How to diversify tech: Start with the recruiters! | with Alison Daley

Sam, Welcome, welcome, welcome not only to the show, but to February. It is the 3rd of February. This has been the longest, longest approach I've ever had to a month. I have never looked forward to a new month arriving more in my entire life than I did to February 2021. And I thank you for coming back to our first show of February 2021. We'll call this the beginning of the year because January was pretty much a show that all of us want to forget when we were probably locked up in your third lockdown waiting for it all to end. You know, living through the post Christmas blues with nothing to look forward to, but it is technically. Well, meteorologists, meteor meteorologists will argue this, but it's in my opinion, the beginning of spring in the Northern hemisphere. I can see more, more sunlight in the morning once, more sunlight in the evening. Maybe an end in sight to lockdowns. Maybe you see vaccines coming our way. So we're going to be positive. We're going to try and move forward and hope to God that February is better than January. Folks, welcome to the show. This is the Shortlist. I'm your host, Johnny Campbell, and thanks for joining us. We're a weekly show that broadcasts live on LinkedIn and YouTube and is also available as a podcast on Apple Spotify. Wherever you find your podcast, you can find more about the show by going to socialtalent.com forward/the shortlist. To those of you listening live, we always welcome your questions and comments. Jump into the comment section live on LinkedIn or YouTube. And myself and our guest today will be delighted to take your comments live and your questions live as well. And today I am very excited about our topic. It's one that I'm very passionate about and our guest is super passionate about this and has a lot of experience and insight working to try and fix the problem we're talking about today. And that challenge is how to diversify tech. And our guest today is going to be talking about how you need to start with the recruiters. So let me talk to you about this. Right? This is very much from a recruiting and hiring lens. We want to talk to you about the challenge of diversity and particularly the tech industry. It's probably the one that's got the most press and is covered the most. It's indisputable. Yeah, but you know, the tech industry, we'd all probably agree, no matter where you are in the world, is mostly composed of a very homogenous group of white men. And time and time again, companies talk about the efforts to try and change that. And almost to the point that they talk about it so much, they feel that that's enough, that they're doing lots because they're talking about it and they're publishing. Well, our guest today is a fantastic expert on this, and I say expert because she's so passionate and she works so well in this space. Alison Daly, she's the founder of a company called Recruiting Innovation. We're really proud of Social Talent to have recently announced a partnership with Recruiting Innovation. Alison Daly is going to be coming to our platform to teach social tal users all about tech recruiting. But today she's going to be talking about not just her passion around tech and tech hiring, but also around diversity. And Alison, I believe your central thesis is to start at the source, but I want you to maybe take a step back and tell us a little bit about your background. Why did you become passionate about these two topics, tech and diversity?

Wonderful. Thanks so much for having me, Johnny. And we are also very excited to be your new partner for your technical recruiting training. I'm excited to be rolling out those courses here in the next quarter. My background is I call myself the accidental recruiter. I fell into recruitment four times and I've picked it three times. The most recent iteration was self selected as a founder of a training platform specifically for training recruiters on how to understand software development and the key roles in that process so that they can have better, more successful, and even more fun technical conversations with candidates and hiring managers. I became passionate about thinking about diversity and especially the responsibility of that landing at the feet of the recruiters, probably starting about three and a half years ago when I started the journey of building the Tech Recruiter certification program. We work for our certification program, we partner with technical experts to talk about their workflow as it relates to what a recruiter needs to know to have good conversations. And in the program, I also bookended it with ending with a diversity and inclusion class because you cannot be recruiting in technology if you don't also first understand fundamentally how homogenous this industry is and what we as recruiters and professional builders of teams can do to really drive diversity through intentional recruiting practices. So as I was recruiting, working with Elaine Marino, who was our diversity and inclusion instructor, she's currently managing director of D and I at Charles Schwab. I just started learning by proxy by helping her create the course for our program. And that's when, you know, the wool just started coming off my eyes about literally how homogenous this industry is. And it started the journey for me to also sort of start self reflecting on my own work as a recruiter and maybe my unconscious bias or my implicit bias and just sort of like even coming from the sort of training aspect, looking at the industry as a whole. And I'm starting to notice that the structures that exist throughout the recruiting process, from sourcing to interviewing to hiring to retention, that it's built and maintained with the idea of who the archetypal hire is, which in tech. 80% of people in tech are white and 74% of them are male. The median age is 27 and the average age, average age is 27, 27 or 29. So statistically, almost 3 out of 1 people in tech are 29 year old white men. And when you look at the structures of hiring and retention, recruiting and retention, everything is to support that profile. And so it just started me on the journey of what would envisioning what, what would hiring in the 21st century need to look like in order to accurately or effectively build a bigger tent that not only draws diverse talent into our process, but then hires them and retains them and celebrates them in a way that is equitable, inclusive and fair. And you know, at the end of the day, I don't think we need to have one more blog post about the business case for diversity. You have more diversity, you are more successful. Okay, let's get that out of the way. What we need to talk about is more the moral reasoning and how do we as the professional builders of teams, how do we as an industry become the spear, the tip of the spear to our organization's goals for diversifying the team? And so everything's just been sort of angling into that direction since.

For the recruiters and talent acquisition folks who are listening or watching, I want to just reiterate something you've said twice now, which is, I think, an absolutely brilliant way to describe the industry. We are professional builders of teams. I would love if every recruiter saw herself as a professional builder of teams, because that is what we do. And when you see yourself as a recruiter, you have one approach. You see yourself as a professional builder of team teams. You have a responsibility, a duty to do that. Right. And I think it elevates the profession, elevates the role correctly, and it's beautifully phrased. Thanks for introducing that phrase into our lexicon. My lexicon, hopefully many, many others. Alison, I'm going to jump into our first news article as I think this is going to really try and explode some of the themes we want to talk about. Today. Now, what's up first? So first in the news, we have from the ft, the Financial Times, this article that appeared a few days ago, it's from the ft, it's under the title of the tech chief who put diversity at the heart of her group. Don't forget. We'll put all the links to these articles in the show notes and we'll post them live for those of you listening live as well. So this article is really about a founder of a kind of fintech or kind of financial tech company, I think, in Asia who was kind of had a moment of awakening around diversity when she was first setting up her firm and set out to enforce a 5050 gender policy in her hiring. And she's now running, I think, 300 strong business, doing really successfully, great founding. And it was kind of a firsthand account of someone who set out to do this for her whole company and, you know, trying to break some of the rules or the preconceptions about whether this is possible to do, particularly in tech. Alison, tell me about your reading of this. What was good about this? What stood out with you? What do you want to highlight for our listeners and viewers today?

Well, first of all, my hat goes off to her. I think that, that the orientation that she took is the orientation we all need to be taking. The structures are so skewed at this point that incremental changes aren't going to get us to where we want to go. I was listening to an interview with Melinda Gates on the Brene Brown podcast, and Melinda was saying that at the current rates of improving gender balance in organizations and executive boards, if we continue at the same rate we're at, It'll be almost 2,500, 2500. It's such a weird thing to think. It'll take like 400 years for us to get to gender balance, which means not in my daughter's life and not in my granddaughter's life. So what we need to do is be doing drastic, drastically different. And just like when you are with your family and you got, you're dawdling behind because you're looking at something and they're up ahead of you, you don't walk the same pace to catch up. You hurry up, you hurry up when you, you're behind. And so for her to take this step and say, you know, one to one, the population of the world is one to one. Why don't our organizations match that? So I think that that's actually the direction that we need to go, that needs to be normalized it does not surprise me that it was a woman founder that did this, because as a woman, she had experience being the only woman in the team. She mentions it in the article. The people that have been disproportionately affected by this imbalance are the ones who are driving the change inherently. Those in power aren't going to like, willingly give up their power. So it's the people coming in from the side. So kudos to her. She did talk about how at the beginning it was quite difficult, but it was a matter like a matter of momentum and velocity. And, you know, that's something I talk to clients about who are wanting to be more diverse, but they're like, it just, it takes a while. Going into any new vertical takes a while. And you take the long game, you play the long game and you put your structures in. You be patient. You do your 20 mile march every day and you will get there. And I will say, as a person who is a founder myself, I get the difficulty. When I was first thinking through the concept of building an online technical training platform for recruiters, I knew I needed help and I just reached into my network. I did one little post to women in the startup field about a marketer and I found five great people who wanted to join me. And I distinctly remember preparing for that team kickoff. And I just stopped in my tracks and realized of the five people I hired, all five were women. Four out of five were white, all five were brunette, four out of five were straight. And I basically hired myself times five. And it was not intentional. I don't think that there's malice, but I think that we get into these habits, we also naturally flock to people like us. So our internal network is just pretty homogenous. And so it's sort of like we have to first recognize what's out there and how it's working so that we can then be like, okay, well, let's pivot slightly so that we can do something different to get a different outcome. And she was successful, but as she said so herself, it was hard to get started. But once you get going, then you build the brand, then you build an awesome company. People want to work there, they want their friends to come there. When half your staff is of underrepresented people and they go into their networks, they're reaching into underrepresented communities and it's exponential. So I love this article and my hat is off to her.

I love the quote she mentions here, is that the whole thing that the pipeline of women does not exist is Ridiculous. You just got to not be biased. And when you, when you dig deeper on that, you know, I, I've heard the stats as you have, Alice, where people go, well, you know, it's difficult because, you know, 80% of STEM talent is male. So, you know, and 20% is female. So how can we get to 50, 50 when that's the case? And the premise of that actually is, is to do with undergraduates and what, how many undergraduates, let's say, or graduates of certain degrees have, have come out male versus female. And I think the point that she was making was, yeah, but you can't just stop with that. Like you have to look and go, okay, that might be true. 80, 20 of graduates. What about hiring a non graduate? What about hiring someone who has the ability, training them up? It's like if you're really going to get to 50, 50, you have to break through requirements, like qualifications requirements. You know, I think they have will be this background. Then you look to the market and go, well, there's only 20% women in that background or there's only 15% non whites in that background. And you kind of go, okay, well, okay, well, you know, what are the real skills you need and what's trainable? And can I look beyond my normal constraints of my harm requirement? A story I never shared with you before, Alison, that was told to me by one of, one of the teams that we know in intel in emea Europe, Middle east and Africa group. They were trying to challenge this and they're going to be mentioned in our, in our next article. I think as a company who've done a whole lot to publicize and make transparent their diversity goals and stats and achievements and pay and so on, so forth, which is commendable. But they, they were, you know, trying to really, you know, drive the diversity of talent in leadership roles in Europe. And they were finding it was just, you know, hitting a brick wall. And they, they changed their approach or point about radically different approaches. They decided that rather than basically taking the wreck and then going out to market and trying to present more diverse talent, they started introducing diverse talent to senior leaders before the recs came. And the idea was that at its core, you know, intel would want to hire people, let's say with hardware backgrounds who understood, I don't know, whatever the base technology, really basic, simple common denominators and say, right, you have to have that, but within that, let's just introduce people of different races, colors, backgrounds, ethnicities, genders to our leaders. And then what happened was after about a year, when the wrecks came up, as in when the opening of the opportunity came up, the leaders who were designing those wrecks had a different perspective because they'd met so many people who weren't from the backgrounds they would have always hired from that they wrote different requirements, and that led to them being able to hire people who then were much more diverse. And again, only one example, but I think it typifies the type of thinking you have to.