job opening and recruitment efforts

My company, Leapfrog Online, is looking to hire a Python web developer. There’s more about the company and the tech team here, and details of the job itself here. I think our tech team is pretty cool, and we try hard (with high-level support) not to be dicks about using open-source tools. Which is to say: we use them and we try to give back to the community by sending our engineers to conferences (as attendees and presenters), sponsoring said conferences (we’ve sponsored PyCon and Windy City Rails in the past), submitting patches to the tools we use, and releasing our code when possible. So I think, tech-wise, it is a pretty good place to work.

Among the software and test engineers, though, I’m the only woman. We’re also a pretty white bunch of people. I often hear things like, “well, I’d hire a woman, but none apply!” And I raise my eyebrows and think, “well, where are you looking?” Our recruiting is poor, and we all admit it; we have one HR person who does almost all of it, and she knows very little about technology. Some of us will post a link on our blogs, if we have them, or on twitter, and that’s about it. We tend to have a problem finding qualified devs in general, let alone qualified devs from under-represented groups. But today I asked my VP about it, and he is totally behind the idea, and asked me to come up with some ideas about where we might focus our recruiting efforts to attract more female and minority applicants.

Any ideas? Please feel free to let me know in comments, or email me (zerbie at gmail), or send this around to any groups or lists you know about.

[ETA: There are some ideas in the comments to this post on geekfeminism that I plan to follow up on.]