Jobs platform SEEK has boosted the percentage of women in its technology graduate recruitment program from zero, five years ago, to 83 per cent by pushing coding down its selection criteria and not making it a barrier in the recruitment progression.

The company is preparing to take on its next batch of recruits for its 2020 program, but to improve the diversity of graduates SEEK Group HR director Kathleen McCudden said the company had to change up its testing.

SEEK Group HR director Kathleen McCudden decided to remove coding as a key selection criteria.

"We were competing with every other tech company to get female talent and it made it really hard to get that balance," she said.

"We found some of our pre-selection tools were biasing towards men. We had a technical coding accuracy tool, but we had a lot more men scoring really highly on that. It was causing a lot of graduates to drop out who had looked terrific on paper and had good academic results."

By making coding just part of the assessment rather than a barrier to progressing to the next assessment phase, the company was able to increase the diversity of its candidates for selection and found that women performed more strongly in areas like problem solving and team building.