 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, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. We're joined by Sarah Clatterbuck. She is the Senior Director of Engineering at LinkedIn, and Erica Lockheimer, the Head of Growth Engineering at LinkedIn. Thanks so much for coming on the show again. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having us. We're getting the band back together, yeah. So, before the cameras were rolling, you were talking about the exciting initiatives and programs you have at LinkedIn. One of them that definitely caught Jeff's imagination was REACH, sort of a crossfit for engineers. So, tell us more about REACH. Yeah, so REACH is a program where we wanted to really look at how we're hiring talent in a different way. So, one of the things, actually it was an inspiration of a candidate that we had at Grace Hopper last year, where she had come and she gave us her resume. Abby, and she said, I can't get an engineering job. I did a boot camp, but no one will hire me. I don't have enough experience. And she really was the catalyst that really created the program. We said, we need to look at talent in a very different way. So, we decided it stemmed also from her and also from Whit, where if there's working mothers, how did they get back into the workforce? So, these two ideas started coming together, and we said, why not create a program where we can maybe have them come to LinkedIn, get their skills back up, teach them how to code, and eventually work at LinkedIn. So, we kicked off the program, and we did very little media, and we had over 700 people applying. We went through 500 applications and had 30 candidates at LinkedIn. And so, they just finished the end of the group session, but they are converting, they're learning how to code, they're checking code live to the site. And these are people from different backgrounds as a veteran, you know, returning back to work, you know, even some people that have been in a bad situation of being homeless. I mean, there's this talk about not only career transformation, but like transforming their lives. And it's such a special program that has just changed the way that we're thinking about hiring. I don't know if you want to add anything? Yeah, I mean, I think that it's had a great impact on our company. I think the way we think about hiring, but also how the whole team has interacted and really come together to support these apprentices in being successful as engineers. So, I've seen it actually sort of transform the entire culture of our engineering team through this whole program. It's interesting to use a word apprenticeship. And I think of that too, because there's always a talk, right, about technology taking jobs. On the other hand, we hear over and over, there's all these open tech jobs, there's nobody to fill them. And then you got to transition, like with the truck drivers that are all going to be displaced by autonomous trucks and then off to distant future. So it's interesting to, as you point out, to kind of rethink kind of the classic, you know, go to school, do your time, come into the bat at the bottom and work your way up because it needs to be much more variant to be able to get people to retrain, to take people through various backgrounds. And are you seeing that reflected? You guys obviously represent a bunch of companies that are looking for people. Are you seeing a broader adoption of this kind of non-traditional approach to getting talent? Well, it's a program that we start off as a pilot. We're definitely going to do a second round. So we would love to share an open source, you know, how we're doing it. And we'd love to have other companies think in this way. But it's truly, back to Sarah's point, it's really not only transformed our culture, but it's even thinking about how we're hiring. Like, we're in hiring committee every single week, and we start looking at these candidates, like, oh, it looks like a reach candidate. And before, you would have maybe bypassed them and said, hey, oh, they're not ready. And this is now a different way to invest. But I definitely want more companies to do this, and we'll pilot it, we'll share it, we'll open source it, and it'll be fantastic. So talk about some of the other programs, including Invest, and how you're helping making sure that employees are happy where they are. So Invest is a program that came out of the Women in Tech Initiative between Sarah and I, and we thought about some of the personal experiences that we had is how did we get to where we're at? And you want to design a program about your own experiences, you're like, hey, I know that works, let me just create a playbook around it. So we met and we said, you know, we had executive coaching, we had basically a community of people we felt we could talk to about some challenges, and we had managers invest in us. So why not create a program about that? So we have, this is our third session that we're doing it, and we have 50 women in the program, but the program consists of two-day executive coaching, one-on-one with your manager, bringing the community of women together, and going through this. And what we found in the success results is there's zero attrition in the last 10 months of them being part of this program and 40% promotion, which is fantastic. And then what also happens is they go into this program and they want to be mentored and then they graduate really literally from the program. Now we want them to pay it forward. To the next cohort that's going to come through this program. And I think we have several things we can measure. I mean, you talked about the promotion rate, but we can also talk about, did they have sort of a career moment in the year following their trip through the program? Were they able to step up and take a bigger assignment, more responsibility? Like there are other ways to measure the success of the program as well. And we're seeing that across the board. Yeah, and just to add onto it, it really is a community that we're starting to build within the company. And it's like, it just feels fantastic. People feel great. We're walking around through the hallways like, I'm part of the best. When can I sign up? Everybody wants to be part of it. So we need to figure out and we can scale it faster. Well, measurement is also so important too, because so many companies want to know what they return on investment. So how do you think about the data collection and then measuring progress? Yeah, so basically for all these initiatives, before we start them, we say what are going to be the things that we're going to measure? What are the metrics of success and I think in this particular case, Erica mentioned attrition rate. That's what's in it for the company is retaining top talented women. But then on the other side, it's are they achieving their career goals? Are they getting promoted? Are they able to step up? So those are kind of the two metrics that we had set for the program before we even started. And then we can basically check and see, are we achieving those results? Or do we need to pivot something about the program or reshape the program? So we do this at least yearly, if not quarterly to see if we're tracking towards our goals. And just to add on to measurement, it's like she mentioned, there's also, it's hard to mention, like how do you feel? You went through this program, how do you feel? I mean, it just, they are feeling better. They are feeling more empowered. They want to actually be proud of it more and then help pay it forward. So that's also an amazing measurement of success. I went to an interesting pitch night a little while ago. Stanford, MIT, Babson and Cal. And there was a startup there. And they're looking at external data sources, social media, et cetera, to try to quickly identify high risk leaves inside the company. So that basically would be to drive your candidate selection to say, this person looks like they're doing behaviors that might indicate they might be bugging. So maybe they should be invested in to keep it going. Cause obviously it's so much better to keep your good people than to have to hire, retrain, et cetera, the huge ROI. And then of course the last thing, and I joke with you guys every time I see you, cause I see you so often on LinkedIn, usually in a classroom with a bunch of little girls teaching them, teaching them, taking your weekends to teach coding and tech. It's just fantastic. But really interesting that you were expanding that program as well, so that Sarah can get some of her Saturdays back, which I'm happy for. And really, taking something as successful, and as you said, open sourcing, open source continues to be such a great innovation engine. I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, absolutely. So our high school trainee program, we've been running it for three years now. We just finished our third cohort. And I think the results sort of speak for themselves. We've got a 96% rate of students going on to pursue STEM degrees and 89% studying computer science in particular. So I think we're actually seeing the result that we want out of the program. And we've even gone and reached a lot of girls who might be first generation college attendees and we're even having the same success with them. And so we really wanted to expand this program, horizontally scale it, so to speak. And so what we've done is we put our program outline as well as our curriculum that we do during the summer online on GitHub. And we're encouraging other companies to pick this up, to adapt it to their own needs and to provide additional opportunity for students around Silicon Valley and beyond. Well, what's the biggest consistent? It's not a surprise if it's consistent and you've been doing it for three years. But as you run these programs, when you get the girls in for the first time, what's the thing that most people would never expect that you see over and over and over? I think for me, it's really seeing the identity transformation of the students. Like they come in, they're not sure if they belong, they feel intimidated. And by the end of the summer, they're confident. They are certain that they're gonna be engineers. They see a future for themselves in Silicon Valley and that's reflected not only at the end of the program but also as they follow up with us in the subsequent years. So for example, one of our first cohort has already finished her undergrad at Berkeley two years in computer science. She finished in two years? She finished her undergrad. She's so excited. Young lady. Yeah. She's amazing. And she's in a third year master's program right now. And then I get updates periodically from all the students, how they're doing, how their programs are going. One of the women from our first cohort, Vanessa, is also here at Grace Hopper. And so we're gonna meet up for dinner tomorrow night and it's really great to follow them as they become confident technologists into their career. A great story. So I want to ask you, being here at Grace Hopper, it's easy to feel that companies really get it in the sense of the importance of recruiting and retaining women, making sure that there's opportunities for them. But in terms of the state of the industry, and I'm asking LinkedIn, which really impitimizes professional career management, do companies get it? I mean, where are we? So I think there's several companies that want to do something. I think we're all trying to still figure it out as sad as that may be at times, but it's a hard problem to solve. But when you're at a conference like this and you're like, oh, there's not enough women in tech, there's tons of women in tech, and you have to think about how you're hiring it and if you want different results, you have to do something different. So what are you doing? Your old ways of doing things is not the way to do it. Clearly, so how can you pivot and change? So I think they need to continually try different things, but I feel good. I feel we're gonna get in that right trajectory, but it's gonna take some time, so. Yeah, I think this is algorithm optimization. Yeah, good analogy, good analogy. The inputs and the outputs. Are we getting the result that we want, and we're all iterating our algorithms to figure out what's working and how we can do better. New inputs, new invites. Excellent. Well, Erica, Sarah, thank you so much. It's always so much fun having you on the show. Yeah, well thank you for having us. Yeah, it's fantastic. It's been a pleasure. Great, I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. They'll be back tomorrow with more from Grace Hopper. See you then.