Forgotten diversity: Making organizations truly inclusive | with Jen Lambert

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.

Thank you.

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 focused 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 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 at socialtown.com forward/the shortlist. 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 include everything like socioeconomic backgrounds, cognitive diversity, class experience, etc. While this can seem daunting, our guest on the show this week will help break it down. Jenn 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 are nailing this approach.

Check.

Jen, welcome to the show. It's a real pleasure to have you. Really excited to have you on the show. I'm 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 professionally as well as personally professional. 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 world. 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 that diverse. 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 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 D and I 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 Abay, 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, 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, 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 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 whole situation with 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 a 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. 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 created essentially 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 his 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, 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, but I feel like 2021 is a, maybe an extra turning point or maybe it's just an acceleration or 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, Jen, 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 more fillable. 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. Yeah, that's what we're focusing on presently.

I love that the trainability is 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 applying. So how do you, how 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 job?

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, you know, she says, I've been a CEO, I can do anything. No, you, you don't have the skill set necessary to be a successful admin. So it's, 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 the, the done the, the start with the KPI. But what was 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 Talents and our colleagues had got involved in several initiatives in the US and Europe around upskilling recruiters or training skill 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 and 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 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 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 would 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 acquire, that you acquire, let's say for something like recruiting and then what's successful and ways of assessing them, what have you noticed that works like, are there any interesting insights as to the type of person who tends to be successful? The type of 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 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 excellence, 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 she wasn't from that background. And they offered her, she was looking 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 want to guess which one won out. So she walked two hours to her job every day, and she walked two hours 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 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, you 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 you've come across when you're looking to hire on scale for employers, some of those challenges?

Absolutely. Now, unpaid internships are not legal in the US and so we don't. That, that's not, that's not an issue. But one of the things that I've seen, especially in coming out of the pandemic, is just this, this great divide between those who have flexibility and those who don't. Right. It's been a really defining moment. I think it's been a, it's really exposed some of the classism in our culture where there were people who were able to work from home, there were people who were able to, you know, make that work. And then you have an entire class of individuals whose work requires them to show up. It requires them to come into work every day and they don't have that same sort of flexibility. They don't get to stay home. They need to figure out how to balance childcare. When you're at the lowest end of the economic scale, you don't have a lot of backup plans. And so if the kid gets sick, if the car breaks down, if something goes wrong, then there's a ripple effect. And one of the things we are really encouraging employers to think about is in this time when a certain segment of our society has been shown a tremendous amount of flexibility and accommodation, we need to figure out a way to do that for everybody. Like how do we get rid of these draconian attendance policies where if you're a minute late, you're punished. Now, does it matter to be there? Sure, it's hard to produce product if you're not there on the factory floor. But can we give people a way to earn flexibility or to create work schedules that actually work for people? So I'll give you an example. There's very early start times for most of these manufacturing jobs. That doesn't work for everybody. Especially if you're trying to get kids up and out the door in the morning. We have a client who simply changed their start time from 6am which is a very traditional start time for a Factory job, to 8am and it has completely opened up the talent pool for us to fill that job. The number of applicants we're getting for that job far outweighs that the applicants were getting for other jobs. Exact same work. But just by making that, that start time a little bit later, it allows more flexibility for that individual and allows people, particularly women again to be applicants for that job. So I think we have to think about some of those barriers. How are we creating barriers for people to be successful at work and thinking about what are the issues that make it harder for a person at the lower end of the economic scale to be successful at work?

Yeah, I think that's a really great story because it is that flexibility which doesn't hurt the company that much or anything at all opens up huge talent pools that they wouldn't have thought about by just changing a convention. But you're right, the circumstances are often unseen or not understood by individuals who haven't had come from that background. My own background in the 80s when I was growing up, my mother had to become the breadwinner. My father was self employed. 80s got hard, he became an alcoholic. My mother needed to get a job to pay the bills and keep the mortgage and keep the house. And I used to go to work with her. She merchandised in retail stores and you know, that was her job. And I only recently looked back and realized what was happening. I had great perspective looking back at my childhood. I helped my mom every day after school. I go around all the stores with her with my little sister for hours and we'd help. It was great to do that. I got exposure to work at a young age. My mother had to bring us because she's no childcare. She couldn't afford childcare and she just luckily had a job where thankfully then no one complained that her kids came with her to do her job. You know, every afternoon look back on Christ, she couldn't have done any other job because what would she have done with us, you know?

Right.

But there's still tons of people like that right now. And sometimes it's a case of, you know, rules and regulations, oh, you can't have children in the workplace. Of course not. We become a much, much, you know, better policed if you like world. But it creates such obstacles and my, I know looking back in as a child Our, our family would not have had any income if we had to obey those rules because there was no alternatives. You know, there was, there was no childcare, it wasn't available back then. And there's still plenty of folks who are facing those decisions, you know, but I don't know if you've in the area you mentioned, obviously manufacturing jobs, etc. You know, I find it interesting companies like Amazon, who, a few years ago, as I'm sure you know, Jen, especially with Amazon based out of Seattle, moved towards, you know, allowing flex workers to choose their shifts essentially to deliver. They could go on, they create a whole website and around this where you basically went on and picked the ships that suited you. And I think that gave them a real extra boost in terms of the amount of the talent that could work for them. And I think there's a copy. They've copied this because it's so smart. You know, what other innovations have you heard of are you aware of? Like changing the roster and the start time. Super smart, super simple to do, not enough people doing it. What else can make a difference to really open up more opportunity for folks?

Yeah, that pick your shift phenomenon is that Amazon really is driving that and we're seeing more and more of the clients that we work with embracing it. It's difficult, right? It adds complexity to have all these varying shifts. But we again, we're seeing more recruiting success when, when we include in a job posting that you can pick your schedule, pick your shift, we get significantly higher response than, you know, when it's a more rigid schedule. That, that would be, you know, a great innovation. Things like lowering the barrier to entry, reducing requirements like drug testing. I think that's an important one for us to, to think about. I mean, in particular with when there's more and more legalization in this country. Almost every state we operate in marijuana is now legal recreationally. And still employers requiring drug tests, you know, that where that person can't test positive for marijuana. We're seeing more and more of our clients to make that job fillable and open up the talent pool they're allowing. They're either completely getting rid of drug testing or they're at least removing the marijuana component of that drug test result as a requirement. You know, it's, it's again one of those requirements that is so classist. I was sitting with a CEO at dinner one night, group of CEOs and half of them are talking about their favorite strain of marijuana. Right. I mean they're using, but I know these, that their Companies hire people that they're requiring to drug test. And I asked, I confronted one of them and I said, now your company requires drug testing, correct? And he said, well, yeah, because, you know, we can't trust the warehouse workers to, you know, be using drugs. Oh, sure. So you're running the company, making, you know, finance decisions and it's fine for you, but not for that warehouse worker. And it's such a classist thought and we put it under the guise of safety issue. It's not a safety issue. It's not a safety issue any more than me having a glass of wine last night was a safety issue for me coming to work today. So, you know, that's an issue. The other is opening up the doors to individuals with criminal conviction records. That is a huge untapped potential talent pool. I mean, I think employers who have be. Have been more flexible about those requirements have found a very trainable, very willing talent source at their disposal. People who are very grateful to have the opportunity here. So many employers complaining about turnover and lack of, you know, lack of retention. If they thought more broadly about opening the doors of different talent pools, I think they'd find that's not, is not as much an issue.

I think, for those, those international listeners maybe don't have the experience working in the U.S. you know, the U.S. has one of the highest level incarcerated incarceration rates in the world. And what, for example, in Europe, what you'd be, you know, put in jail for and get a criminal record for is very different. In the US there's things that will be absolutely no way you have a criminal record for in Europe that you would get automatically criminal record for in the US for whatever reasons historically and politically have led to that. It causes this big, big, big disparity, you know, in terms of, of those who are formerly incarcerated not being eligible yet, having the skills, having the willingness. And then from a societal point of view, if you don't offer those jobs, the chance of repeat offending goes way, way up. Because how else is that person income when you close all the doors to them? And there's big multinationals, I've heard great stories about big multinationals, call centers, all sorts of businesses saying we, we actively hire in the formerly incarcerated population, great programs, and we've had amazing success. And surprise, they didn't steal everything, they didn't break things, they just worked hard.

No, I was disabused of that notion a long time ago. This is a less enlightened time in my life. I was out meeting with a prospective client. And this is at a time when we were very proud of the fact that we connected very rigorous criminal background checks on everybody. And this employer said to me, asked me a question if we conducted criminal background checks, and very proudly jumped into my sales pitch about, yes, we absolutely do. And he said, that's unfortunate. He said, this department you're walking through right now, every single one of the individuals in this department has a criminal conviction record. Not only do they have a criminal conviction record, they have a specific conviction for murder now. So let's talk about that, because many employers have opened up their requirements, but there's still certain categories of conviction that are off limits to them. And when I tell this story in HR circles, I see them like, you know, kind of tense up, like, ooh, hiring murderers. But he shared with me that individuals who commit that particular crime, they pay a very steep price. I mean, they, they spend a minimum 10 years in prison. They don't want to go back. They're very committed to not going back. And so the, the likelihood of a repeat offense is almost zero because they are very committed to staying on the outside of prison. And what he found this was, this was in a foundry, which is a very intense job. It's very physical, hot. Not a highly desirable job. But these individuals were so grateful for that opportunity. And he had almost no turnover in this department because he had thought bigger. And that was a huge, huge awakening moment for me to think. To start to think bigger and think differently about how do you make that job more fillable, but also how do you be more fair to, you know, don't we all deserve the opportunity to start over again?

And it's funny because you, I mean, it's not funny, haha. But you mentioned this point around, you know, being surprised by this. And, and it's interesting. The article we talked about earlier on referenced how one of the ways to really unlock this diversity is having more folks in an organization who have different backgrounds. And I imagine if you have a policy of not hiring someone with a criminal conviction record, or you've only hired from top pedigree degrees, it's all very well to listen to a podcast like this and hear a conversation, nod your head, but you don't have that around you. You don't see that every day. Whereas if there was somebody in your executive team who had a criminal conviction, it was someone your, you know, your boss came from a real, you know, lower economic background. These are the things that begin to change cultures because you actually have real people dotted around the Business, particularly in senior leadership roles. I know one of the, one of the, one of the anecdotal kind of stats in the article was that GDP is higher per capita in countries where more managers come from lower social class origins. And it seems to be like a self fulfilling prophecy in terms of if you have senior leaders with more of a mixed background, you're going to have more of a mixed team in the business and you're going to have higher success and it tends to have knock on benefits for the economy as well. So there are some good examples. I think in the article it mentioned the current COO of Walmart started on the shop floor at 17.

Yes.

And I think her, his mother is the person who got on the job in Walmart at 17 because she herself shops or worker. I love this stuff. Too often it's probably the exception than the rule. Like you know, how, how do you, how do you really drive those leadership roles? Because again it's one thing saying we should hire into roles more skills based and we open up opportunities for people at a more entry level role and so on, so forth. But what do you think? How do we untap the potential of somebody to then accelerate up to executive level roles running companies making these real decisions? What do you think of the obstacles there for folks like that?

I think time, you know, time investment is part of it. We don't know what was the time span from the time he went from the shop floor to CEO. You know it wasn't overnight. Right. So it's a long, it's taking a long term view. We just know the encapsulated version of that story. But you know, I would love to know this step by step, you know how that story, I think creating better career pathing. I think I was reading this article and I was thinking about a client that we worked with that had a well defined career pathing opportunity. Entry level workers, they would teach them a skill and then they had the opportunity to test, demonstrate proficiency and move up the ladder. And every time they would move up and test into this new skill level, they would gain a pay increase. And that gave them more opportunities. They could, could grow into supervisory leadership, frontline management leadership. But almost nobody made it through that process because they required the employee to instigate that process themselves. And so the HR leader would throw up her hands and say, well if they want to advance in this company, they need to show the initiative to put themselves forward. They need to ask for that test, they need to really assert themselves. And again, this is such A value judgment about an individual's worth when, when you know there are people, especially at the lower end of the economic scale, they just don't necessarily ask. Right. So what would it if we, instead of you know, we meaning in leadership, you know, demanded that people, you know, advocate for themselves? What if we became advocates for talent? And we said I see in you Johnny, something that I want to develop. And so I'm going to put this opportunity in front of you and yeah, you're going to have to reach for it a little but I'm not going to make you reach, you know, reach more than I'm reaching to make that opportunity available. So I think having good career pathing, showing training opportunities, making examples of other people who have risen in that organization, I would love to see, you know, and it got me thinking more about how we inside of our organization could do a better job of making this visible as well. Really highlighting that. I was looking at a company's diversity report yesterday, their self reported data and they were slicing it among, across gender and across race and then they had broken out company wide management roles and technical roles. And I thought wouldn't it be interesting to see a company's diversity data around social mobility to show that people can advance their career here and they can rise and improve their own life situation through the opportunities here. That to me would be a huge win.

I fully agree with you. And there's not enough people doing it. I think there is a challenge. You mentioned it earlier around the data it's hard to know who, who comes from that background. The self identification isn't always there, the questions aren't asked of the workforce. There's a stigma attached to perhaps identifying yourself as somebody coming from a lower socioeconomic background. And any work I've done with clients trying to measure D and I efforts, it starts with the starts with that classification challenge. If we aren't classifying it, there's very little we can do or prove that stuff works or have the data to say this works and this technique doesn't work. So often it's down to solving that. And there are great examples. The article mentioned EY in the UK and their move, which was the first of the EY firms to move towards getting rid of the kind of college degree or the certain degree requirements and saying we build an assessment. If you pass that you get an interview regardless of your background. PwC making moves globally around similar initiatives as well. So and I mentioned to you offline, NBCUniversal are one of the organizations who take a priority on socioeconomic above race, gender, and the other typical D and I sweet spots. They recognize the correlation between socioeconomic background and lots of other areas. And actually it's one to tackle by itself. And we spoke about, you know, I think that there's other great data that says, you know, one of the negative things is that, you know, that. I'll read this out. Workers who come from lower social class origins in the United States are 32% less likely to become managers than those who come from higher social class origins. That represents a disadvantage even greater than the one experienced by women compared with men, which is 27%, or blacks compared with whites, which is 25%. It's actually a bigger problem. But when you get to the. If you. The flip side is if you're wealthy, your race, your gender doesn't matter because, you know, the club you're now in is the wealthy club. We're all friends together. I was, I'll tell you a story, an Irish story, Jan. You were asking me recently about where I was going on vacation, and I took a week with the family up to north of Ireland. As many will know, the north of Ireland has its own colorful history. And I stayed in a town called Port Stewart, and it's next door to another town called Port Rush. And I was only when I came back, my. My neighbor said she used to live there in her. In the 90s when she was at college. And she said, well, Port Rush is the Protestant town and Port Stewart's the Catholic town. I didn't know this. And I was like, okay. She was, yeah, I. She stayed in university in the, in the, in between the two. And they turned up in a bar in Port Rush and because they had Southern accents, were told, you need to drink in Port Stewart. You can't. You're not welcome here. You're not allowed to drink here.

Wow.

You have to go to a different town. And Port Stewart has, as a town, is now the wealthiest town in Northern Ireland. And it's kind of. It's full of second homes. It's on the coast. It's gorgeous. You'd love it, Jen. But there's no longer. It doesn't seem to be any sort of problem with religion now because everyone there is wealthy. Not everyone. Right. But there's so much more wealth. It's funny how, you know, when you.

Give people rich trumps, all right, you.

Can solve loads of the world's problems, but just giving everyone, you know, that better opportunity, more, more money, they stop, they stop worrying about some of these Other issues. Right. I'm not saying it's as simple as that, but there is a correlation between, you know, wealth can solve a lot of these disparities. You know, we all have in, in groups and out groups. And if you just move more people into the in group of, of having money, having income, it does begin to, according to data, solve for a lot of these problems.

Well, the greatest predictor of wealth is coming from wealth.

Yeah.

I mean, at least in this country, at least in the U.S. and so, I mean, this is why I love this topic of focusing on social mobility and looking at how do we raise people up. Because, you know, to your point about rich crosses all lines. So does talent to some degree. Right. My, I have a very good friend who has his master's in electrical engineering. He has his mba. He is highly, highly talented. He happens to be black. Right. And he has no trouble getting a job. Like, hiring him is a win, period, because he's super, super talented. It's not a diversity win. It's just a talent win. If you don't hire him, your talent machine is broken. Where's the real win in elevating individuals who maybe have not had access to those opportunities, who aren't the obvious choice? I mean, even some of the tools that we're using now, I saw a demo for an AI tool where they're redacting information from resumes to try to create a more blind hiring process. But even this tool still flagged the college as a top school. Right. And is that really blind when we're still giving that sort of, that sort of weight to the quality of the school that you went to? What if you're really talented and you went to a bad school? Like, could you still be a good hire? I think so. What if you didn't go to school?

These are indicators we all use, you know, in every city where I'm sure everyone listening, wherever you recruit in or hire in, you'll know an address on an address on a resume and you'll say, your head will say that's the good side of the city or the bad side. The city. That's a good completely neighborhood, Bad neighborhood. That's a good school, bad school. And it, it happens in a second in your brain. And it's great to see lots of this being changed. Like LinkedIn announced this week that they're, they're making available button for everybody that turns off your photographs and also scrambles the. The name with just four random letters now as well, so that you can kind of have that blind hiring, but that's not, that's not getting to the heart of these things. It's also one or two issues quite well, but potentially well. But it doesn't get to the heart of this issue, which we just established is arguably a bigger issue and a bigger impediment to progress and opportunity than any of the other big categories of diversity. So I think I want to summarize because we're almost at closing. Going to ask you for your last tip in just a second, Jen, but I think it's a good call out to anybody who is passionate about diversity, inclusion and equity and who perhaps has an opportunity to influence in their own organization is to ask why aren't we addressing socioeconomic differences and backgrounds and what are we doing to try and try and focus on that rather than just perhaps the typical categories. But Jen, you've given us a lot of tips, advice, insight, and thank you so much for that over the last 45 minutes.

Thanks for having me.

But I could ask you one more. We ask all of our guests to leave us a tip for our shortlist of tips. If you were to give our audience some advice, whether it's advice from your own experience or advice has been handed down to you, if you pick one thing, what would that be? Jen?

You know, this question has really tormented me, Joni. I knew that this was a question that I was going to be asked and I was on a four day backpacking trip last week. Four days, no cell signal, no WI fi. It was heaven. But that question was rattling around in my mind for all the miles that I hiked with a 30 pound package on my back. Was like, what's the one piece of advice? Because I have a lot of different things I would love to share, but if I had to boil it down to one, I turned to my husband while we were backpacking and I said I got to come up with one piece of advice. And he said that it was funny because the one piece of advice that came to mind is the one that he thought was the most powerful as well, and one that he sees as far as how I've lived my life. And that is start from a place of yes. Start from a place of yes. Think about. And I think it's relevant to this topic. It's relevant to your personal life, your professional life, how instead of saying why not or you know, what, what are the barriers? Start from a place of yes. If the willingness is there, if the desire is there to make something good happen, then it's just a matter of details, but at least start from that place of yes. So much of my life's opportunity that's opened up to me has just because I've been willing to say yes more than I said no. Sometimes I was absolutely scared by the yes because it put me in a complete place of discomfort. But that's where the best things have happened to me, is where I got myself out of that comfy, comfy place into that more uncomfortable, challenging place and started from that point of yes. And to that point, I'm glad I said yes to this conversation with you.

And I'm glad our listeners said yes to listening to this. Jen, I think you're right. There's a movie on Netflix, a family movie called Yesterday that was released I think late last year. It speaks to this. It's like, you know, take the approach of yes to everything. And I remember reading a book about 10, 15 years ago about a true story of somebody decided he woke up one morning and said, I'll say yes to everything. And where that took him over the next few years. That's fascinating. It's a whole lot more interesting than our typical no. That's a great philosophy. Quick last question from Richard Shaw. Richard Shaw is asking, is this recorded? Can I get a copy of this fascinating discussion to share with colleagues? Of course you can, Richard. This will be available as a podcast recording on Spotify or Apple tonight and you can also go back to our YouTube channel, YouTube.comSocialTalent or my LinkedIn profile and you'll find a full video recording available to play of all these shows. So please do share that. I'm glad we could help you, Richard and your team. Jen, thanks so much for having taking the time and saying yes to joining us and yes, to try and choose something more for those perhaps from different socioeconomic backgrounds who aren't being considered and aren't given the limelight. And hopefully by shining this light on them today, others will do so in turn. Thanks, Jen.

I hope so.

Have a great day.

Thank you. Thank you.

Take care and thank you for listening. Thanks for saying yes to the Shortlist podcast and say yes to coming back next week. Next week we'll be back same time as usual. We have a kind of catch up show, part of our summer series. Next year we'll be having a recap of some of our conversations we've had during the year with on some of our live events. So do come back for that next week. You can come back 4pm UK Irish time. That's going to be 11am on the east coast and 8am on the west coast of the US but of course, our podcast is available for whenever you need it on Apple and Spotify. And again, Richard, thanks for that. By far the best and most insightful discussion I I've heard in years. Well done. Thank you, Jen for driving that discussion. And there's 62 more episodes for you to find, and you'll find them all at socialtalent.com forward/the shortlist until next week. Thanks for listening. And don't forget, next time you're asked, say yes.