going to promote differently. Once you start to redefine the systems that you were taught, you can think differently, hire differently, develop differently.
Channing Martin, IPG Global Chief Diversity & Social Impact Officer at M13 Future Perfect 2023
During hiring: Structuring an equitable process
Implementing a structured interview process helps eliminate bias, foster fairness, and ensure alignment among interviewers. Properly training interviewers and defining interview steps and rubrics for evaluating candidates leads to more objective assessments.
The good news is that setting up this process once, especially when you’re just starting out, enables you to scale and grow in a sustainable and intentional way—saving small teams time and enabling you to hire better and faster over the long run.
Here’s a checklist for setting up a structured–and more effective—hiring system:
Align with your team on the specific traits and abilities needed for a job description
Run the job description through a gender decoder to ensure gender neutral language
Widely share and post the job description, including actively posting to job boards that can surface the role to candidates outside your immediate network
Use the job description to develop a scorecard that is standard across all interviewers
Choose interviewers who will be part of the potential new hire’s day-to-day experience and can authentically highlight the diversity of your firm
Choose an advocate from the management team to be responsible for ensuring everyone is doing the right thing for candidates, from application review to the final debrief
Prepare and circulate a pre-brief highlighting the job description, candidate scorecard, and questions each interviewer is expected to ask
Take the time to train your interviewers to be objective and consistent
Complete a pre-interview eligibility screen with the candidate before their first interview to ensure that timing, salary, and eligibility to work in the country align
Ask each interviewer to take detailed notes and submit their feedback within 24 hours of the interview without discussing it with any other interviewers beforehand
Ensure that candidates from underrepresented groups are included at each stage of the hiring funnel before moving on to the next stage
Throughout hiring, we also recommend researching which tools—like interviewing.io and BrightHire—can make your interview processes more inclusive and bias-free.
Above all, don’t rush the process. In our experience, hiring teams are eager to fill roles and leap into onboarding, but the single most important thing a startup can do to ensure they’re getting the best person for the job is giving the process time.
At the end of the day, taking a little bit longer to hire the right person will be better for your organization than hiring the wrong person quickly.
After hiring: Ongoing efforts to create an inclusive work environment
DEIB efforts neither start nor stop at hiring: they need to be actively built into all aspects of company life.
At M13, we believe that in order to effectively embrace DEIB, leaders have to fully live the values that they agree to in all aspects of their work. That’s why we proactively offer our portfolio companies training and workshops around leadership development, compensation leveling, feedback sessions, and more.
Data and accountability are also crucial. In the words of M13 Partner and Head of Talent Matt Hoffman, “What gets measured gets managed. Setting concrete metrics and goals around DEIB elevates the priority of the conversation and ensures accountability. It’s never too early to put these goals in place.”
Setting concrete metrics and goals around DEIB helps hold your team accountable, even when the work becomes hard. These goals don’t have to be hugely aspirational, just measurable—such as ensuring that a minimum number of candidates from underrepresented groups are included at each stage of the hiring funnel before moving on to the next.
In thinking through the metrics you want to set, ask:
Actively championing DEIB from the inception of your company is mission critical. By building DEIB into the foundation of a company, you are setting up a positive flywheel where diversity begets diversity—resulting in stronger company culture and results.
Get in touch:
If you're passionate about championing DEIB principles and have innovative ideas to share, we'd love to hear from you! Join our talent community and be a part of the conversation that's shaping the future of startups and diversity. For more information, reach out to talent@m13.co.
In recent years, conversations around how to integrate diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) principles into the workplace have grown exponentially. The consensus? It’s hard work, and there’s no silver bullet—but it’s vital for creating healthy, productive, and engaged workforces.
Today’s startup ecosystem is far from representative of today’s consumer populations: VC-backed startup teams are disproportionately men (89.3%), white (71.6%), based in Silicon Valley (35.3%), and Ivy League educated (13.7%), according to data from Diversity VC. While there’s work to be done on the investor side, founding teams can also help create a more representative tech ecosystem by institutionalizing DEIB early on—and unlike larger companies that struggle to tackle institutionalized diversity challenges, startups can set the right course early and grow their efforts as they scale.
At M13, we believe it is critical for startups to embrace DEIB as early as possible. More diversity at companies leads to broader perspectives, increased innovation, expanded market share, improved product development, and access to a wider pool of talent. The business case is clear: increased gender and ethnic diversity are correlated with increased likelihood of financial outperformance, per McKinsey, and today, 100% of Fortune 100 companies have publicly committed to DEIB initiatives.
Below, we lay out the strategic steps startups can take to build DEIB principles into their hiring and culture. While we don’t expect every company to start doing everything immediately, we believe the culmination of these efforts will create a positive flywheel effect within your organization—and prioritizing DEIB today will yield the benefits of a more diverse organization faster and more effectively.
It's not about adding diversity for the sake of diversity, it's about subtracting homogeneity for the sake of realism.
Mary Robinette Kowal, author
Before hiring: Building a foundation
Facilitating diverse and inclusive hiring begins long before your team actually needs to hire. In short: you can’t neglect thinking about diversity and inclusion and then expect a broad range of candidates to magically appear when you publish a job posting; you need to put in the effort ahead of time. Early focus on building a diverse network and connecting with a broad community will help you cultivate a more diverse talent community to tap into when the time comes.
When it is time to hire, you want candidates to feel a sense of psychological safety when entering your workplace and meeting the team. This needs to be in place before you ever post a job description, or you’re setting candidates—and yourself—up for a sub-par experience.
To hire in alignment with DEIB principles, your team needs to know what those principles are. This means that your founding team needs to get together to clarify what DEIB means to your company and how each person can be clear on and accountable for upholding these values.
A productive conversation begins with acknowledging that bias exists and has a clear impact on the hiring process (such as judging candidates based on assumptions drawn from their name or alma mater). Awareness of these biases is not enough; the important part is knowing how to combat them. Consider unconscious bias training (at M13, we hold this annually), which can help your team better understand:
Dedicating time and resources to team education will pay dividends in building a strong company culture.
What does it look like to center people at the margins? If you decide to redesign your talent or hiring systems to center single moms, you’re going to hire differently. If you start redesigning your promotion system to include people who don’t have a business degree, you’re going to promote differently. Once you start to redefine the systems that you were taught, you can think differently, hire differently, develop differently.
Channing Martin, IPG Global Chief Diversity & Social Impact Officer at M13 Future Perfect 2023
During hiring: Structuring an equitable process
Implementing a structured interview process helps eliminate bias, foster fairness, and ensure alignment among interviewers. Properly training interviewers and defining interview steps and rubrics for evaluating candidates leads to more objective assessments.
The good news is that setting up this process once, especially when you’re just starting out, enables you to scale and grow in a sustainable and intentional way—saving small teams time and enabling you to hire better and faster over the long run.
Here’s a checklist for setting up a structured–and more effective—hiring system:
Align with your team on the specific traits and abilities needed for a job description
Run the job description through a gender decoder to ensure gender neutral language
Widely share and post the job description, including actively posting to job boards that can surface the role to candidates outside your immediate network
Use the job description to develop a scorecard that is standard across all interviewers
Choose interviewers who will be part of the potential new hire’s day-to-day experience and can authentically highlight the diversity of your firm
Choose an advocate from the management team to be responsible for ensuring everyone is doing the right thing for candidates, from application review to the final debrief
Prepare and circulate a pre-brief highlighting the job description, candidate scorecard, and questions each interviewer is expected to ask
Take the time to train your interviewers to be objective and consistent
Complete a pre-interview eligibility screen with the candidate before their first interview to ensure that timing, salary, and eligibility to work in the country align
Ask each interviewer to take detailed notes and submit their feedback within 24 hours of the interview without discussing it with any other interviewers beforehand
Ensure that candidates from underrepresented groups are included at each stage of the hiring funnel before moving on to the next stage
Throughout hiring, we also recommend researching which tools—like interviewing.io and BrightHire—can make your interview processes more inclusive and bias-free.
Above all, don’t rush the process. In our experience, hiring teams are eager to fill roles and leap into onboarding, but the single most important thing a startup can do to ensure they’re getting the best person for the job is giving the process time.
At the end of the day, taking a little bit longer to hire the right person will be better for your organization than hiring the wrong person quickly.
After hiring: Ongoing efforts to create an inclusive work environment
DEIB efforts neither start nor stop at hiring: they need to be actively built into all aspects of company life.
At M13, we believe that in order to effectively embrace DEIB, leaders have to fully live the values that they agree to in all aspects of their work. That’s why we proactively offer our portfolio companies training and workshops around leadership development, compensation leveling, feedback sessions, and more.
Data and accountability are also crucial. In the words of M13 Partner and Head of Talent Matt Hoffman, “What gets measured gets managed. Setting concrete metrics and goals around DEIB elevates the priority of the conversation and ensures accountability. It’s never too early to put these goals in place.”
Setting concrete metrics and goals around DEIB helps hold your team accountable, even when the work becomes hard. These goals don’t have to be hugely aspirational, just measurable—such as ensuring that a minimum number of candidates from underrepresented groups are included at each stage of the hiring funnel before moving on to the next.
In thinking through the metrics you want to set, ask:
Actively championing DEIB from the inception of your company is mission critical. By building DEIB into the foundation of a company, you are setting up a positive flywheel where diversity begets diversity—resulting in stronger company culture and results.
Get in touch:
If you're passionate about championing DEIB principles and have innovative ideas to share, we'd love to hear from you! Join our talent community and be a part of the conversation that's shaping the future of startups and diversity. For more information, reach out to talent@m13.co.
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