Pinterest is in the market for female engineers. While the social media network has an overwhelmingly female user base — 71 percent of its 72.5 million users are women, according to comScore — it lacks diversity in its workforce. Expect that to change in 2016.

In a blog post last week, Pinterest’s Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer Evan Sharp stated that the company’s goal is to increase hiring rates for full-time engineering roles to 30 percent female. The lack of diversity in the technology industry has been well documented, and Pinterest is planning on doing something about it. In addition to hiring more female engineers, Pinterest is setting a goal to increase its hiring rates for full-time engineers to 8 percent underrepresented ethnic backgrounds, and 12 percent underrepresented ethnic backgrounds for nonengineering positions.

“By sharing these goals publicly, we’re holding ourselves accountable to make meaningful changes to how we approach diversity at Pinterest,” Sharp wrote. “We’ll also be sharing what’s working and what isn’t as we go, so hopefully other companies can learn along with us. Over time, we hope to help build an industry that’s truly diverse and, by extension, more inclusive, creative and effective.”

Pinterest isn’t limiting its hiring goals to engineering positions. The social network is instituting a Rooney Rule-type requirement where at least one person from an underrepresented background and one female candidate is interviewed for every open leadership position.

This hiring initiative builds on what Pinterest has already done to promote diversity in its workforce. The company has increased its percentage of employees that are female from 40 percent to 42 percent, engineering interns increased from 32 percent to 36 percent female, and women engineers hired out of school increased from 28 percent to 33 percent.

To help reach its hiring goals, Pinterest is taking the following steps:

  • expanding the set of universities it recruits from;
  • launching an early identification intern program for freshman and sophomore students from underrepresented backgrounds;
  • working with outside strategy firm Paradigm to set up “Inclusion Labs”;
  • having every employee participate in training to prevent unconscious bias; and
  • supporting the creation of a training and mentorship program to maximize the impact of black software engineers and students.

It will be interesting to check back in on this next year and see if Pinterest has met its goals. Let us know your thoughts by submitting a comment below