Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss why major companies like Toyota, Walmart, and Target are cutting DEI programs. They argue for merit-based hiring and cultural fit, sharing hiring stories from their own experience.
Toyota, Walmart, Target, and other brands are cutting DEI. Here, I'll tell you what I think about it. I'll take the juicy one first. Okay. I just think, man, like, enough is enough. Like, yes, this all— this stuff matters at the end of the day. But what matters the most is that you do good work and you be kind to people. That matters more than anything else. And the more we can cut These, I'm going to call it like they're distractions. The more we can focus on doing good work, the more we can focus on being kind. That's, that is all we need to do.
You know, I look at DEI as, I don't know how DEI organizations are run. As a business owner, it's really simple to me. I don't look at someone based on gender, color, or age or any of those factors. I look at it as black and white. Good person for the job, bad person for the job. If someone can do a good job or get trained into it, or they're smart, ambitious, and willing to work hard and learn, I'm all for it. If someone's lazy, I don't care about any of the other factors. In theory, why should lazy people who suck at what they do get paid well when there's a lot of hardworking people who should deserve that job? And again, I don't look at gender or race Or age or any of that, or even education.
Both of us employ across the spectrum.
Yeah, we employ all things. And people can't say based on our organizations that we're sexist or anything like that, or we discriminate against any kind of race, or if someone may be gender neutral. None of us discriminate, or you and I don't discriminate against any of that. And we look at it as like, you do good work, awesome. You know, you're gonna do well in our organization, keep getting promoted, keep getting paid well. If you do terrible work and people hate the results and you don't wanna show up or even work, Or do anything, why should you be around in the organization? It's not fair to all the other people who could either have the job, or it's not fair to the people who are working hard. Merit.
People like to— people like to poo-poo on merit. It's like, oh, you think America is a merit-based economy? Yes, I do. Um, and so, you know, more than most countries, right?
I do think organizations should look hard for all qualified candidates. Yeah. And not just be like, this one person applied, So I'm going to hire them. And I think that's a bad part about recruiting. For me, that has nothing to do in DEI, but you can lump that in because when people apply for a job, even if that person is amazing, we still go out there and try to find other people, no matter about their gender, race, or age or anything like that, finding other people who could be potentially skilled. And what you'll find is you may end up finding people who are better for the job. And I'll give you a great example of this. I won't name the person. We had someone interview for one of our positions as a leader of one of our countries, male. All right? And in this country, almost all the leaders are male. Did amazing on the interview and they probably would've killed it in the job. We said, eh, one person, let's continually find more people. We found this female. And when you look at this female, In this country, a lot of people will talk down because that's how culturally they are, which sucks, but that's the reality and it's changing, but changing slowly. We ended up picking the female, not because the person was a female. We picked them because they had similar experience, if not even a little bit better of experience. They were more expensive, believe it or not. and they were a much better cultural fit. So a little bit better experience, even though they were more expensive, we look at the experience and better culture fit and we're like, that's worth it.
Never in my 13 years of knowing Neil would I have expected him to talk about cultural fit, which is really important.
When you have a lot of employees, it is, and I'm not saying we have a ton compared to like a Microsoft, but at our scale it's still a lot when you're over 1,000 plus. Cultural fit is really important.
It's everything.
Yeah, because when someone has to work with, Hundreds of people, it doesn't work out if they're not a cultural fit.
And culture is just how you do things. And everything has a culture. Every organization has a culture. Your company does. Your family has a culture as well. So that's all it is. All right. Quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain. And Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. I want to talk about a couple of new strategies. And if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's We're building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint. And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint, and our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more. And we'll see you inside.
And it was funny when I interviewed her, she was telling me how she's a woman and, oh yeah, and you know, in the country it doesn't go as well because some people— I'm like, I don't care. And what do you— she's like, what do you mean? I'm like, well, if you're telling me people are giving you problems because they're female and they're not good, we can make changes. And she's like, really?
Well, not only that, she's dealt with it.
Yeah, she's dealt with it.
She's got the thick skin.
Yeah, she has a thick skin and she's just like, I can put up with it. And I'm like, well, If people are giving you issues and you don't think they're the right fit, we can make changes if you don't think that's best for organization. She's like, really? I'm like, yeah. She's like, you don't care I'm a female? I'm like, no, you're a better fit for the job. I'm like, gender doesn't matter to me. The question is who's best for the company. I think it's you. We'll make changes if people don't want to fall in line. It's that simple.
Right. That is it for today. Go to marketingschool.io/agency. By the way, that price keeps going up. It just doubled. Um, last yesterday actually. So yeah, go check it out and we'll see you tomorrow.
Bye!
