HubSpot is a leader in being transparent and active with its DE&I initiatives. We spoke with Katie Burke, Chief People Officer at HubSpot, which has more than 3,000 employees.

HubSpot's journey toward becoming a more diverse company is well-known. What are some of the things you did to accelerate diversity in sourcing?

I don't think people talk enough about the fact that really some of the most important work you can do in building more diverse teams is to focus on the skills and attributes you really need for a role versus relying upon, for example, degrees, years of experience, how well someone knows something, or how flashy someone is. We try to train interviewers to seek out and assess those skills in objective ways.

At HubSpot, we do our best wherever possible to eliminate credentials or time limits that don't actually matter, like “Five years of experience. Bachelor's degree or equivalent required.” I will admit that I was someone who grew up saying: “Years of experience is a good proxy. We want someone who's done this work before.” A good recruiter pushed me to think when they said, “The five years of experience is really just a proxy for this skill that you need.”

If you are a proficient project manager, it actually shouldn't matter to me whether you have five years of experience or 50 years of experience. The excellence of project management is really the skill I'm looking for. If you hire a lot of people, it's in your best interest to realize that you can still get the things that you really value in a candidate without using the traditional crutches we use to get them.

There's a ton of great research on the corporate skills gap and how it's developed over time. One of the biggest problems that occurred over time is degree inflation. A Harvard study found that 67 percent of job postings required a bachelor's degree or higher, yet just 16 percent of workers already in that position held such a degree. We use education as a proxy for experience or skill, and doing that has huge negative implications, not just for race but also socioeconomic diversity—access to more rural areas in the United States.

It's an important distinction to really push ourselves to go, “What is the skill someone actually needs,” versus assuming that a degree is what gives you that skill. Honestly, it's a hard conversation to have with hiring managers. This is often a tough sell at organizations where folks are really proud of their education. But what you have to remind yourself is eliminating years of experience or a BA requirement does absolutely nothing to devalue your personal experience.