SAN FRANCISCO _ Pinterest last year set ambitious hiring goals to diversify its predominantly white and Asian workforce, releasing targets that many Silicon Valley tech firms strayed away from publicly announcing.
Friday, the tech firm released data showing that while it hit and exceeded some of these goals, it fell short in others.
"Our efforts improved our hiring process and resulted in the most diverse team Pinterest has had to date," said Ben Silbermann, Pinterest's CEO in a post about the topic. "We didn't make as much progress as we'd like, but we learned a lot that's going to help us create an even more diverse Pinterest next year."
The company had a 22 percent hiring rate for female engineers in 2016, falling below its goal of 30 percent. While the image bookmarking site still aspires to hit that target, it said it was lowering the women in engineering hiring rate goal to 25 percent in 2017. Pinterest said it's trying to attract senior female engineers, which take longer to hire.
Pinterest did slightly surpass its goal for the hiring rate of engineers who are underrepresented minorities. The hiring rate for those engineers rose to 9 percent from 1 percent last year, exceeding the company's goal of 8 percent.
Pinterest hit its goal of increasing the hiring rate of underrepresented minorities in business and product jobs to 12 percent.
Overall though, Pinterest's workforce is still predominately made up of white and Asian employees, data show. About 49 percent of employees are white and 41 percent are Asian, which is relatively the same compared with last year.
The percentage of black employees increased from 1 percent to 2 percent. Hispanics made up 4 percent of its workforce, up from 2 percent last year.
Pinterest did show gains in the percentage of women in tech jobs, which increased from 21 percent to 26 percent. But the company still has no blacks in leadership positions, which are 70 percent white, up from 47 percent last year.
Tech companies, including Facebook and Google, have struggled to diversify their workforces but many firms have stopped short of releasing goals publicly. These companies say diversity is an important part of helping increase their business.
"At first, we debated sharing these goals because diversity is such a sensitive topic. But we believed that erring on the side of being open about our progress and what we learned is the best way to help the whole technology industry become more diverse and inclusive," Silbermann said.
Last year, Pinterest teamed with Paradigm, a company that has worked with Airbnb, Twitter, Slack and other tech firms to diversify its workforce. It also hired its first diversity chief Candice Morgan this year and implemented a hiring requirement, similar to the NFL's Rooney Rule, where at least one underrepresented minority and one female candidate is interviewed for every open leadership position.
The company's goals for the hiring rate of underrepresented minorities in engineering and product and business roles will remain the same in 2017.
Pinterest, which is valued at $11 billion, has more than 500 employees worldwide, according to its website.
