Across Silicon Valley, diversity has been hailed as one of the tech industry's greatest problems. Facebook, for example, has publicly acknowledged its struggles with gaining a diverse employee base. But diversity isn't quite the same challenge for one Bay Area-based tech company: Yelp.

Yelp, the application and site that allows for local discovery of restaurants and services, has a diverse workforce that welcomes Latinos, African-Americans and women. Based on 2015 diversity numbers that have already been released, this is something that no other tech company has accomplished. More than that, Yelp has taken comprehensive steps to institute inclusive hiring.

The company's 2014 workforce diversity report already showed that the company was one that looked to be inclusive of various cultural backgrounds, life experiences, ages, genders, sexual orientations, religious and political beliefs, educations, opinions and more. Employment efforts to procure women engineers, multicultural employees and individuals of diverse lifestyles were executed to accelerate the company.

Last year, approximately 47 percent of Yelp's staff was female. Also, 12 percent of the staff was Asian, 7 percent was Hispanic and 4 percent was black. While the staff was overwhelmingly white, the diversity numbers are higher than the numbers from similarly ranked companies. For instance, 30 percent of Google's employees are women, 3 percent are Hispanic and 2 percent are black; 37 percent of Yahoo's employee's are women, 4 percent are Hispanic and 2 percent are black. Also, 32 percent of Facebook's employees are women, 4 percent are Hispanic and 2 percent are black. Neither Google nor Yahoo showed any gains since last year, while Facebook saw a one percent increase in the number of women it employs.

Yelp is a slightly different type of company than many others, however. It's much smaller than Facebook or Apple, which have 10,000 and 98,000 employees, respectively. Meanwhile, Yelp has just 3,000, which makes it easier for them to achieve gains in diversity. Also, women and multicultural groups might find less difficulty when looking to penetrate Yelp's workforce, as half of the workforce is on the company's non-tech sales team. Additionally, Yelp has chosen to aggressively recruit at universities with sizable diverse populations, and they encouraged company leaders to reach firm objectives and goals. Pinterest and Intel have also done the same.

According to the National Girls Collaborative Project, Yelp would like the percentage of female engineers to be equal to the number of women receiving computer science degrees (18.2 percent). The sales team is working toward 2020 as a major benchmark for additional diversity and inclusion efforts. They're also looking to increase female representation among the company's engineers.

"For us, we're doing really well with gender equality here, but when you're looking at gender when it comes to our engineering team, we definitely have a lot of growth to do," Rachel Williams, Yelp's head of diversity and inclusion, told International Business Times. "That's the focus for the engineering team -- getting more women in and retaining those women."

Yelp has partnered with Women Who Code, Hackbright Academy, Year Up, Awesome Women in Engineering, and DiverseBurst to find and employ extraordinary candidates. Also, the company surveys institutions like City University of New York, the University of Central Florida and the University of Texas, and placed student ambassadors at Howard University, Arizona State University and several other diverse schools to help fuel the company. Additionally, Yelp has focused it's interest on bringing in underrepresented groups, matching the demographics of whatever city a given office is based in, whether its Chicago, New York, San Francisco or Scottsdale.

Yelp has reportedly also taken several steps to make its company more welcoming and empowering for multicultural individuals and women, which should help them to reach its diversity goals. The company may be far from its goals, but their ongoing strategies will help them to effectively employ an increased number of women, Hispanics and African-Americans.

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