Yesterday, I enjoyed listening to Cloudlife Podcast #39, which was recorded at 35,000 feet as Matt Morris of Desynit and James Governor of RedMonk were returning to the UK from Dreamforce 2014. James shared his views on diversity in tech, including how he sees women and underrepresented minorities as a “community that can do an amazing job technically” and as a “natural resource” that we should be leveraging to fill the jobs that we need to keep our businesses sustainable.

Matt shared pieces of Elaine Marino’s Dreamforce 2014 DevZone session, “Grow Developers. Grow Diversity.”, saying “I saw the most wonderful presentation in the community theater on Wed afternoon…” and recounting how Elaine shared her personal journey and then gave practical advice on how to make hiring practices more inclusive and increase diversity in our companies.

A key piece of Elaine’s advice is about job descriptions. Rather than saying vague (and intimidating) things like “Develop web applications based on complex scientific and engineering algorithms,” be very clear about what you really need a developer to know:

Here’s the full video and the SlideShare – I’d love to keep this conversation going! (Note: I am working on uploading videos from all six of the DevZone Luminary sessions. Stay tuned!)

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Looking for me on Twitter? I’m @rockchick322004, and I tweet about the Salesforce1 Platform and Diversity in Tech.