Whether it's advertising your company at college career fairs at women's colleges

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HBCUs, associations like the Black Data Processing Associates (BDPA) , or events like the Grace Hopper Conference , you need to get your name out there. Don't expect diverse candidates to come to you unless you're actively seeking them out.

Now, if only a few people get interviewed, you’ll have to rethink your strategy again. Because when it comes to diversity, interviewing is no longer just about assessing your candidate’s competence. You have to look at yourself and assess how you might be holding the process back.

Krista Morgan of the Young Entrepreneurs Council puts it this way: "Forget the beer." Or, in other words, the idea that you should only hire people you'd go out drinking with.

“The idea that you should only hire people you’d want to have a beer with is complete nonsense in my opinion,” she continues . “I love having a drink with all kinds of people, and that doesn’t mean I’ll enjoy working with them. Instead, I suggest hiring people who pass the ‘they’re going to make me raise my game’ test. Focus on the right qualifications for the job, even as you strive to balance a culture that’s right for each hire.”

Diversity is a multifaceted issue in the tech industry some of the key features of band (which is probably why people keep writing about it), meaning there are a variety of solutions and steps you can take to grow and develop your IT team. The issue could be in the wording of your listings, in how you market your openings, in yourself, or even in your company culture and compensation plans .

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Be ridiculously helpful
I can't say I came up with this one myself. In fact, it's one of the core values​​of Platforms . But it's still as applicable and important for your IT team as it is for Platforms .

In the film, Baymax is created for the sole purpose of helping others in need. Activated by shouting "ouch" and only suppressed when the patient is satisfied with their care, it's not hard to see why this robotic marshmallow quickly becomes friends with Hiro and the gang.

When others think of IT, they think of it as a department that solves problems . That’s partly true. But beyond fixing problems with an employee’s Wi-Fi connection or printer, IT is designed to prevent problems in the first place. Your teammates aren’t just first responders or crisis managers. They’re also general practitioners, helping to implement preventative measures.

Writing in Computerworld, Paul Glen goes further, acknowledging that IT also strives to find the best solution, even if that means doing more than senior management has asked.

“It’s great to want to help,” he says , “but sometimes we’re just trying to please instead. They’re not the same thing at all…. You have to dig in and figure out what users really want to achieve. When you do that, you’ll often find that what you’re being asked for isn’t the best way to achieve the real goal, and sometimes it’s not even close. As IT professionals, we’re not really doing our job until we’ve figured out what’s useful, regardless of what’s being asked for. Being a technology expert means doing more than just following orders.”

An ITSM software solution is a good start to better manage employee issues, but you can also take it a step further by including non-IT IT professionals, executives, in the conversation. Often, senior executives don’t know what work the IT team does to complete a project, which shouldn’t surprise you since they’re not IT professionals. So help them look at things from a technology perspective so they can understand the amount of work and time the task will mean for your team. Bridge the gap between IT and the business.