How to Diversify Tech: Start with the recruiters! | with Alison Daley

Foreign. 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 shit 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 the shortlist. To those of you listening live, 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 in 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 cause 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 talent users on 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. 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 a managing director of DNI 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, 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, 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. N 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 with great, 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, you know, as a person who is a founder myself, like, I get the, 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. 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 when you dig deeper on that. You know, 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 to do with undergraduates and how many undergraduates, let's say, or graduates of certain degrees 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. 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 have 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 the teams that we know in intel, in emea, your 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 were 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 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 kind of 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 Recs came up, as in when the opening or the opportunity came up, the leaders who were designing those recs 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 is, you know, it typifies the type of thinking you have to actually go through to really change the needle in this. Which is, which is important. I'm going to move on to our second article, Alison, because I think there's so much more to uncover here. It's from Market Watch and it's about, you know, the title of this is we are learning more about diversity of tech companies. But it isn't good news. I'll go straight to you, Alison. What does it mean? It isn't good news. We are learning there's more transparency about diversity. We're sharing gender, pay gap data, we're sharing all these different things. Why isn't it all good news?

It's not all good news because nothing's changing. And you as anyone, I mean at this point the talk is not being followed by the walk. And this is why I'm talk. I kept banging on the drum that we need to remodel, reimagine what recruiting and retention looks like. Like, because the models that exist now perpetuate bias for those that are the dominant archetype in the community or in the industry. And so until things completely, radically change, they're going to keep putting the same output out and following on what you were sharing too. Johnny, maybe we talk about this a little bit later, but the concept of outcome based hiring is what you were talking about. We need to go away from years experience. I just want to take a moment here and just think about this for a moment, everybody. Because when you think about the structures of when we're hiring, let's say the job description, you know, the first point of contact, I need seven years of experience. Well, when you look at the market and you realize that there are groups of people that aren't even given the opportunity to get the first year or even the second year of experience. How convenient that you're requiring seven years of experience. You're naturally just cutting out a whole group of people that you know, don't fit that profile. And then you think about the interview process and people have to work, people have families. And if you're requiring co tests and five hours of face to face time for all of your interviews, while this person also has a job and has other things, like you're also not making your interview process equitable and fair or inclusive. And it just piles on from there. And so when I was reading through that, that article and all the data, it's like Google was one of the first people to produce, like, produce their diversity numbers in 2014. I think it was 16. And it was because they were forced to because they're a government contractor and they had until then refused to share their demographics. But to be, you know, work with the US Government, you have to share that information. It was abysmal. Like one and a half percent black talent. It is six years later and what it's now at like three and a half percent, 5%. Like, they clearly don't care about the problem because they are not putting the muscle behind it. They are Google. They like shoot Internet from the space, from the satellites. Like, can't you figure this out? They don't want to. Where there's a will, there's a way. And at this point they're showing us that they don't have the will to do it.

It's funny. I. Sorry, it's not funny, right? I might say it's, it's, it's funny.

Yeah.

Sadly funny. Right. My impression here, when you look at, you know, the tech companies in particular, right. Again, they can produce data, which is fantastic. And there is some progress to your point. It's, you know, it's, it's inching along at a glacial pace and getting somewhere, but it isn't going to change things fast enough. To your point, about 20, 2500 is not the, not the, not the goal any of us are going to have. Like, great, we're going to have parity by 2500 and it just doesn't make sense. Right. I think, you know, there, there are good intentions with many individuals. But what happens, I don't think it's that companies don't want to change diversity. Now I think you'd ask any of the white male CEOs of these tech companies and they want to do it. It's just that when it comes down to things like we have to get hire 300 engineers and we have to hire them tomorrow, it's kind of like, well, which is more important? We wait to get 50, 50 diversity or get 20 black or 15% Hispanic or do we just go fastest? What happens is they prioritize speed and they go, you know what, let's just get them fast for this project, for this 300 engineers for these 1,000 engineers for these six managers. And that is never, ever going to change. So I think that's where you get the difference between the talk, which is what we do want to do this night. I don't think they're lying. I think they want to do it, but their priorities. You have to prioritize things, you have to say what's, what's more important, continuing to go fast or stopping and saying this is a harder problem, it will take more time. And this is to the first article where that founder was saying that she actually learned herself that it is harder and takes more time and she was impatient and she had to learn some patience. Not 400 years of patience, not, but maybe a few more years rather than a few months. And, and it works, you know, so you know, what, what have you seen Alison, that works? Like, do you have any examples of tech companies who actually have done it right and have put the diversity piece first and if so, what do they do?

For sure, yes. And it's, it's something about, you know, there's a little bit about you have to slow down to speed up and that the power equals work over time. And so you have to be willing to put in the work, you have to be willing to put in the time and you will derive the power from it. And at this stage of the market, it's not even just about doing the right thing, it's about staying competitive because your competitors who have diverse teams, who are able to speak to the customers and who are able to speak to innovation and bring ideas from other spots, they're creating products that are more designed for the customers, that are more inclusive, that are getting better traction faster. And so you're kind of cutting off your nose to spite your face by saying we got to go for speed. Your competitor isn't, they're doing the right thing and they're going to beat you. So you know, on that point I always like to also think about, well, what does different look like? And so you just asked that I. There's a great company here in the Boulder area. I'm out here in Colorado and I liked your opening because today it's going to hit 60 degrees, which is like 15 Celsius. So it'll be again like 10 in a 40 degrees here in just a week. But anyway, springtime. So here in Colorado, Cognizant Accelerator, which is an accelerator within the larger Cognizant brand they hired, I think it was 32 full stack developers in a two month period. 40% of which were women and 30% of which were people of color, black and people black, indigenous people of color. And how did they do it? Well, first of all, they had a woman CEO, so obviously that always helps. And I'm not trying to diminish the men, but like when you have a firsthand experience of being the other, you have a different approach, you know. So what they did, their leadership team, their hiring leadership team, it was four people, it was a CEO plus three dev managers. Two of the dev managers were women, one of them was a person of color, a woman of color. And what they decided to do was they kind of reimagined how they were going to qualify people. So they started with actually the decision rubric, like what makes a yes? What are the outcomes? What are the abilities? What is the yes? And then from there they wrote the job description, which is a form of outcomes based hiring, which I would love to talk about because that is the future of recruiting outcomes and not qualifications. They re, you know, rafted the job description based on outcomes and abilities. Then they pushed it out to all of the networks that they knew. And because they're a diverse leadership team, their networks inherently are more diverse than the typical ATS and asking for referrals from the 80, the folks that represent the same archetype. And then what they did was they restructured their interview process. So it was a two interview, two stage process. Well, technically three. So the first was a 30 minute phone call with a CEO where she was just kind of getting a pulse check on the person and their background and sort of their intrinsic qualities. Motivation, perseverance, things like that, communication. Then they were given a CO test and there's a lot of opinions about CO tests in the market and I think most of them are valid. And what I liked about their CO test was it was very simple. Get into the Weather Channel, weather.com's API and set it up using any code you want so that when the user puts in their zip code, the background would change color. Something very basic. Any language, right? Not the language of the company, but any language showing that you know how to think and decode and have an outcome that meets the requirements. Once those code tests came in, they had from the team, a senior dev and a junior dev review those code tests. So you're not getting just the seniors maybe somewhat biased opinion, you're not getting the junior person somewhat biased opinion, but you're going to aggregate that between the two. Those that were deemed like that's great code, that's Clean. They have well documented. Let's bring them in. Their on site interview consisted of 90 minutes. A single 90 minute interview. The first 30 minutes they were meeting with the team lead, the manager that they would report into, getting to know the manager, vice versa. Then the next 60 minutes were spent pair programming with that junior and with that senior dev. That was where it's like, hey, let's walk through your code. Talk to us about what you're thinking about. Let's do some modifications, make it do X, make it do Y. And then they're coding together. This was beneficial for multiple reasons. One, it's a way to see is that person, that candidate differential to the senior and dismissive of the junior because that's an indicator of potential issues down the road. Plus it was like, are you able to integrate feedback from multiple levels of people? And then more importantly, they're showing that candidate, hey, we value everyone on our team. Seniority does not rule. We don't align ourselves with the geniuses. Everyone's important. And then it just respected that candidate's time as well. And so through that process and that preset rubric is like, can they do these things? Does their code work? Are they communicative? Are they collaborative? Yes, yes, yes. And so then within that small amount, in two months, they hired 35 full stack engineers. 40% women, 2025%, 30% people of color. It can be done, but the process needs to be reimagined.

So that's two points of that one. I want to come back to something you said earlier on, which was I'm so glad you mentioned the seven years of experience piece. I, I did a, a talk here in Ireland online last week with 100 or so folks and talking about the same topic and I asked everyone to put their, their favorite number into the chat and everyone put their favorite number into the chat. I've done this loads of times and guess what the most popular fame favorite number in the world is, Alison?

Seven.

It's seven. And then when I went, I was able to show like 30 examples of job specs that say seven years of experience. And my point is to go, it's an arbitrary number. The hiring manager thinks she's given it for good reasons. It's probably just your favorite bloody number. And like that's as much science as when you're putting seven years. So one bin that right. You're pointing at outcomes based hiring. Absolutely. On the cognizant piece, it's funny, I interviewed the head of their AI business in Europe a couple of Years ago in Amsterdam. And he told me, not a dissimilar story. I've been introduced by their head of ta, a friend of mine, Jody, who wants me to talk to him because he was putting her under pressure to hire more AI people, right? Machine learning, all that stuff, all these data scientists that everyone was trying to hire. And a few years ago she just said, no, she said, we can't afford them, there aren't enough of them. Just forget about it. Everyone's trying to attract these people. And she said, let's build them. And again they turned on its head and they, they, they, they talked about that same, you know, that, that test, they built a test to say, I don't care who you are, turn up and do the test, you're in for an interview. And they built a whole process. And then when they got them in on the, they looked at entrepreneurship plus code coding ability and they, if you have the two basics, they put you in the team and they put you on a 90 day training program ups upskilled you to be a fully fledged billable data scientist, which is usually valid, valuable, right? And they weren't doing it for diversity, they were doing it for business reasons, perfectly good business reasons, like you can hire cheaper, you can create supply when there is no supply. But the accidental outcome was you hired much more diverse people that wouldn't have otherwise got the job. And this is kind of. It is, does require a turning on its head because I've told that story to so many people and they look at you like you have two heads. Because it's like, well, isn't it easy to take the wreck, do some sourcing, find the keyword, the qualifications, build a short list of white males and just do you know, I'm under pressure and I'm going to call it a question, actually, because it's a great question from Magdalena Kozlowska. It's a long question, but I think it's worth reading. If you don't mind, I'll put it on your screen as well so you can see it and adjust. Alice. But I'll read it out for our podcast listeners. So if the business is looking for a senior employee, the market is full of typical candidates and you may not be able to hire someone who is diverse than your current group of employees. For example, I would like to recruit more diverse group of engineers, but it's not easy to find women engineers. This is the problem that started a long time ago and it's difficult to change the current situation. In her opinion, we can Only try to hire a diverse group of junior mid level employees and do it slowly. I'm going to guess you disagree with that, Alison, and I'd love to hear what your thoughts are because I think Mag Blaine's question represents how many recruiters feel who are faced with the challenge going, listen, don't put this all on me, you know, I can't find the candidates, I'm under pressure.

Well that's a very great question. And it is, it is like the crux of the problem, right? It's, it's how are we going to have a different outcome? By doing the same thing that we've always done. And this is where that, you know, we go from being the order takers from our hiring teams to being the consultants and it's process and I totally empathize because I have been there. But why do you need a senior developed developer? Why do you need these higher level positions? What are the outcomes? And that's one of the things that we talk about and I one of my favorite people who talks about outcomes based hiring is Anthony Lewis at Beacon Talent. He works with high growth startups to set structures in, to you know, scale and hire 100 people six months. Right? You do that by having a system. And so this is where I keep coming back to the outcomes based hiring as a, as the future of recruiting. So rather than saying blanket, I need a senior engineer. Well, let's step back. Talk to me about what it is this engineer is going to be doing. Who are they interacting with, what are they coding, what value do they bring to the organization? What are they interfacing with, what are the skills that they need? What are the outcomes they're going to be delivering? Okay, great. Let's step back. Well, what qualities do they need to deliver those outcomes? And the qualities can be critical thinking, creating algorithms, doing the work. But that is literally irrelevant to the years of experience to anyone in the industry because you say to these hiring managers and they will nod their head. A year is not a year is not a year. To every engineer. You can have a high performing engineer who came from a boot camp 18 months into their first job. They're running circles around the senior engineer who's been sitting in that seat for four and a half years. So years experience, seniority, that is like you were saying, it's arbitrary. Let's talk about outcomes, let's talk about motivations. I know that doesn't help you in the moment right now Magdalena, because you're like dealing with this situation. But again, this is Part of us, we have to like slow down a little bit in order to speed up and also to start educating our, our hiring managers how maybe these structures that we're not critically thinking about are perpetuating our issue over time. And what you brought up a minute ago too also brings up the whole like growth organization question of build versus buy. Does it make sense to build our own platform or should we just buy a plugin and go with that? And so you're the organization you mentioned. I think it was intel. They've chosen to build the talent and in the market, especially on the women engineer side, it's like, why do you, you know, people kind of questioning like we can't hire, we don't have the bandwidth to hire junior engineers. It's like, well then maybe you should question titling some of your engineer seniors. If your seniors don't have the ability to mentor and grow as part of their responsibility as a senior, maybe they're not really seniors or they're not being treated like seniors. And it's one of those questions. It's just like, I think we also need to sort of reevaluate what is good, you know, a CS degree, you can come out with a computer science degree and not know how to code. Whereas a boot camp person might only have six or nine months of training under their belt, but they can at least code in the language that they've been, you know, boot camped under and know how to critically think and build things. Not to mention their mid career pivoting and making a decision to go into this field versus someone who's 23 years old and just went to college because that's what everyone does and is even just learning how to work. So you know, I think that it's just, it kind of comes part and parcel of being like, let's just kind of come back into the component parts. What are the outcomes, what are the qualities, what are the, you know, the intrinsic things that this person needs to have. And then if we find the right person that might have the gap in learning, any developer will tell you the code isn't the thing, it's the thinking, it's the ability, it's the drive, it's the communication. Okay, I learned C Sharp, dude, I can pivot to Java like that. It's like questioning, not just taking the resume, the job description and taking what the hiring manager gives us, but saying, let's unpack this a little bit. I want to really understand why is this a senior role, why is this a junior role? What Are they doing? Describe your ideal person to me and let's start with that and then move to the job description and then outward from there.

I used to work with a recruiter early in my career, Alison. Let's call him Niall, because Niall was his name and he was a chartered management accountant, and he got his chartered ship, whatever you call it, and became a qualified accountant by cheating. And he showed us and he forwarded stuff and he put in false stuff and they approved him. He's going through life as a chartered management accountant, and everyone who's looking for qualifications going, he'll do box tick, move on. He lied, he bullshitted. It's not true. A test of can he do the work would reveal, you know, from an outcomes perspective, he's the right candidate. There's loads of them out there. I want to change gears for a second. Alison, I'd love you to tell us about the Ernestine McClendon McClendon Grant. Did I mispronounce that?

No. McClendon. Yep. Yes. So the Ernestine McClendon Talent Grant is something that I created this summer while, you know, here in the US and it's spread globally, we as a country are going through a long overdue racial reckoning in our country about really, the structural racism that exists in our. In our country. And part of that process, and as part of my own growth and learning and unlearning, especially as a white person and as a white woman of privilege, um, my eyes have been open to how much I've been able to grace through life through my race. And that's. That's no fault of my own. But it does mean I have a responsibility to pay it forward and to create opportunity for others. And so during that time in June, in July, specifically in June, I was just like, what? What can I do as a leader of an organization, as someone with a little bit of a platform, as someone with a digital platform training program that, you know, helps people get into the world of tech recruiting. I said, why don't I create the tech recruiter certification program as Give it away, why don't we? And so I had this lightning bolt of inspiration. What if I actually made it a talent grant? And we have. I just started doing some research, and I learned about a woman named Ernestine McClendon, who was a black woman in the 50s, successful theater actress, couldn't make a break into television. Racism was serious, seriously, here in the US in the 50s. And her life changed the moment her daughter saw for the very first time a black man in A commercial. And her daughter said, mom, come look, there's a black man on tv. She saw that, had a lightning bolt of inspiration, took it upon herself. She made over 100 phone calls to both advertisement agencies as well as product companies to say, why aren't you featuring black talent in your commercials? We have a huge buying power. No one's talking to us. You will create intense loyalty if you represent us in your, in your advertisements. And she started getting some nibbles. And then it turned around saying, okay, well, do you have some black actors for us? And she said, I can get them for you. So she launched the Ernestine McClendon Talent Agency, and she was the first black talent agent and the first agent for black talent. She single handedly created the pathway and the industry for black talent in commercials, which then of course led to other TV programs. And so I thought, what better way to honor and continue her legacy than to name our talent grant after her? And so the, the Ernestine MCC McClendon Talent Grant is designed to attract, train, certify, connect, mentor and connect into jobs underrepresented talent to become certified tech recruiters. And this feeds into multiple things. First of all, even before this, I knew that I wanted to help drive diversity in the tech industry through training and enabling recruiters to have more intentional recruiting practices. And then the next concentric circle, of course, is like, what better way to drive diversity in tech than to drive diversity in the recruiting industry? And so what was a lightning bolt of an inspiration? Two weeks later, we launched our first program. We were literally like building the bus as we're getting on the highway. And it was just me and one part time person at the time. And we, you know, five months later, we graduated, I think about 2018 certified tech recruiters into the market. 80% were black talent, 70% were women. We just launched on February 1st, Black History Month. Our second cohort is now a fully baked five month program. We have 35amazing professionals in in our program. Everyone from people that have their own staffing firms, to people that are recent graduates, to people that are in HR or payroll that are wanting to get into recruiting. And it's a five month program. We have two events a month, one with a leadership series where we get to hear inspiring leaders from the talent industry about their careers and how they've grown, plus a study group and networking. And then about two months in, they get connected with mentors. And so our first round of mentors were absolute incredible. We had people from Google X, the Moonshot Factory. We had people from high growth startups in the Bay Area, VPs from like the top 10 IT staffing firms. People want to contribute and I just feel so wonderful to create a thing that creates opportunity and access and certification to a group. Groups that were traditionally have been literally blocked, not even like ignored, but blocked from opportunity. And to see folks getting jobs and building their networks and to just see that they are valued, that they are important, that their contribute, contributions matter has just been a very rewarding thing and it's now become a key pillar of our business.

It's amazing. It's, it's, it's inspirational that you took the time to actually do something about it. That you've, you've already changed the lives of so many and hopefully creating 35 more professional builders of teams over the next five months. Alison is fantastic. If anyone listening would like to get involved, offer their help, know somebody who'd like to be on the next group. How can they reach out to you? How can they find out more?

Thank you so much. Yeah, it takes a village to bring about real change and I genuinely believe that people really want change and they're just looking for ways to contribute. So if you would, if you, if you're interested in learning more, please go to the recruiting innovation website. If you go to recruiting innovation.com there's, you can click on grant at the top of the menu. We are the, the ship has sailed for this talent cohort. But we are doing. Our next one starts July 1st through the end of the year. It's either July 1st or August 1st. I think it's August 1st through the end of the year. We are taking applications now to bookmark for the next round. But we are actively looking for mentors. We need more mentors. So if you have at least even three years of experience in recruiting all the way upward, especially if you are a manager or a hirer, like you're going to want to hire this talent. We want to, yeah, please connect to mentor. And then also we are starting to open it up to sponsors. So I know that there are organizations out there that are putting their money where their mouth is. They are putting momentum behind their intentions and we have an opportunity to sponsor the grant. So then you become a marquee sponsor to help build the diversity pipeline for the recruiting industry. And there's a lot of opportunity there to also maybe even job, have a job fair where you can have first crack at meeting all of our talent grant recipients. And you know that's kind of mentorship, sponsorship and applications. You can even Nominate. And if you have people you want to nominate for the grant, then that is also available. So, please, by all means, we want to hear from you. This is going to take all of us, and we've got some great momentum, and I really appreciate anyone that wants to get involved in any way.

Why, Alison, as you come towards the end of the show, why is representation at the recruiter level so important?

Well, for multiple reasons. One, because it's time. I am really tired. I. I really want to see this industry be what I believe it can be. And it. I believe it at heart. It's hard. It wants to be. And so that means that we create a more welcoming, inclusive environment that. Where talent and. And this is where I. Like, I'm starting to get all wound up because I love the recruiting industry. It is my everything at this point. And I truly believe that as an industry, it's one of the most approachable industries out there. You don't need specific training, you don't need experience, you don't need certifications. If you like working with people, you're tenacious and you're highly communicative. You can have a flourishing career. Not just a job, a career in this industry. So I want, just in general, to do a PR for the market as a whole. Come be a recruiter. We need you. We need your voice, we need your experience, we need your perspective. It's approachable. Come in. And then not only that, when we recruit and you look at all of the data, people naturally hang out with people like themselves. It's our amygdala. Right? It's just like, finds, like. And so when your team, and your recruiting team specifically is diverse, naturally the pools of candidates that they operate in are going to be more diverse. Like, you're. You're almost like, without much challenge or, you know, force, naturally going to create more diversity in the candidates that are pulled in, because your team has more diverse perspectives. So it's one of those things that's like, it seems small, but it, like, it exponentially grows from there. So. And that's also, as a recruiter, you're the face. You're welcoming, you're. You're reaching out. You are the brand. You are the employer brand in Live3D. And so if I'm an underrepresented talent professional, and I. My recruiter looks like me, and she's recruited me, and she's gonna be my friendly face throughout the interviews, even when I'm nervous, she's gonna give me tips, I'm gonna feel better. I'M gonna like, you know, I'm gonna perform better because I see myself there from the beginning. And so again, it's just like the butterfly wings thing. It just really builds up on itself and grows from there.

We've got a lot of hallelujahs coming in, sitting Chan saying, I agree that starting with diversity inside talent orgs is key because of affinity bias. I remember recently, two weeks ago, three weeks ago, being on a call with a prospective customer and we had tons of the recruiting team on the call. It was a zoom call. And I looked around the faces and there was a black woman. And I said to myself, I hope, I hope, I hope she's a recruiter. Enough of the diversity team. And sure enough, when we got to the intro, she's, hi, I'm from the diversity team. And my heart sank. I was like, why can't you just be a black woman in the recruiting team? Why is the only black woman in this group specifically working in the diversity team? It's like, come on, you know, it's all these other non diverse folks sitting around trying to talk about how we bring diversity. And it's like, you know, it's so easy. Just start with yourselves. If you guys were a little bit more diverse, this wouldn't be so hard. You could probably solve it yourselves by having better conversations. To your point around, the talent pools would be more diverse. Naturally, they wouldn't have to question how do we engage with this type of community because they just reach to their colleague who already is in that community or understands that community. I think it's probably the one thing I'd love people to take away from today's show, which is to kind of back to our first point, understand that as the professional builders of teams, you have to represent the teams you're trying to build, and those teams have to represent the customers they're trying to serve and the clients are trying to serve. So it is admirable that you want to try and learn more about how to recruit more diversely, that you're passionate about it. But really, please stop and look around you. Look in your teams, talk to your boss, or if you are the boss, ask about your own hiring practices. If you're trying to change an organization's entire diversity, why don't you start with your own team and make the talent acquisition or recruiting team? Or if you're a recruitment agency, a staffing agency, an opo, start with your team and go, we did it. Let's show you how we did it and then help you do it as well. Wouldn't that be the best way to convince the whole organization that you can do it?

Well, and also to piggyback on what you just mentioned about, you know, that question of how do we reach these communities, or what do we say? As a white person and as a white woman, I can see that even happening just in the male female dichotomy and recruiting. Because someone's like, hey, how do I approach a female engineer? It's like, how do you approach a male engineer? Like, has anyone ever said, hey, we're looking to hire more guys? You're a guy and you're an engineer. You want to talk. No one says that. If you wouldn't say it to a guy, a white male, in this case, you wouldn't say it to anyone else. And so it's almost like we get, you know, a little bit nervous because it's so different. It's like, it's really actually not everyone wants to have a job that they care about, where they can make a difference, where they can leverage their skills and their abilities. That is literally no different what your skin tone is or how you orient in your, you know, your social life. And it's because we're so homogenous that we think it's so different. It's not. But we don't know that until we just start to feel like we start to see more perspectives and integrate that. And when we're going through change, sometimes we feel like we have to do a running start. But when it just is naturally happening, you know, it feels much more organic and it's much more successful. And, you know, we do our own dog. We eat our own dog food. Here at Recruiting Innovation, when we are growing the talent team and we said, you know, we're ready to hire a marketing and community coordinator, it's like, let's talk about the communities that we serve. Let's talk about who our talent grant recipients are. Let's talk about these communities. And we went out and intentionally found a highly communicative, social, experienced person who happens to be a fantastic black woman. And so it's like, I'm learning from her, she's learning from us. Things I don't even have to talk about. She's already doing that. I don't have to onboard someone because they already understand more than I even know about the community. And so it's like, we gotta do it, y', all, and it'll feed itself, and it feels really good. And it's just, I don't know, it's this is a new dawn. We have a new era and we have a lot of opportunity. And I hope that people are seeing this as an adventure and not as a drag. Right. Like this is exciting. We are changing the industry, we are changing lives and we're doing that with intentionality and not just doing the same thing we've always done and thinking we're going to get some different outcome.

I love it. We'll call it our Spring Forward show where we're focusing on the, on the, on the glimmers of light that can be seen on the horizon. Later in the evening, earlier in the morning, the flowers beginning to come back. Hopefully we can make 2021 a better year. As we go to our close, I'm going to quickly say thanks to everyone else who commented, particularly to Arlee and Simon. Didn't get to your comments, but thanks for sharing them with us live. Alison to close, I'd love if you could leave us with your piece of advice for our shortlist. We ask every guest to leave us the piece of advice for our audience to add to our shortlist, which we publish every 10 times. We have somebody on the show I'd love to hear more about. What tip would you give to our audience that either you've gathered through your own experience or has been passed on to you from somebody else?

My piece of advice that I also take for myself is to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Discomfort is a prerequisite for growth. You will not be better or different if you don't, if you're not willing to be uncomfortable, to change even something so small. As I did a UX boot camp about five years ago and I was so uncomfortable because I've been a professional recruiter for 15 years and this is new and I wasn't good at it. Well, you keep going and then you get better. And like I said before, power is work over time. And so your ability to grow as a professional and as a person is in direct correlation with your ability to sit with discomfort and to turn and look in the mirror and face some of your own history. Face the environment around you with your eyes open and through discomfort you can grow and emerge from your cocoon as a butterfly. But that middle part is so messy and hard and just take it as actually a sign of growth that you're when you're uncomfortable. Oh, look at me, I'm growing. I used to say thank you challenge for this opportunity to grow. And so literally I would like very facetiously like, oh wow, that's happening. Oh, look at me grow.

Well, you know what? We've lived through 11, 12 months of huge challenge and discomfort. Maybe, you know, if we can get through that, you can get through any discomfort and you should embrace it. Allison, it's been a pleasure. Thanks so much for joining us. We ran over it, but I'm so glad we did because I, you know, really wanted to hear your thoughts and I think you've got an amazing voice to share on these topics and great insights. Thanks for joining us. I'm really excited about you partnering with us and your training going live next month on our platform. To those users listening, Alison will be coming to a screen and app near you from Social Talent very, very soon. Allison, thanks for joining us.

Thank you. Oh, may I just say, and anyone that wants to connect with me on LinkedIn, obviously I'm there every day. Alison, Daily D A L E Y I'd love to hear from you and your thoughts as well.

Well, awesome. Thanks so much Alison and please do join us again next week. We have another great show coming up for you next week that is going to be the 10th of February. Again we broadcast live at 4pm UK Irish time, which is 11am on the east coast of the US, 8am on the west coast. And joining me next week will be Nick Johnson. He's the VP of Talent Acquisition at EAD Airways and Nick has worked for SAP and many other organizations around the world in senior talent acquisition leadership roles. And Nick is somebody I met recently and I just loved his way of communicating some great ideas around talent and also around definitions of something like quality of hire. And Nick is going to be discussing this elusive concept of what is or how do you define quality of hire on the show next week. Always a controversial subject, Nick, as a Brit who's living in the Middle east at the moment with a heck of a lot of experience on this topic and sharing his insights with us on the show next week. So do tune in. Check out our full list of previous shows and our upcoming show shows as always on socialtown.com the shortlist. Huge thanks to Allison for joining us and sharing those insights. Don't forget to check out her website Recruiting Innovation if you'd like to contribute or like to be a part of that grant. It's an admirable thing and hopefully this February is the beginning of something new for you too. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next week.

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