Name Dropping is a Q&A series that aims to elevate the stories of women and nonbinary people leading in the tech space. The idea came from Angela DeFranco, a VP of Product at HubSpot, who said one way to be better allies is to name drop more women and nonbinary people in discussions of achievement, inspiration, and disruptors in tech, instead of referencing, time and again, the same set of (often male) leaders.

This edition of Name Dropping features Amy Schultz, Senior Director of Product Recruiting at LinkedIn.

What are the top priorities your team is working on today? What challenges are you solving?

Diversity, inclusion, and belonging (DI&B) is our number one talent priority at LinkedIn, and it certainly is for us too in Product Recruiting. It’s super important for us to recruit talent that reflects the diversity of our member population, as the people we hire are designing and building the products our customers and members use every day. Therefore, for our products to be inclusive for our over 660 million members, it’s vital that the talent we hire can reflect, represent, and have empathy for the experiences different groups have across the globe on our platform. While this can be seen as a ‘challenge’ to solve, it presents a huge opportunity to help LinkedIn realize its vision of creating economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. Never before has the intersection of talent and business strategy been more integral to how companies respond to and rebound from COVID-19. What underpins the future of work is empathy and the experience we create for our members, customers, candidates, and employees.

Can you talk to us about how remote work is changing your recruiting approach at LinkedIn, if at all?

When LinkedIn moved to a work from home model globally, we made the move to a virtual interviewing and hiring process overnight! While we were already using video technology to conduct many of our interviews, we had to pivot fast, and to the credit of our recruiting teams and hiring managers, we were able to do so relatively seamlessly. Once that was done, we needed to think through ‘how do we create a world class candidate experience that’s 100% virtual’? We’ve replaced in-person office and campus tours with video tours and have partnered closely with our Learning and Development and IT teams to help ensure a positive onboarding experience. There were a few bumps at first, but it’s been amazing to see so many teams pull together quickly to come up with creative ways of making things work in a remote world.

Given most tech companies in the Valley (and globally) will continue to allow employees to work from home for the medium and even long term, this creates such an amazing opportunity to rethink our hiring and talent strategy, which I believe could have a very positive impact on DI&B. I predict we will start to be more open to hiring talent where they are, rather than having them relocate to the Bay Area or another location. I’m excited about the convergence of workforce planning, DI&B, and real estate, and how together these groups can reimagine the workplace and workforce of the future, which I hope will be more inclusive and hyper-focused on employee experience.

To read the full article, visit the HubSpot Product Blog.