Pinterest has ambitious plans to diversify its staff

As criticisms of Silicon Valley’s lagging diversity have simmered over the past year, Pinterest has been gearing up to tackle one of its biggest challenges yet: diversifying its own ranks, which, despite the social network’s hefty female user base, are still skewed heavily toward white and Asian men.

On Wednesday, the San Francisco company announced a partnership with Jopwell, a hiring platform that connects employers with minority candidates, a “searchable pipeline” that Pinterest hopes will infuse the company with more diverse talent.

Jopwell is only the latest addition to an aggressive diversification strategy that Pinterest began rolling out when the company released internal employee data 10 months ago. A wave of other tech companies released diversity data around the same time.

Since then, Pinterest has partnered with Paradigm and Vaya Consulting, two upstart diversity consulting firms that help Pinterest rethink recruitment strategies, develop bias-training programs and tweak the hiring processes, all with the goal of creating a more inclusive workplace. The company also hired a head of diversity programming — a position that rarely exists at a company the size of Pinterest, which has 500 employees.

“Our goal is to make diversity a companywide initiative,” said Abby Maldonado, the diversity programs specialist.

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Porter Braswell, co-founder and CEO of Jopwell, said he and his partner launched the company earlier this year after realizing there were three main barriers to connecting companies with diverse employees: inadequate marketing, a limited pipeline to diverse talent and a lack of resources for diversity efforts.

Jopwell seeks to solve for all three by reaching out to minority candidates through its website, then allowing companies like Pinterest to connect with them via an algorithm that filters for exactly what a company is looking for.

“We thought there was a need to bring a disruptive mentality to diversity recruiting,” said Braswell.

The company charges its clients, including Facebook, an annual subscription fee that of up to $75,000 that varies based on a company’s size and the types of positions it is hiring for.

Maldonado said Pinterest has already begun to see an impact from its efforts — tweaks as subtle as rephrasing descriptions in postings to orchestrating major recruiting drives at places such as the Grace Hopper Celebration, an annual conference promoting women in tech.

At Grace Hopper, Pinterest wound up hiring 12 female engineers — double its hiring goals for the event. Of its incoming entry-level engineers who will graduate this spring, one-third are women.

When Pinterest released its employee data last fall, 21 percent of its technical positions were staffed by women. Overall, 92 percent of its staff were either white or Asian American, and 60 percent were men. (The company anticipates releasing updated data this summer.) The company has so far focused on a department most out of balance: engineering.

Pinterest was already ahead of many tech companies. At Google, women hold 17 percent of technical posts according to numbers released last year, while at Facebook and Yahoo they hold 15 percent.

Maldonado pointed out that Pinterest is in a unique position — it is a major tech company that’s still small enough that hiring a few more female software engineers can shift the gender balance dramatically.

“We know from history that once we get more diverse employees in the ranks, it becomes easier and easier to then attract more diversity,” she said. “Anytime that we can have a way to get more diverse candidates in our pipeline, we’ll take it.”

Kristen V. Brown is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: kbrown@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kristenvbrown