Diversifying Tech & Creating Culture Crushes

Jason Medley, Chief People Officer at Codility, shares our mission to embody an impactful model of diversity, equity, and empowerment in our culture and policies. Read below to find out why he believes in creating “culture crushes”  through responsible leadership and a remote-first work structure that mitigates bias.  

Throughout my time working in people operations, I’ve always been wildly passionate about three things: Diversity, Equality, and Empowerment (DEE). While I haven’t always executed perfectly, I’ve learned many lessons along the way. Still, as HR professionals, we have a considerable influence and a responsibility to positively influence any company we work with. We can help and empower people to live their best lives possible—in and out of the workplace. 

As companies and leaders, we need to have conviction around remembering the human side of what we do. We can create policies and cultures to allow and help people be there for their families in life’s worst moments. We can show up in meaningful ways. We can mitigate the intensity of work on lives by what we create and build with a remote-first and among other workplace cultures. 

Our influence with one company, big or small, can leave a footprint to pave the way for how companies come and lead after us. It is not just one business we are changing, but entire industries and their mindsets. I call this creating culture crushes – by embodying a model that is so impactful that it empowers other companies and leaders to want to emulate it.  

That is what I’m excited to do at Codility.

The diversity, equality, and empowerment mission with Codility  

It’s no secret that the tech industry still faces massive inequality. It’s one of the most significant barriers to break when building inclusive cultures. Just take a look at the five largest tech companies on the planet (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft), and you’ll see that women represent only 34.4% of their workforce.

This needs to change. Personally, I will always be fighting for equitable, all-around treatment for women in the workplace. I believe in technical assessment platforms’ effectiveness for diversifying engineering talent and promoting gender equality in tech. 

I feel empowered to evangelize Codility’s mission to help engineering teams succeed by enabling accurate and fair hiring decisions. If companies aren’t considering advocating a budget towards a technical assessment platform, I would encourage them to reach out to understand how they can open the playing field to diversity by using Codility.   

Mitigating bias in the hiring process

Codility has always been a remote-focused company, and it encouraged the team to re-evaluate and challenge how tech businesses interview candidates. The Codility platform was built to support remote hiring but, more importantly, to support equitable treatment of all candidates. Since the pandemic, we’re beginning to see more companies introduce equal opportunities in the talent search. 

I believe recruiting processes and the way we recruit people have stayed the same for decades, and while Codility has taken a big stride in shaking that, there is still a lot of work to be done, and I’m happy to be able to use my skill set to solve that. 

I hope to impact recruiting processes across the industry, as I believe they are at the feet of culture. For all the technology, resources, and conversations out there, there is still a ton of bias we can undo. 

Closing out

In everything we build and create, my vision is that we do it through the lens of diversity, equality, and empowerment first. 

Codility is collecting a powerful force of change-makers with our product. I’m excited to unite them, change the status quo, and pave the way for tech and other industries with what we do. There will be quite a few more culture crushes sparked in the future, and I can’t wait to see the role Codility will play in that. 

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