Pinterest has lowered its hiring goals for women in engineering roles

Pinterest found that the 30% hiring rate it set for women in engineering roles was doing too much, so it’s lowering its 2017 goal to 25%, Pinterest disclosed on its blog today.

“We still aspire to 30%—but realize it’s likely going to take more than 12 months to get there,” Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann wrote on the company’s blog.

Over the past year, Pinterest’s hiring rate of women in engineering roles was just 22%, “one of the reasons being our prioritization of hiring senior women engineers vs. focusing on a larger number of junior engineers,” Silbermann wrote.

While Pinterest didn’t meet its hiring goals for women in engineering roles, it hit — and sometimes beat — its goals in all the other areas. It’s worth noting that Pinterest is one of a handful of tech companies that actually set goals. Over the past year, Pinterest was able to increase the hiring rate of underrepresented minorities in engineering roles from 1% to 9% (a beat). Pinterest also reached its goal of increasing hiring rates for underrepresented minorities in non-engineering roles to from 7% to 12%.

Moving forward into 2017, Pinterest’s goals entail a lot of maintenance, with the exception of lowering its hiring goals for female engineers to a rate of 25%. Regarding people of color, Pinterest wants to maintain at least an 8% hiring rate in engineering roles and a 12% hiring rate in business roles. The company also plans to extend its Rooney Rule requirement — where the company interviews at least one person of color and one woman for top-level managerial positions — to additional executive roles.

“We put the processes in place to make the company focus on our new goals, but we would’ve made faster progress if we made sure every hiring manager understood how a diverse company advances our goal of building world class products,” Silbermann wrote. “We missed an opportunity to delve deeper and get managers to take ownership of the company’s goals alongside recruiters. If we could go back, we’d spend more time explaining the why as much as the how.”