We think one action that raised diversity of our engineering team was raising the bar to include evaluating for soft skills in addition to technical skills. In general, raising the bar and having a more rigorous process tends toward more diversity: https://medium.com/inclusion-insights/want-to-hire-more-dive...
We have designed interview formats that specifically test for them. This actually isn't that revolutionary, as manager interviews have always weighted heavily on evaluating soft skills. We took some inspiration from interview formats used to evaluate managers and we also added a project interview that is about how people get work done in teams. By creating detailed interview guides with expectations and evaluation criteria, this skill is absolutely teachable. It does require significant investment in interviewer training.
