Attraction

Creating a diversity-first hiring culture

Samsara aims to attract and hire top-level talent with a wide range of skill sets and experience. With a diverse group of talented people, we create better solutions to increase the safety, efficiency and sustainability of the world’s physical operations. It’s not just good for business, it’s the right thing to do. Inclusive recruiting ensures diversity is more than a buzzword by deeply embedding objective, equitable and inclusive behaviours throughout the recruiting lifecycle. It means engaging in partnerships and events, prioritising talent pipelining, ensuring our job postings are inclusive, providing education and relevant data and driving accountability at all levels. 

Broadening our top-of-funnel:

• We are taking proactive steps to increase diverse representation by attracting and hiring talent at every level through partnerships and collaboration with a number of different job boards, a wide range of universities and volunteer event participation. In addition, we are intentional about outreach through source channels that include diverse representation.

• This past year, Samsara participated in the Atlanta University Centre Consortium Career Fair, representing four historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), with 60 students from various majors. We also participated in our frst military career fair, Military MOJO and our R&D and DEI teams attended the 2023 Grace Hopper Celebration.

• Through our Project SEED (Source, Engage, Evaluate, Drive) approach, we’ve prioritised executive talent pipelining, proactively identifying potential future executive leaders to build and nurture relationships with over time.

Creating opportunities for equity and objectivity:

• To ensure the language in all of our job postings is inclusive, we launched a step before posting each job, where job descriptions are run through a gender decoder to eliminate gender-coded verbiage prior to the job being posted publicly. 97% of all posted jobs were run through a bias decoder since implementation.

• We’ve initiated a programme called “Owl Ambassador,” which pairs candidates with a Samsara ambassador they resonate with. This provides candidates a chance to immerse in our culture and fosters a sense of belonging. 

Driving accountability:

• We have instituted a strategic goal-setting framework focused on enhancing gender and racial/ethnic diversity across tech, non-tech and go-to-market roles, underscoring our commitment to producing meaningful strides in enhancing diversity and equity in crucial areas.

• In order to boost the effectiveness of recruiting outreach strategies, we introduced a process to ensure that the initial stages of the recruitment funnel yield a diverse candidate pool, equipping our recruiting team with relevant data to guide their actions.

• We have launched multiple training programmes to educate all interviewers on inclusive recruiting best practices. Our “Diversity First in Every Search” training equips hiring managers to consistently source diverse talent. Our Inclusive Hiring Training programme, which educates our recruiters and sourcers about unconscious bias throughout the recruiting lifecycle, has reached a 93% completion rate. 

Looking forward:

• We will focus on implementing targeted strategies in our recruiting processes and hiring practices to promote fairness and an equitable candidate experience, while maintaining a strong emphasis on objectivity.

• We will continue to aim for interview slates that represent the demographic market availability by function type. We will lean in to lead the way where possible, consistent with our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.

Development & Retention

Accelerating innovation through representation and inclusion

It’s not enough to attract globally diverse talent. We have to ensure that individuals transitioning from candidate to employee feel welcome and connected and have the opportunity to excel professionally. We continue to invest in enterprise-wide programmes, professional and leadership development and employee-driven groups to help ensure that members of underrepresented communities feel our support and know their sense of belonging is a priority.

Fostering an Inclusive Culture

•  We launched a Women’s Leadership Programme (WLP) for our employees in our R&D department this year. This programme, focused on retention and development, is a unique opportunity designed to build a sense of community, foster collaboration, increase self-realisation and offer tangible, practical skills for the workplace.

• Owl Connected, our company-wide mentorship programme, launched late last year, giving participants opportunities to own their development, expand their network, promote career development, learn new skills and support each other through shared experiences and meaningful relationships. We have 32% of Samsarians registered as either a mentor or mentee, with 52% of registrants engaged in active pairings and ~1400 mentoring sessions completed.

• Samsara-wide DEI training, Inclusion in the Workplace, is a foundational part of onboarding. This education helps participants recognise and manage unconscious bias, ensure more equitable decisions, more productive teams and a more inclusive culture. 72% of employees have completed the training so far.

• We support and encourage participation in seven active Employee Resource Groups (ERG) across the company, along with multiple shared-interest communities.

• We enable Global DEI Working groups across all our cost centres. These groups lead the execution of DEI initiatives and project creation for their respective departments to help make progress for the furtherance of our goals and our diversity, equity and inclusion strategy.

• Owl In[clusive], a quarterly newsletter and DEI Intranet page -- delivering all things diversity, equity and inclusion -- provides updates on DEI goals progress as well as updates on DEI programmes, events and projects.

Oversight & Accountability

Raising our bar

Ongoing, we propose, review, and revise policies and goals to ensure fairness of process in all departments, initiatives, and activities. Here is how we raised our bar in 2023:

• Expanded DEI Steering Committee: This group meets regularly to shape policies and procedures, provide advice and counsel to executives on DEI action plans and provide governance and oversight to our DEI strategy.

• Incorporated DEI data and narratives into our Quarterly Business Reviews to share goal progress, highlights/lowlights, lessons learnt and areas of opportunity.

• Created new DEI OKRs by department to hold teams accountable towards specific DEI efforts. Progress on these OKRs is tracked quarterly and reported at department leadership meetings.

• Continue to develop DEI data tracking dashboards to ensure that we are able to identify trends and make informed decisions as they relate to representation, performance, attrition and recruiting.

• Embed best practices in our performance review process for all Samsara employees that ensure bias is mitigated, ratings are collectively calibrated and a DEI analysis is conducted to ensure scores are fair and distributed across demographic groups, departments and levels.

In order to uplevel our DEI efforts, we must continue to:

• Source, engage and hire the best talent from schools, networks and industries where diverse talent is. An aggressive and strategic approach will yield tremendous results.

• Train, develop and create equitable opportunities for the diverse talent we currently have to grow professionally and secure promotion into leadership positions. Creating pathways for upward mobility and removing barriers for groups that are underrepresented in the technology industry will ensure that we keep and expand the diverse talent we have.

• Continue to create awareness and education opportunities for our leadership team to understand that intentionality in DEI leads to increased innovation, better business outcomes and increased workplace effectiveness. This level of awareness will enable our leaders to turn good intentions into reality and equip leaders to explore the impact diversity has on perspectives, assumptions and approaches and identify ways to prioritise change and measure progress.

• Hold leaders accountable towards DEI progress, outcomes and integration into leadership competencies to ensure diverse representation at the executive leadership level.

• Focus on next-generation company-wide goals beyond 2025, addressing known gaps and opportunities while broadening our DEI efforts globally.

• Ensure DEI is everyone’s job and embedded into the business rhythm.