 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Grace Hopper's Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Jarvis Sam. He is the Manager of Global Diversity Issues at Snap Inc. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really happy to be here. So I've got it, first of all, you're wearing a Rosie the Riveter shirt. We've got these Chachkes here. Can you explain to our viewers a little bit about that? We got to talk about these first. Of course. So the shirt was actually inspired by our lady chillers. It's our local women employee research group at Snap. The idea was take the ghost, the representative mascot of Snap Inc, and parlay that with the idea of Rosie the Riveter. Of course, powerful in her own right. All right, I love it. And then these spectacles are... Yeah, so spectacles are Snap Inc's first ever hardware product, released earlier this year. They allow for you to take an in-the-moment Snap to be featured on your phone. Using Bluetooth technology for iPhones and then Wi-Fi technology for Android, they allow individual users to record snaps on their phone while, of course, not distorting the experience of being able to use your hands in the moment. So I love it. These are the recruiting tactics, you're your own product. Exactly. So they want to play with these toys, come work for us. So tell us a little bit about what you do, Jarvis. Before you were at Snap, you were at Google. I was. And really engaged on these diversity issues. So what do you do at Snap? Yeah, so at Snap, I manage our global diversity effort. What that includes is analyzing the diversity framework across three key verticals. First on the pipeline layer. So what are we doing by way of K-12 education to ensure that communities of color, as well as women. K-12. Exactly. Wow. Have specific opportunities in the space to be impactful. We often create this framework or archetype for what we think is an effective software engineer, for example, or account manager. Reframing that by providing access and opportunity to showcase to people that the image that we have is not always the image that we want to portray is critical. Next, then we focus heavily on the idea of the candidate. So candidate experience. Deep diving into understanding key talent acquisition measures as well as key HR practices that will allow for us to create the best experience moves us forward in that regard. But then finally, and this is where we get to the whole global perspective, is the idea of the employee. Creating a nurturing community where the idea of psychological safety is not only bolstered, but ensuring that your community feels empowered to the idea of inclusion. Making sure that inclusion is not just a seat at the table, but rather a voice in the conversation that can be action to bond. So I want to dig into that a little bit. There's this voice in the conversation. Before the cameras were rolling, you were talking about these very difficult, candid conversations that employees that SNAP have. Tell our viewers a little more about that. Yeah, so I think one of the greatest challenges across the tech industry and at SNAP as well is the idea of referral networks. The tech industry on its own right has grown so greatly out of referral networks. People that you've worked with previously, people that have the same academic or pedagogical experience as you. The problem with that is traditional network analysis would seem to let us know that you often refer people who look like you or come from a similar internal dimension background as yourself. In a community that's largely rooted in the dominant discourse by wider Asian males, that means that we're continuing to perpetuate that exact same type of rhetoric. That's where you're recruiting. Exactly. And so then the idea of getting more women or communities of color involved in that space can often be distorted. So that remains a challenge that we as a company, as well as the tech industry needs to overcome, is understanding, one, how do we encourage more diverse referrals over time? But then, two, creating an ecosystem where this seems natural and not like an artificial standard. Okay, so how do you do it? I mean, I think that we've pinpointed the problem and it absolutely is a problem. But what are the kinds of things that SNAP is doing to improve the referral process? So it's the idea of being innovative by design. So one thing that's unique about SNAP in particular is we are an LA-based company. So based out in Venice Beach in Santa Monica, California, we don't face a lot of the core challenges that we see in Silicon Valley and as a result have the opportunity to be more innovative in our approach. As a result, when we look to referral networks in particular, one thing that SNAP has focused on is building in the idea of diversity recruiting as a core pillar or tenant of all of our employee research groups. Not only do they join us to attend conferences like Grace Hopper, like the National Society of Black Engineers, but we actually do sourcing jams where we sit down with them and mine their networks either on LinkedIn. Sourcing jams, I love it, okay. Either on LinkedIn or GitHub or any of the various professional networking sites that they work on or technical networking sites to find out who are great talent that they've worked with before. Yeah, who do you know, who can join us? And then what's more significant than that is creating a sense of empowerment where we're actually having them reach out to their network as opposed to a recruiter. It creates more of a warm and welcoming environment for the candidate where the idea of being a simple passive candidate is further explored by activating them to showcase how your experience has been great. And how are you also ensuring that the experience at SNAP is great, particularly for women and people of color? Yes, so one area is our employee resource groups. We have a couple. So Lady Chill is, of course, who I'm wearing today, but SNAP Noir for the Black community, SNAP Pride for the LGBTQ Plus community and Low Snaps for the Latinx community. How big is SNAP? We should also just... Yeah, about 3,000 people globally. 3,000, okay, wow, wow. And so one of the exciting things that we do is ERG Day. So it's where we bring all of our employee resource groups together and they hold massive events every single quarter to encourage other communities that are either allies or individuals of the sociological outgroup to understand what they do. But this deployed in so many different ways. In June for Pride, for example, we held Drag Bingo, where our LGBTQ Plus community participated. In March, we did a whole series of events celebrating women in engineering, women in sales and women in media that resulted in a large expanse of events allowing for people to come in and learn about not only the female experience more broadly, but particularly at SNAP and some of the great endeavors that they're working on. And I know you're also working with other organizations like Girls Who Code, Women Who Code, Made With Code. Can you tell our viewers a little bit more about SNAP's involvement? 100%. Made With Code is one of the most exciting projects I've had the opportunity to work on. It was, for me personally, this great combination of working with my previous employer, Google and SNAP. So Google's Made With Code project is an idea that started to empower teen girls to code, age 13 to 18 primarily. What they found was that's the exact same demographic that primarily uses our product. And so about three months ago, we decided to come together to launch an initiative where we'd have teen girls make geo filters, one of SNAP's core products. The project actually launched one week ago and teen girls are using Blockly Technology to actually go about creating their own geo filters and then writing a 100 word personal statement defining what their vision for the future of technology is. I'm personally excited to say that after checking the numbers this morning, more than 22,000 girls have already submitted responses to participate. Wow. It will culminate in an event November 1 through 3 where we'll take the top five finalists to Ted Women in New Orleans to not only showcase women who have done incredible things in the past and present, but also showcase their work at participating in this competition as the women of technology for the future. And the next generation. Exactly. So I mean, we're running out of time here, but I want to just talk finally about the headlines. I mean, it's very depressing. Absolutely. The Google Manifesto, the sexism that we've seen against women, the racism in the industry. I mean, we don't want to talk about it at the celebration of computing because we want to focus on the positives. And yet, where do you feel, particularly because you have worked at large tech companies on these issues for a while now? Not facing challenges head on is going to be the greatest threat to the tech industry. This idea of avoiding conversation and avoiding sheer communication of these challenging issues will continue to result- And ignoring the bad behavior. Exactly. And it results in negative rhetoric that inherently puts these communities out of wanting to work in this specific industry. But arguably, given that technology not only represents the face of the future, but how every single product and entity is made for the future, we have to include individuals. Everyone often wants to highlight the McKenzie study from Diversity Matters, highlighting all of these great ways of diversity impacting the business, but we need to look at it in addition from an ethics standpoint. The idea that technology represents how we're building our future, leaving entire communities out of that, primarily focusing on people of color and women, will result in a space where these communities will never have access, opportunity, and thus employment to exist in the space. Being able to attack these issues head on, address the bad behavior, highlight what the potential negative implication is, is step one. Step two, though, is being proactive in everything that we're doing to attempt to ameliorate that from the beginning. You'll notice one thing that's very different about SNAP's diversity strategy, as we seek to build infrastructure first, then focus on talent acquisition. Once we can ensure that communities of color and women are entering a space that is psychologically safe, open, and inviting, then we can focus on how we're bringing in talent effectively, so that the idea of retention and advancement is not an afterthought, but rather top of mind. Right, because you can't recruit them if they haven't had the opportunities to begin with. Exactly, and that's why SNAP often upholds the value of the idea that diversity is our determination, while inclusion is our imperative. Jervis, I love it, that's great. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much, I appreciate it. It's been a real fun talking to you. Thank you. We will have more from Orlando, Florida, the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, just after this.