Forgotten diversity: Making organizations truly inclusive | with Jen Lambert

Sam foreign. Welcome everybody. Welcome to the Shortlist. This is episode number 63, I think. My name is Johnny Campbell. I'm going to be your host for the next 40, 45 minutes. I am the CEO and co founder of an organization like Social Talent and you're very welcome to the show. If you're a first timer, it's great to have you on the show. This is a weekly show and podcast that goes out on itunes and Spotify, but also goes out live on LinkedIn and YouTube every Wednesday. Pretty much every Wednesday. And we talk about all things talent related, recruiting related as well, particularly focus on things that leaders can impact. And today's topic is one that's very close to our heart, as you will know as a regular listener. But we're taking a particular angle on it today that I think is interesting and that's forgotten diversity, which I think is pretty important. Before I go into that and introduce our guest today, let me just quickly remind you, if you want to know more about our show, want to find out more about the shortlist, check out our previous episodes of what's coming up next. You can do so@socialtown.com so talking about forgotten diversity, there can be absolutely no denying the need for diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace. We get it. If you're a regular listener, you're on board. We get this. But when we use the term diversity, it's important to remember what this actually means. To stop for a second. According to workable, the types of diversity are theoretically infinite. They encompass every characteristic that appears with variations among a group of people. So to make organizations truly inclusive, we have to look beyond a limited definition of diversity, expand the scope to inclusion, everything like socioeconomic backgrounds, cognitive diversity, class, etc. While this can seem daunting, our guest on the show this week will help break it down. Jen Lambert is joining us from the west coast of the US this morning for her and she's the chief strategy officer at Terrace Staffing Group. She's here to shine a light on forgotten parts of diversity and show the importance of social mobility in terms of solving some of the recruiting challenges that you all have. And also to give us some examples of a company she's working with, I are nailing this approach. Jen, welcome to the show. It's a real pleasure to have you. Really excited to have you on the show and dying to hear. Maybe you can share with our audience a little bit more about yourself, Terra Staffing Group, and why this topic's important to you.

Absolutely. So Terra Staffing Group is a Seattle, Washington, USA based company. We have 14 branch offices across four Western states in the United States. And we do a lot of different types of staffing and recruiting. A lot of what we do is based in manufacturing. So we have a team that specifically focuses on technical and professional roles. That's a smaller boutique part of our firm. The vast majority of what we're doing is contract temporary staffing, some full time placement as well. A lot of work in manufacturing, a lot of work in distribution. And so a lot of the workforce that we're connecting with employment is more entry level, a little more unskilled. And so this topic is very, very personal for me. It's a high interest for me. Professional as well as personally. Professionally. This is the world that we operate in. I remember saying to one of my business partners, once upon a time, you know, I had a certain amount of discomfort around the types of jobs that we were putting people into. And his response to me was a really good one. He said, jen, we didn't create low wage jobs, we can just make them a better experience for people. And that's what I focused on for the past almost three decades that I've been in this business is how do we make this segment of the workforce more successful? How do we create a better work experience for people who are at that lower end of the economic scale and the lower end of the skill scale. It's also personal for me because I have personal experience and I can share a story later about a family member who is cognitively impaired for whom employment made all the difference in her role. I've seen it make a difference firsthand. And so it's a topic that is very near and dear to my heart.

Jen, I'm going to start, as we always do in the show with a bit of news. And this is some news from several months back, but I think super important to this topic and to our audience. So now let's roll the news. So to say the news, it's coming from earlier in the year, right? And I read this article at the start of the year in the magazine in Harvard Business Review and I think it's a, it's a fantastic read. We're going to put a link out on the show notes and we'll put it live for anyone listening on YouTube or LinkedIn. And the article I want to reference is called the Forgotten Dimension of Diversity by Paul Ingram. And it's a big read, but I think quite an important read as it contains a lot of really well researched data and there's obviously great passion in this. Before I comment myself on this, what were your initial thoughts on this? What did you get from this, Jan? Did you learn anything new? And if so, what did you learn?

You know, I feel like I'm living this. And so I was excited to see a publication like Harvard Business Review take on this topic. I mean, it really is. It is really important and it's so interesting. It was interesting to me, the point that was made here, that when you address the issue of social class, you also pick up other issues with it. Right. Because sadly, there is a more disparate impact with social class issues for individuals in the black community or the brown communities. Right. And so if you are addressing social class, you are also addressing racial disparities at the same time, which. And you're also. You're not so narrowly cutting those diversity lines. I think we've gotten overly simplistic about just cutting across racial lines. And I think it's a more intellectually honest approach to look at social class.

And to kind of. Just to kind of demystify this for our listeners and viewers today. What we're talking about is income, Typically not only income, but we're talking about those who have and those who have not. And rather than looking at race and looking at gender and looking at backgrounds, we're saying, you know, organizations tend to, of course, give folks those topics as they should in their DEI efforts, which is fantastic. But one of the things the article pointed out was that almost nobody, almost nobody prioritizes this. And it is a separate challenge to your ethnicity, your gender, your background, your. Your sexuality, all these things. It's just different. And it's a different. It's a different cut of society, a different way of looking at society that requires different responses and different actions to try and improve the lot of those who are perhaps, according to the data in this article, misrepresented and who don't have the same opportunities. So when you look at this and, you know, when you first of all tackle that topic of why people don't focus on it, what's your sense of why this isn't a leading topic for every DNI committee.

I think it's more invisible. Right. It's easier for us to tackle issues that we can see readily with our eyes. And I think that there is so much. There's. There is a certain amount of just lack of visibility to it. I think that there's some shame around it. I don't think people often talk openly about, you know, I grew up in a single mom Household, not my story. But, you know, people don't always talk about those things. They don't talk about the fact that maybe nobody in their family has gone to college, that they grew up poor.

Right. That's.

That's just something that is still a very uncomfortable topic. One, it's not visible. Two, we don't talk about it. And yeah, I think that's part of why organizations aren't tackling that.

It's a fair point. I remember a couple of years ago meeting a fantastic woman called Joanna Abayi, who has since become one of the presenters on the social talent platform, talking about diversity. And she was lined up to speak at a private event we were running in Spain for 20 of our customers. And we were talking the topic of diversity. And one of my colleagues had lined her up to speak. And, um, she is a black woman from the uk, and as she was taking the stage in the small room, I, you know, so well, I know what this topic's about. You know, it's most likely going to be about her race or gender or perhaps both. So let's go. And she spoke about neither. She spoke about being poor and she spoke about the challenges of poverty and never once talked about race, never once talked about her gender, because that was the area. And I said, shame on me. I went into this again. I looked at what was visible. To your point, what you can see is what you assume is the topic is the thing to fix. Well, there's a. You see, you don't see that hidden layer. You know, I spoke with another colleague today, again, a black woman who was talking about, you know, how she's presenting to individuals and talking about diversity. And she has those two lenses. And I said to her, I said, there's another. There's a third lens. I said, you're an English woman working in a culture of Irish people. I said, that's another. At least one other lens that people wouldn't think about that's really, really important and could impact how you do your work and how you fit in. And I think you're right. The visible things are really important. And you mentioned neurodiversity. I have talked to folks and we've had some great guests in the past talking about disabilities and so on and so forth. And, you know, the very visible disabilities in that category, and they don't get much, but in the category disabilities, the visible ones get the focus. And neurodiverse folks who have disabilities, you can see, tend to get overlooked. That's probably your experience as well.

Jen is It Absolutely. And they get overlooked and misunderstood. There's a great book by Malcolm Gladwell, Conversation or Talking to Strangers? Conversations with Strangers. I don't recall the specific title, but he talks about how we don't really know what we're dealing with until we get deeper under the hood. And he tells a story about the Amanda Knox trial and how her behavior was, if you remember that, that whole situation with that, the murder in Italy. And she was presumed to be guilty because of her behavior, but she has a particular personality type that behaves differently than we would expect. And so there was assumptions made. The same thing happens when we're interviewing people. When people's behavior is different than what we expect to show up, we start making assessments and judgments and interpretations of why they're behaving that way. And it may be much more complex than we really understand.

I want to take one piece from the article, Jen, and get your thoughts on it. And the Author claims that 67% of job postings for production worker supervisor in the US require a bachelor's degree, even though only 16%, 1 6% of the people who hold the job have that qualification. Is this disparity between what we ask for and what we hire or have, is this real? And if so, how do we combat this?

Yeah, it's absolutely real. It's what I'm combating my team is combating every single day. I literally had this conversation with a client yesterday looking at a job description where they're requiring a very, not just a degree, but a very specific degree for a role that arguably a person with a certain set of experience could be very successful in the role. And you know, why. Why do we do this? I don't know. I don't know if it's just out of habit. If we, if we're, you know, filling in the blank on a, on a job posting template and there's some education piece that we think we have to fill in, but it's absolutely the wrong way to approach it. We advocate much more for reverse engineering. What are the skills? What are the. What is the actual experience, the actual skills that an individual needs to bring to that role to be successful and that ends up creating more opportunity and more inclusion and it makes the job more fillable, right?

It does. And I think this is important piece and I want to talk to you about the skills based hiring approach. It reminds me of a story I listened to a podcast recently about. It's a fascinating podcast about a gentleman who went to work in a Frito Lay factory many Many years ago. And he was a Mexican immigrant into the US and to get a job in the factory, you know, he had to lie. And his wife filled out the application form for him. She better English said yes, he speaks English, yes, he has some sort of second two year degree post college and he got the job. All of it lies. And this guy, this guy, eventually, you know, he just worked really hard. He, he created essentially the, the hot sauce on Cheetos so that the hot Cheeto version was down to him. And he ended up being a VP for PepsiCo many, many years later, retired as a VP for PepsiCo from that role. But I think about, he told us fantastic story, but he shouldn't have been hired because technically he didn't have the qualifications. He ended up, you know, you know, many people go from the factory floor in a, in a, in a Frito Lay factory all the way up to the VP suite in PepsiCo. I mean they do, right? But it shows how this, this, this, this misalignment exists and, and, and how it can, you know, you really, you only hear of the stories of the very few who kind of punch past it. But I feel like 2021 is a, maybe an extra turning point or maybe it's just an acceleration of something that's been happening. But there has been talk of this skills based hiring and this being a new thing. Can you explain what skills based hiring is to me, Jan, and compare it against what is non skills based hiring?

Yeah, I can tell you what it means to me and that is that you're looking at job qualifications that actually map to success in the role. And really one of the things we're advocating for right now is stripping out as many of the requirements as you reasonably can to make that job marketable. You're absolutely right. 2021 is creating a real opportunity to drive some of these initiatives just based out of necessity. But the idea being that instead of hiring for traditional resume, for education, particularly pedigree around education, all of these different proxies for qualification, we're actually saying does this person have the actual skill? Or in many cases can they gain the skill? For a lot of the jobs that we're placing people in, it's all about trainability is the person who we believe can learn the skill. And that's what we're focusing on presently.

I love that the trainability is a really important factor as well. Not just having the skill, but the trainability. Scott Blackledge is listening and he's put in a comment saying sometimes clients ask for a specific qualification as a way to stop people from applying. Sounds counterintuitive, but some roles have a perception that anyone can do them. My experience is this sometimes as well, Scott, that, you know, we put in these things to try and dissuade the inappropriate or wrong candidates from, from, from, from applying. So, so how do you, how do you, how do you balance that, how do you balance not getting a ridiculous volume of unsuitable candidates with actually really understanding what are the skills required and getting people who can do those skills? What do you recommend as a process or what do you see as a process that works for that? Jen?

Yeah, that is the challenge when you are opening up the requirements is then how do you, what are you using as criteria? And that's so true that the perception that anyone can do it. I remember I had a friend who was a CEO who had retired early and she said, I just want to go work as an admin. And she said, jen, place me in a job as an admin. And I finally had to say to her, you don't qualify as an admin. Like how arrogant to think that. She says, I've been a CEO, I can do anything. No, you don't have the skill set necessary to be a successful admin. So it's really a model that we use is to again reverse engineer and say what is the work that actually needs to be done? So starting, I call it start with the KPI. What is the work product that needs to actually be delivered? What should this person have done in their past that would lead us to believe that they could do this job successfully? So breaking it down and really, I mean it is harder for entry level jobs to really understand who is going to be the fit. So part of it is do they have this, do they have a skill or an aptitude to gain that skill? And then there's also, you have to also about to do that type of work. It does make the screen more difficult for sure.

We mentioned on this show only a couple of weeks ago how social talent and our colleagues had got involved in several initiatives in the US and Europe around upskilling recruiters or training people who know recruiting background, how to be sourcers and early in career recruiters and you know, this was our kind of initiative to try and to give opportunities to folks who perhaps have been more marginalized, haven't had those opportunities in the past, who we really feel, you know, could do a fantastic job. Recruiting is one of those jobs I think you can train someone up for. You don't need a Bachelor's degree, There's a bunch of experience you can, you can go after if you're, you know, you have some of the core attributes. Have you seen in our profession, have you seen that yourself? You know, obviously, you know, large staffing firm, you employ a lot of folks across your different businesses in different states. Has it been something that you've seen in our world to be successful that we can take somebody, focus on the core skills and turn them into really successful recruiters?

Absolutely. Yeah. We, we have refined a hiring model for recruiters in our company that we, it is very unusual for us to actually hire an experienced recruiter. We have just had, we have had more success taking trainable, trainable potential hires and building those skills. And so we've broken it down into again, like what is the deliverable that they need to deliver? What should they have done in the past that lead us to believe that they could do this again? So for us, it's all about somebody who first and foremost enjoys interacting with people on a very frequent basis, somebody who's very comfortable connecting with strangers, somebody who has a track record of making good things happen and making connections between people or projects. So we have built out an entire model where we are taking people purely on potential and developing them into successful recruiters.

What have you learned from that? Like when you look at the skills that you need to require that you acquire, let's say for somebody like recruiting and then what's successful and ways of assessing them. What, what, what, what have you noticed that works like, are there any interesting insights as to the type of person who tends to be successful as a person who's not the support that's required in the early stages that you can share this?

You know, it's. Yes, it's, you have to layer in. In addition to the skill of recruiting, there is also the, the, the environment in which they're recruiting. And so in our particular company it would be different for other companies, but for our particular company, we are a very process oriented company. We have systems and methods. We like our ways best as a company. And so we're not a rogue environment. People who like to work rogue don't work well here. People who are willing to trust and follow a system and process and relax into that and be willing to do step A, step B, step C and know that that's going to produce a good outcome are people that work really well for us. So we've had the most success for, in our particular environment hiring people who come out of a company or a system or an organization where there was a management structure, there was operational excellence, and they have a history of executing on a system that. That has been the most successful hire for us. That would not be a successful hire in another recruiting organization where there isn't those same systems and structures. So I think that's an important piece too is understanding what is the environment in which you're going to be operating. It's not just the skill, it's also the, you know, you are a product of your, of the environment to some degree.

Big time. Big time. I want to go back and just share with you about again, the first time we met Joanna Obayi and she presented with our audience and she talked about, you know, the disadvantages of being poor. And she told her own personal story of going to work for an ad agency. And the ad agency, you know, had typically hired from their kind of Oxbridge type schools in the, in the uk and, and she wasn't from that background. And they offered her, she was looking to, to get an internship and she was offered this internship. And like most internships, it didn't pay. And what they did, they, they felt this is fantastic. We're offering an internship to somebody from a lower socioeconomic background. This is going to be fantastic for them. And what they didn't know about her and what she didn't share very deliberately was she said when she was at that level of poverty, she had a choice every day when she wants to take the internship up. She had enough money for lunch or transport, not both. And she said she had to make the decision, do I eat or do I walk along a long distance? And, you know, you probably guess which one won out. So she walked two hours to her job every day, and she walked two hours home and got up really early and that allowed her to eat lunch. You would never. She. Far too much pride to reveal this to anybody on the internship, but she told the story more from the perspective of saying for a lot of folks, they just wouldn't be able to make that decision. And you know, when you think, you know, sometimes employers with the best intentions would say, I want to open the doors to folks from different socioeconomic backgrounds and give them the opportunity. And they see this, well, I'm going to give them the job and the training, which is enough. And her point was you actually have to go deeper sometimes and you have to look at the circumstances. Say, actually that person needs to be able to get to work. You need to provide transport for them. The person perhaps, or each. Yeah, they have caring responsibilities. How do you figure that out? And also it changed my whole perspective on internships. I had free internships and low paid internships in our business since our formation 10 years ago. Our last two interns this year who joined us got paid market rate, good salaries because know I realized from what Joanna shared, well, I don't know someone's background, I don't know what they're doing. And I can't just say, well the opportunity is enough. You have to give them the ability to focus on these things whilst allowing them perhaps retain their pride by not asking them these questions. Is that something.