Navigating DEI and Compliance in 2025 with Jo-Ann Feely

But I still believe that when I'm not gonna. I don't believe floodgates will open, but they'll. There will be some movement in the market. And when that happens, the top talent, the talent that has the best capability isn't going to stay. I really don't believe they will stay if they feel their values are compromised and if they feel that the organization has not either taken a stance, taken, you know, perhaps taken no stance, or hasn't responded positively.

Hi, and welcome to another episode of the Hiring Excellence Podcast. I'm Johnny Campbell, CEO of Social Talent, and I'm joining you today from Villa Rosa in Sitges outside Barcelona, where we've brought together a bunch of fantastic talent leaders to talk about the topics that are burning right now, what's on their mind. And one of those topics we're going to discuss today with one of those fantastic leaders. We have Joanne Feeley from AMS joining us today. And we're going to be jumping into a hot topic, a topic that matters massively to me personally and I know to. To Joe as well. And that's the state of DEI today, where we are in 2025 on this. Joe, it's so great to have you here. You're Chief Innovation Officer of ams. For our audience who aren't familiar with ams, perhaps you might give a background to the organization and maybe to your career, your backgr. Well, and why this topic, how you ended up as the Chief Innovation Officer sitting here today talking with me about such a hot topic?

Yeah. Thanks, Johnny. So AMS is a global recruitment, outsourcing and consulting organization. We hire about 300,000 colleagues on behalf of our clients globally, and we support many different brands and sectors, pretty much every sector across the globe. I joined AMS nearly 24 years ago, which I'm almost embarrassed to say. I was clearly a very young woman when I joined, absolutely straight out of college. And I suppose I've been very privileged to have had a really interesting journey because when I started at ams, we were reasonably new. We were inventing the concept of recruitment process outsourcing. We came up with the term, and it's a term we're in many ways moving away from because it's really about talent, and we're really moving towards the concept of talent orchestration and orchestrating all the elements of talent. And DEI is a really important topic within that. So my role as Chief Innovation Officer is to keep our services current and to make sure that we're taking all the trends that we see in the market all of the challenges that we see, our kind of vast portfolio across the globe dealing with and really synthesize those into a set of services that support clients going forward. And this is, you know, I probably have said every year for the last five years that this is a really exciting time to be in this industry. I think even it's gotten even more exciting. I know for many it's daunting and there are some things in many ways kind of coming at us, be it technology and the impact of digital talent, which I think is a better term for agentic AI capability. But also, you know, the backlash that we're seeing on some of the core principles of talent acquisition, which are about diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging to.

I share your enthusiasm. I think we're in the minority. I think maybe there's something wrong with us that we get excited by massive change. It's an amazing time to work in talent acquisition and talent. I think it will look very different in two years than it does today. Five years. Certainly I embrace that. I love that. But you're right, there were a lot of change, not all of it positive. And we have had a huge change very quickly on the topic of DEI. Obviously 2020 was probably a turning point for many when the prominence of DNI rose vastly after the murder of George Floyd in the US in particular, Black Lives Matter and other themes coming out of, you know, a pandemic where the world was fragile and, and feeling, feeling it to 2025, where we've had a huge shift in policy in the US with an executive order issued in January that has a massive impact on not just American organizations, but anyone doing business in the US and has, you know, really, really changed the conversation. Can you maybe give me some insight as to what you're hearing from the customers that you work with and the people you talk to? What are some of the issues out there? What are some of the fears? Maybe some of the questions people are grasping with. Or maybe can you even describe the change as you see it and how it affects organizations?

Well, I think first of all, it's sort of at the end of the day, we're in a people based business and it kind of cuts to the core in many ways. It cuts to the value set of most individuals who are engaged, most leaders who are engaged in talent acquisition because really we're here to promote fair practices no matter what. And so I think that it is. There's been a bit of a head scratching moment because it's sort of an attack on the very core of what we do as practitioners. And I think now that the kind of. Even though that was only January, a little bit of the fog has settled and people are really now getting pragmatic about what to do. So obviously we've had a whole bunch of executive orders, as you said, at the moment, that really impacts federal contractors, but it also impacts those organizations who support federal contractors. And the first of that was the doing away with the legislation on affirmative action, which, you know, in my time, I used to be a recruiter in the US Many years ago, and affirmative action was such a monumental piece of legislation at the time. So that's been done away with. And I think what we're seeing now is, whereas the performative aspects of DE and I were so important, prove it to me, prove it that having a diverse organization is going to outperform competitors. That was the imperative at the very start of this journey. And I think we've spent an awful lot of time really proving it and working on the performative aspects. And now what we're seeing is organizations needing to move away from those performative aspects instead. A lot of the executive orders are in many respects a backlash on the idea that the minority has been favored over the majority. And now we hire on merit. But that suggests that we live and work in a meritocracy and we don't. And I suppose if you were to pare back, and this is when I talk to a lot of TA leaders, what they're really looking at now is paring back the terminology on DEI and saying, @ the end of the day, it's about fairness. Are we really not going to pay people fairly? Are we really not going to treat people fairly? So if you kind of take the headlight or the headline away and look at it from a very pragmatic perspective, I am encountering lots of TA leaders that are not really changing their practices. What they're doing is they're not shining a spotlight on it. They're not perform. They're not looking at the performative measures anymore. Whereas before, you know, even there was a legislative requirement in some jurisdictions to report on. And we still have it in Europe, obviously, with Equal Pay Act. Whereas before, you know, we were. We were actively in ams, we were taking targets on how we could present diverse slates and also increase representation and increase representation in a targeted way. Absolutely. Seeing organizations moving away from it, but moving away from the measurement, but not moving away from the practice and really looking at how they can rename the practice to keep it going, because it feels like A moment in time. It feels like this will come back at the end of the day, you know, I was just looking at a report and it's kind of based on some of the measures that McKinsey brought out back in the early 2000s, when all of this sort of diversity and inclusion, as it was often known at the time, came out around the performance of organizations who have a more diverse leadership. At the time, it was about leadership, and obviously it's infused way, way further down the organization. And organizations with better representation still outperform their peers about 35%. It's a fact. So are we really going to move away from that fact? I doubt that we are. But if you look at some of the, you know, the facts around that 35%, the fact that we are in a world where there are talent shortages everywhere, we have an aging population, we have birth rates declining, we have an aging, we have multi generational population workforce for the first time, all working together. There are a number of different people issues that are making up the workforce. And so it's really hard to see how the core aspects of DEI are going away in that sort of smorgasbord of what we have to deal with.

There's a lot to unwrap there. Let me start with the kind of branding piece. So you're right, DEI gone, in our words, like culture and engagement. So you have folks who are now the culture team, the head of engagement, as opposed to the head of dei, which, you know, his case, I guess, is a cosmetic change. It's, you know, we just rename it and we keep going and that's good. But there are real things that the executive order is changing and forcing us to change, or at least its interpretation is changing, such as slates seem to be out. General recommendation, do not talk about slates.

Absolutely.

You know, representation on the shortlist. You know, we can't talk about that. You know, if we're doing direct sourcing for folks because they come from underrepresented backgrounds. Stop that. Don't have any of that anymore. You know, career sites completely changed, language removed. I saw a great example where if you logged into a massive big life sciences company in the uk, you got a certain page and if you went to that same page and you were in a US IP address, it was 404 page not found.

Yeah.

On the same day, you know, by changing IP address. So like, literally, very quick, let's remove it from one part of the world to the other. But if I go back to your point, you, you know, you look at the McKinsey in 2000s and the data, and you look at, let's say, CPG companies, the CPG companies, the consumer kind of organizations, they begun looking at this because their consumer, their buyer was changing, becoming more diverse, and it just made sense. They had to make products for a different buyer. They had to appeal to a different buyer, an increasingly diverse buyer. So there wasn't Even necessarily a McKinsey study necessary. It was the case. Our buyer is changing. They are a different gender, they're different backgrounds, different socioeconomic backgrounds. Their needs are now different. They need different products and we need to influence them in different ways. So super simple. And those organizations don't stop. They continue as. But some companies did kind of jump on the bandwagon in 2020. They put the rainbow sign up on their Twitter handle. They did all this kind of stuff. They went all in after never doing before. And whilst I would love to believe that all we're doing is changing the name, there are companies who have shut down activities, let go whole teams, said, don't mention any of this again, like it never happened. So they're. There are many camps. There isn't a kind of. Everyone's just doing it this way. We are in different camps. Organizations are doing. And some are doing it for genuinely, you know, genuine business reasons. Like if you have millions of dollars wrapped up in federal contracts, the risk posed by this is potentially just too much to take.

Yeah.

So how do you see those different camps? How are people navigating it? What's the impact of that? Do you think the talent, to your point, which is becoming increasingly scarce, will care? Do you have evidence of this? Yeah, a lot of issues, a lot of questions. But what do you think?

Well, I don't have evidence of that particular point yet, but I think that evidence is going to come, especially as we know that, you know, the. The generation that's emerging now, you know, whether it's zeds or Alphas, cares about purpose. You know, we know that's through so much. There's so much out there on what's really attracting that particular, you know, generation, and it will be purpose. And so purpose and culture are so entwined. I know, because we run the graduate recruitment and the campus recruitment teams for many of our organizations that that is still the number one thing that graduates look at. They look, they go straight to the purpose page and they will, you know, we've seen tranches of candidates in that particular part of the hiring cycle exit themselves from prop from certain organizations if they just don't see it posted. It matter. Okay. So maybe they don't have the power. They're not at management level, but they will. They'll be there someday. And actually, they're a very important cohort. You know, there's many organizations that rely on that sort of talent coming up from. From below and infusing to above, and that will matter. But it's very interesting because we see exactly as you've described. Right. So what you described on a job board, we're seeing it everywhere. We see organizations disassociating themselves from their same entity in the U.S. so it's, you know, I hate to say this is just a us issue. That would be really simplifying the challenge. Right. The reality is it is predominantly a US challenge, but everybody in the rest of the world is sitting back and watching, and some are taking note and some aren't. And some are saying, in spite of that, we're doing this. We have a number of clients who are saying exactly that they're disassociating their European, their APAC entities, kind of disassociating from that. Even if they're pulling back very visibly from programs that they have won awards, rewards for in the past, they're not doing so in other aspects of the world.

I've seen report in the news that President Trump is calling French companies and demanding to know what they're doing around dni.

Yeah.

You know, so, so that reach is extending. I said the U.S. we, like it or not.

Yeah.

There's a, there's probably unique demographics going on at the moment around talent. Like, we are in a situation where we have this, this, these two tensions between Gallup saying that in their last, their last poll published last month, that we have the highest levels of desire to move job that we've had in 11 years. And then we have the lowest levels of attrition we've seen in probably the same amount. So people want to move jobs more than they've ever. But they're not. That will break at some point. Right. They will both reconcile themselves again and we'll have some sort of move into the market. Is it, you know, is it just in 2025, early 2025, we have the situation where because there's such low attrition, we're not seeing the effect in, let's say, experienced hires on this, on what companies are doing or not doing or NDI isn't impacting time just yet because they're not moving. But as they, as this reconciles itself and they start moving Again, do you anticipate that that's where we'll see people voting with their feet and saying, okay, you did this in 2025 or didn't do this in 2025. And I'm going to remember you for that. Like we did in Covid, when companies responded positively or not. And then by 2021, when people started moving, we saw the impact, a year later hit the workforce going, I didn't like the way you handle Covid. I didn't want to leave the job at the time, but now that I can, I'm gone.

Yeah, I believe we will, but I, I also don't believe we'll ever see the hiring volumes come back at the rate that we saw in 2021 or 2022. Certainly not my career life cycle. And also digital talent will have such an impact. Organizations are just not going to hire at that level that they did before. And. But I still believe that when I'm not going to, I don't believe floodgates will open, but they'll, There will be some movement in the market and when that happens, the top talent, the talent that has the best capability, isn't going to stay. I really don't believe they will stay if they feel their values are compromised and if they feel that the organization has not either taken a stance, taken, you know, perhaps taken no stance, or hasn't responded positively. It's interesting though, Johnny, because we saw Google, for example, pull back in a fairly major way from their diversity, equity and inclusion practices. And now, I don't know if you saw, but there was, I read an article on CNBC just this weekend where, you know, we've seen the CEO of Google now saying, well, you know, actually we're, we're still true to our values, we're still true to our cult, our culture. And they've renamed, they've renamed it to the Diversity and Opportunities organization. Right. So equity is the one that's coming out. And I find that really interesting because to your point, you know, in 2020 and the focus post, the murder of George Floyd and the resurgence of the Lives Matter movement is really when equity became part of the equation. It was diversity and inclusion or just diversity before and equity became part of that. And yet equity in many respects is the most fundamental part because it is about creating an even playing field. An even playing field can mean many things. Back to my point around, are we really not going to pay people the same? And some of this needed to be exposed. Is that really going to go away? I don't Believe it will. I mean, if you, if you. Again, if you pair it back to. At its fundamental core, what are we trying to do? We're trying to treat people well. We're trying to create, you know, the capability within the organization to drive us to be more competitive. Why would we, you know, stop ourselves? Why would we hold ourselves back from doing that? Back to your point, very limited movement in the market, back to the point that there's, you know, skills shortages. It's, you know, we shouldn't disadvantage ourselves. We should look for every opportunity to create some competitive advantage. And when you talk about how some of the consumer organizations have just done this, because it makes sense, it's common sense. This is our consumer group. We see the same thing happening within organizations, those that are operating in certain locations and are still requiring individuals to do those roles. And in many respects, the Trump administration's strategy is about manufacturing and bringing manufacturing back to the US Again, I find it extraordinary because surely a manufacturing is the one area that's super ripe for digitization. Either way, if you are going to get back to that sort of manufacturing plant based or local based hiring, you are very, very constrained by the talent that exists in a radius that could be 100 miles, perhaps it could be 20 miles, it could be 5 miles. And so differentiation is key, but also creating talent. And what we're seeing outside of the U.S. it's a term I don't ever really come across in the US is social impact and social nobility and aligning that to a sustainable hiring strategy. So it's hard to. Ultimately, I'm sure ESG will be the next thing that's attacked where the backlash will be felt. There is no doubt that that's probably the next one on the agenda. But ultimately we're seeing a lot of organizations aligning the princip principles of their ESG policies to their hiring policies. And it makes sense. Again, it's just common sense because this is the radius in which we operate in. This is where our talent can be. We have to engage with the talent in the locations that we're at. And that might be an upskilling or a reskilling program. You know, that that probably isn't hiring ready made talent.

We talked about it before we record this podcast this morning. Separate was talking about, for example, your idea of, of manufacturing being done by robots. It's probably the way it is. We talked about life science examples and other industries where it's inevitable that you're going to see robots do it and who makes the robots other Robots, right. Building robots for factories with robots that have very few people, like data centers, right, where you have. The construction of those same buildings might generate jobs, but then when they're up and running, you don't really have any jobs. And then there's areas like the textile industry, which we discussed this morning, just doesn't belong in the Western world. It just isn't cost competitive. You can't do it. It's moved to Asia. It has to go to certain markets because cannot compete at the volume of, let's say fast fashion with, with manufacturing or any sort of support in Western economies like the US or in parts of Europe. It's just, it's long gone from here and then coming back and it sits in different economies. But to your point around, I think the, the when you boil it all down to we need talent to do jobs and there are geographical restrictions, there's skill availability constrictions and we activate different types of talent if we're going to fill these jobs. And, and its core, I think, you know, both of us sit in Europe, both Irish, where we've worked in an environment largely in our careers that never had affirmative action.

Right.

This has never been a case in the eu. We've always had to hire based on your skills and ability. And the approach to DNI that I've seen from Europe has always been about, you know, you have an extremely fair process, but what you do is you make sure that enough people who are disadvantaged are allowed to be in that process or get into the process in the first time, first stage. So I think there's, there's positives around if you have to have a very defensible hiring process, which I think, you know, on the plus side, the executive order is reinforcing the fact you have to have a very defensible hiring process, show that there's no bias. Yeah, that is really positive.

Yes, it is positive.

It's just allowing us to activate talent that wasn't getting opportunities or wasn't being considered before is the work we need to do and hopefully rebrand it. Final note on this because we could take this in a large tangent. Is there any company you want to talk about that you admire, I've seen, have worked with you, think it does it well, or even if you don't want to name a company, is there a way you can describe when it's done well, reacting to 2025, what does that look like? So others perhaps can take some advice from a company that's doing it well, or examples you can Give.

It's difficult for me to name a company because a lot of the work that we're doing is. It's quite confidential. What we're doing with a lot of organizations, and particularly those that do have federal contracts, who want to, on the one hand, be true to their values and remain a culture that's inclusive, but at the same point in time, comply with legislation. There's a real kind of rub there to make sure those two things can coexist and they can coexist. So we're supporting organizations. We've got a diagnostic that we have adopted. We've had a DEI diagnostic for some time and we've worked with a number of organizations in supporting them, ensuring that their hiring processes are inclusive, et cetera. Whereas now we're looking at that diagnostic, we've refocused it to help organizations look at their policies. Make sure that, to your point, the wording of those policies is still about inclusivity. It is about having the key measurements. But those measurements are not in any way controversial when it comes to the executive order. Those executive orders have not been passed into legislation yet, obviously, but there's anticipation that there will be, or that at least for federal contractors, they will maintain to be that way. So we're looking at how we can help with the language, how we can help with, you know, sort of separating what is a requirement from an audit perspective, but what actually is a practice perspective that can remain so that these two things can coexist. And we're getting a lot of traction, particularly with, you know, formerly heads of dei, who are often now called heads of inclusion, heads of culture, to your point. But this is really creating a kind of a like, just catching your breath moment to say, look, we are compliant. We do have the right level of audit capability where it's needed to show that we're not actually hiring unfairly, that we're not, you know, we're not dialing up anything that we shouldn't be dialing up, but actually that we have, you know, that we've got the right level of measurement and we can comply with legislation whilst at the same point in time and ensure that we are assessing our talent against the same and the appropriate capability framework, and that we're not disadvantaging anybody, because that's the name of the game.

Anyone watching this episode or listening, if they. They. They hear that you might have a solution for them, they're interested in knowing more about the diagnostic, about the work you do with organizations, about getting some guidance. What's the best way to reach out to ams or what's the product offering they should be searching for?

Yeah, they can search for that DEI diagnostic on our website. We are AMS.com they can also message me on LinkedIn. I run a DEI BCOE within AMS. At the end of the day, we're a talent organization, so we won't be backing down on our commitments to DEI and to supporting the organizations that we support and having the most inclusive and fair hiring processes whilst helping them be legislatively compliant. And that's the same whether you're US organization. European. There's so much European legislation at the moment on disability and accessibility and there's also audits that need to be done. We're supporting lots of organizations across the world doing very different things actually in different jurisdictions. We're seeing a real focus in the UK at the moment on social mobility, particularly since the riots in the UK in September, where this really near the Equality act really brought that to the fore. So we're still very, very busy ensuring that organizations are compliant whilst maintaining that culture.

That's good to hear. Joe, thanks for joining us today. Really appreciate it. Pleasure and thank you for joining us and listening today or viewing the show. Hopefully that's given you some food for giving you some structure and ideas about what you can be doing around your D and I policies within your organization, how you're framing them, how you're still doing the good work while being compliant. We'll be back next week with another episode. Don't forget to follow us on LinkedIn or YouTube or subscribe on Apple or Spotify, wherever you find your podcasts. We'll be back with another great talk next week. Until then, thanks and take care.