00:00:00Evolving Careers in Tech and HR
00:06:52Embracing Diversity in the Workplace
00:16:32Equity in Hiring and Workforce
00:29:00Building Inclusive Tech Industry Cultures
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Our guest today is Siân Govind, Director of Global Talent at Auror and Founder of BeHeard.
We shine a spotlight on the critical importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the tech sector, especially within New Zealand.
Siân delves into the nuances of creating genuinely inclusive workplaces and explains Auror's robust DEI framework, which prioritizes listening, learning, unlearning, and actioning to build a truly diverse workforce.
The insights shared will challenge you to move beyond token diversity initiatives and build equitable systems that genuinely engage and retain employees from underrepresented groups.
Learn how to outperform traditional recruitment agencies at PICWA.io
English
United States
SHOW NOTES 🔗
TRANSCRIPT 🔗
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Hello and welcome.
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I'm Anuj, host of the wayforwardtv podcast, where, in season three, we dive deep and focus on the evolving world of human resources, DEI and talent acquisition.
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But before we begin, I'd like to talk about our sponsors, Piquaio.
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Piqua is a tech recruitment agency that helps hire tech talent 40% faster using Gen AI and unorthodox methods across local and global talent pools.
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To learn more, visit picquadio I was in a career that I wasn't happy with and I was kind of at a loose end for you know what to do.
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Um, I went to a recruiting agency and I said, hey, like these are my skills, these are my qualifications, what can I do with them?
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Do I have to go study something again?
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Or is there some sort of job out there where I can take my transferable skills and someone will hire me and they turn around and say, well, we've got a job here and voila, um, so that was my first taste.
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That was in a recruiting agency here in New Zealand.
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Um, going back a while now.
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Um, but very much my first flavor.
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Um, there were things I liked about that job and things that I didn't like about that job.
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Um, I didn't like the agency recruiting agency culture, where it felt a little bit like revenue was more important than placing the candidate in the right place, and so I loved the kind of engagement with people and, you know, helping them find their right role and likewise helping businesses find the right people.
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But I kind of figured out pretty early on their agency life wasn't for me.
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But not long after that I decided to move to the Netherlands and so that was a massive move.
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That was really just random, to be honest.
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I wanted a different experience and different culture and we had recently gotten married and it felt like a good time, and that's when I first discovered tech.
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So the first role that I got in the Netherlands was with Bookingcom, during a time where Airbnb was kind of just taking off and Bookingcom was like, uh-oh, what are we going to do about this?
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So I grew the department that looked after their private homes.
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We started off as eight people and I just took on a contract there.
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In eight months we grew that team up to a sub-department of 120 people.
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Yeah, it was pretty quick moving.
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And at that point in time I got a little chat from a startup and that was my entry into the startup world and that was very much where I found like, okay, here's, here's my place, here's my people, like the fast pace, the the kind of where you need to get like something done.
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Yeah, just the.
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The nature of like high growth and excitement and high risk was very rewarding.
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Unfortunately, that startup didn't quite, you know, go down the startup route, dream the dream route where you IPO or you sell out, and so they ended up closing the Amsterdam office.
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They were a Silicon Valley based startup.
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They ended up closing the Amsterdam office because they couldn't quite get the product off the ground in Europe.
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But yeah, when a door closes and you open it.
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And that took me to Uber.
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So Uber in the Netherlands at that point in time was the headquarters for Europe, middle East and Africa.
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We had, I guess, just under 200 people in the office and in the four years that I was at Uber, by the time I ended I think, we had a few thousand people across three different campuses in Amsterdam.
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So very exciting period of growth.
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The super pumped experience being on his written book or watched the show, and I got to see, kind of like black and white, day and night, the flow on effects from different types of leadership.
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So leadership under Travis Kalanick, who was the co-founder, who ultimately got ousted by the board, and the culture that was built under his leadership and the culture that was built under Dara's leadership and the business impact it had as well.
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So it was a very interesting time but it really shaped the way that I think about building cultures, building teams, building, you know, forming businesses really.
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And from there I decided well, at some point in time, I decided that it was time to come back to New Zealand.
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That it was time to come back to New Zealand and after a short kind of little contract that I had with Tesla kind of tidying over I ended up at a Kiwi startup called Holter.
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We were about 60 people at that point in time, with 120 in the first six months that I was there.
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Where was this At Holter?
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Yep, and then I started there as a talent manager and moved into the head of people role and decided to wrap up there I guess it was just about a year and a half ago now and start my own thing, which is Be Heard, which came about from a place of, I guess, frustration, you could say, at the Kiwi tech sector.
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I loved coming back to New Zealand after seven years abroad and seeing the progress that had been made in the Kiwi Tech sector.
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I was really excited by the start-up scene and all the kind of opportunity and exciting things that were happening.
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But at the same time I felt like there was maybe not a lack of responsibility, but how would I put this like a lack of the understanding of the responsibility that we have in the tech sector to be building products that serve society equitably.
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So diversity, equity, inclusion was and, I guess, still is in a lot of ways, a bit of a diverse group of people at the table when we're building products that shape the way that we do things in the future and shape the way you know we're disrupted right In the tech sector.
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We're disrupted and so we can be tech for good or we can make things worse, and, in my opinion, the only way that you're going to have a product that truly serves society equitably is if you have a diverse group of perspectives who are creating and building that.
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Um, and that's what I felt was kind of missing when I was talking to people with different businesses across the kiwi tech sector and so be heard.
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Um was a journey that I didn't really know what it was going to look like, but I wanted to do something in the New Zealand tech industry to help move the dial in terms of like, not just kind of surface level conversations about you know how do we increase diversity in our talent pool, because you know that's a lot of what I was hearing, but really kind of the why we do this and more about the equity and inclusion as well, because I think part of the annoying thing about acronyms is you can sometimes lose the meaning behind the individual words, right, and I think quite often we hear DEI or DNI or EDI, whatever, and people think, oh, diversity, but what about equity?
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What about inclusion?
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And I see so many businesses put a lot of effort into thinking about how they're going to diversify their talent pools and their make-up of their, their employees, but very little thought behind how they're actually going to build equitable systems and processes of operating procedures that truly create equal opportunity within the company and how they build inclusive environments so that when those people from underrepresented groups get into their business, they want to be there, they want to stay and they can bring their full selves to work.
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Because you know, it's one thing to attract the talent to your company, it's another thing to have them engaged and, um in, retain them.
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So sorry that was a very long-winded answer about my journey um, but that's kind of the the journey that I've been on and and how I kind of got here and more recently I joined Aura.
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So Aura was business that I got to know through my work with Be Heard and, to be honest, they're a Kiwi business that I admired for a long time because of the way that they were approaching diversity, equity and inclusion.
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It was very intentional and they were very transparent about it.
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So coming on board and working with them through BeHeard was very much.
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It was great because, you know, I got to see that it wasn't just talk, it very much walked the talk, and having the opportunity to come on board as their director of talent was, yeah, something that I was super excited about because we're very well aligned values-wise and, I think, had a huge impact there as well.
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So yeah, what does DEI and practice look like at Aura?
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That's a good question.
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I'd say at Aura we have created kind of an approach or a framework where we're listening, we're learning and unlearning and then we're actioning.
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The listening is how we understand from our people how we're doing, and that's really key to make sure that you know we are not making assumptions and you know we're really understanding, beyond kind of the numbers and the data, what people, how people think and feel about working at ORA and the learning and the unlearning.
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They kind of come hand in hand.
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I think one thing, when we're talking about diversity, equity and inclusion, there's a bit of a journey that everybody goes on.
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I've been on that journey myself.
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Like I think a huge part of what has shaped my journey is was my experience moving overseas and being part of a culture where, you know, I wasn't part of the, the dominant cultural group, for the first time in my life and a lot of things that I just kind of believed as truth were.
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Those things were challenged because I was surrounded by people who had different life experiences to me.
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Um, so I think something that we've always acknowledged um is that you know everybody's on a journey, um, everybody will be learning as they go, um, and we just need to kind of embrace curiosity to understand different perspectives, um, and there's a lot that you have to unlearn as well, and that was something again that I kind of took from my journey.
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I very much kind of grew up in a very kind of like sort of environment.
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I didn't have a lot of diverse people around me growing up and I very much took, like my parents' values and beliefs and just adopted them and, if I'm honest, I had to unlearn some of those beliefs along the way as I.
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It's kind of like that thing like you know, the more you know, the less you know, to unlearn some of those beliefs along the way.
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It's kind of like that thing like you know, the more you know, the less you know.
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Like the more you learn, the less you realise you know.
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So unlearning is a huge part of it too, and then we just make sure that we're actioning from there.
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I always like to take an approach of knowing your baseline, knowing where you're at, and then focusing in on where you have opportunities for improvement.
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I think another thing that I see a lot of in DEI and all of this comes with good intent is these kind of long laundry lists of initiatives that people have thought up, because you know it seems like a good thing to do and maybe it is but maybe it isn't.
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But ultimately there's so much that you can do.
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When it comes to reverse deep conclusion, like to the point where a lot of people I talk to almost feel like in this state of inertia because it's like where do I even start?
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And they're kind of sort of paralysed.
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But if you can just understand your baseline and you can kind of pack a couple of focus areas and hone on those, like you will be able to see outcomes as a result.
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So I think that's just another thing that's really kind of important about the way that we approach things.
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We're very intentional about looking at, hey, where are we, um, where do we want to be?
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and then, once we've got that baseline and then we'll start we figure out what comes in between so diversity to me and I want you to school me um is gender, cultural and maybe even religious differences as well.
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Yeah, what am?
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I missing Everything else.
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Yes.
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I mean, there's so much to it, right, and again, I think you know you could cut this so many ways, but there's age, there's, you know, disability status, there's just socioeconomic factors, there's just diversity of thought and experience, like something that was really interesting that I saw at a previous company who were working with a team who were very what should I say?
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They had a strong bias towards certain schools.
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What should I say?
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They had a strong bias towards certain schools.
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There's so much that makes up who you are and there's almost no limit to what makes somebody diverse right.
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It could be many, many things.
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One thing, it's just a question I have.
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So people with disabilities let's just say, for example, some people who are deaf might be very strong coders but it's difficult for them to communicate with a team, because maybe the entire team I mean not maybe, let's just say in this scenario, the entire team they can speak, they can hear as well.
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How would you go about having a conversation with the company?
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And also, what sort of formula would you have of trying to bring that person into the workforce?
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like something that I've always, something that we try and do um at aura is is kind of be mindful of the way that we work beyond.
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Just like being in the office.
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So having different tooling, having different ways people can communicate, you know having flexibility and you know where you work, how you work, and I think, honestly, it's just that it's just it's not assuming that you know what that person needs, yep, but rather you know letting them tell you, like how do you want to be supported, like what tools do you need?
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What is it that we can do to make this successful for you?
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And then, a lot of the time, like it might not even be a heavy lift I think this is the other thing.
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People kind of get into this um mindset that like, oh, we can't go there, that's going to be such a such a thing, but, um, it might not be, um, and we can't make those assumptions.
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Like we always need to test our assumptions to.
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You know, get past that like what we think versus what is actual fact.
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I don't know if I have a formula, but it would probably just be a little bit more like hey, what?
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What would you need to for this to be successful?
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Um, and then I think you know, if that person is amazing at their job, then you know, I guess it's probably going to differ from business to business, but I really like to believe that people would do the right thing to help that person get on board.
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That's what I'm like.
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I totally agree.
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One question what's your thoughts on street smart versus academically smart?
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Oh my gosh.
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Okay, so I feel strongly about this.
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Uh, I am not university educated, um, and I so perhaps, like perhaps I'm a bit biased, but in all of the businesses that I've been in, I can say, like there is also, there's obviously value to education.
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Don't get me wrong.
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I'm not saying that there isn't value to education, but I can also say that there have been people I've worked with who don't have formal education qualifications and they are bringing just as much, if not more in some situations, to the table.
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Um, so I just don't think like your, what, what you've studied or where you've studied, is necessarily an indicator for whether or not you're going to be able to perform, with exceptions, of course right, you know there's obviously some roles, like if you're a lawyer, you need to be a lawyer and you need to.
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You know your degree and pass the bar, whatever.
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Uh, if you're a doctor, you don't want somebody operating on you if they haven't done their training, so you know, take that with a grain of salt but the businesses that I have worked in in the past, there isn't necessarily a strong correlation between success and the impact the individual can have based on the schooling that they've had.
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So again, like it's something that I just try to keep a real open mind about, I know there's this huge halo effect that happens when somebody's been to a certain school and you're looking at a CV you're like must be smart, yeah, but you know probably are smart, not necessarily the right person for your team or your business, and you can't let that detract from what you're looking for.
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Again, like you can bring in a bunch of smart people, but do you want a team of smart individuals or do you want a team of smart individuals or do you want to like a team of high performers or do you want a high performing team?
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Those are two different things.
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So I personally don't get caught up in schooling.
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Yeah, that makes sense.
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Equity what does that actually mean?
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Good question.
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I feel like equity is like the E in DEI just doesn't get the same airtime as probably the other two.
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So equity is your systems, your operating procedures, procedures, your processes and the way that you build your functions to serve people equitably.
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I was just about to say something.
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What was I about to say?
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Yeah, I had a conversation with somebody recently who was asking about my work with Be Heard and they were like what do you do?
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And I'm like it's kind of like what do I not do?
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Like I feel like equity is so, like it touches everything.
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It's not just like this thing that you can do in isolation, like oh, you know, you know, sometimes you see that there is like a function within a business which is like diversity and inclusion, but I wonder that how much that achieves in the equity piece right, when it's not baked into the business.
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Like equity, you're talking about your, how you think about compensation, how you think about progression, how you think about giving feedback.
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There's so much and it's really something that you need to ingrain in pretty much every single process that you have that touches the people in your business.
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So, yeah, I think it's something that you can't really do off in this silo and this little vacuum, like I think it's just something that your leadership need to be on board with and obviously your people functioning to be on board with, because, yeah, it just attaches everything.
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If we were to break it up, I guess maybe I'm not asking the right question, but let's just say that if we wanted to ensure that we're equitable during our hiring process in particular, what are signs we are and what are signs we're not?
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Yeah, okay, cool.
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So, like an equitable recruiting process, you're putting everybody through the same process.
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Yep, first of all, you have the same steps and the same process for everybody.
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You have the same questions that you're asking everybody.
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You're not chopping and changing for different people so you can actually get a proper.
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You can properly benchmark candidates against one another because you've asked them all the same thing.
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Um, it's about making sure that there's equal, like opportunity for people to come into the funnel as well.
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Um, speaking like recruiter lingo here, but like coming and entering into your recruiting process.
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Like you know, there's something that I see a lot of um, and it's never lived ill intent and this is a thing right, like, I feel like I preface a lot of things with that, but a lot of the time you know people, people aren't intrinsically bad.
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Most people right, they want to do the right thing.
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Um, these are just things that we do without thinking that have negative consequences.
00:22:27.635 --> 00:22:36.497
So you have to be so intentional when you are thinking about diversity, equity, inclusion, um, you have to kind of stop and think and pause and think about what you're doing.
00:22:36.497 --> 00:22:49.443
But the example I was going to give there was like um, I've seen situations where there is a new position that's been discussed at like a leadership level, like oh, we need a we need somebody over in a new market.
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We need somebody over in chile.
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Um, and somebody pipes up oh, I'm the perfect person, sandra, sandra would be great at that.
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Next thing you know, sandra's on a plane and like her whole team's going.
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Wait a second.
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Like never heard about that role, never had the opportunity to put their hand up little do you know, tom is fluent in spanish and spent two semesters there like maybe there was a better person for the job, but you didn't even stop because you, just, you just acted without thinking.
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Um, so it's also like giving people equal opportunity to get into to put their hand up, um, and then that you know the equity throughout the process, making sure the process is fair.
00:23:29.981 --> 00:23:31.986
It's the same as objective as well.
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Um, objective interviewing, like again, this kind of blows my mind, but I guess I am, you know, fit in the game for a while now, so maybe it's just because I'm I'm so in it, but it blows my mind.
00:23:45.508 --> 00:23:49.196
How few people have ever actually been trained to interview?
00:23:49.878 --> 00:23:50.118
Yep.
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This was a question I asked people when.
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I was starting to be heard and I talked to a bunch of leaders in tech, did some discovery work, because I just came to understand where is what's the landscape here?
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Where are people at?
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And one of the questions I asked was how did you learn to hire?
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Nobody had an answer to that.
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Um, perhaps like two people who had like a people background.
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I had like an answer that everybody was some form of well, I was kind of flung into a leadership position for the first time I had to hire, so I just did it and I kind of watched what everybody else was doing.
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So I just did what they were doing.
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Maybe somebody says, oh, like you know, I read an HBR article or something Like.
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But that is really the extent that people are like trained in interviewing.
00:24:40.241 --> 00:24:49.769
So again, it's like it's not necessarily that people are coming at things with ill intent, but when you're not trained to objectively assess somebody's ability, it's very hard to do right.
00:24:49.769 --> 00:24:58.643
It could take years and years to for you to perfect that because you have no sort of guardrails as to like what, what does good look like, what does best practice look like?
00:24:58.643 --> 00:25:03.558
Um, so that's something that I always kind of like hone in on it as well.
00:25:03.558 --> 00:25:07.690
Like do do we actually know how to objectively assess somebody?
00:25:07.690 --> 00:25:09.161
What does that look like?
00:25:10.564 --> 00:25:32.265
Something that I see happening a bit of like that makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable is when people say, okay, our team is lacking xyz, so we're only going to look for this, and that can have really negative flow-on effects.
00:25:32.265 --> 00:25:36.416
It can be really like tokenistic.
00:25:36.416 --> 00:25:38.143
It can come across very tokenistic.
00:25:38.143 --> 00:26:06.884
It can cause a lot of resentment in the team with the people who identified with the group that you said that you're no longer going to look for um, and there is huge chance that when that person comes on board eventually it's going to get to them that oh, you were our woman higher um, and then they're going to be questioning whether they're there because of their gender or whether they're there because of their skills.
00:26:07.724 --> 00:26:19.074
So the way that I like to approach things is to focus on the balance pipeline at the very beginning of the process.
00:26:19.074 --> 00:26:32.259
So making sure you have a very balanced type of funnel and then from there, making sure that you have that very kind of fair, equitable and objective assessment process.
00:26:32.259 --> 00:26:41.342
And if you have a, you know, if you have a balance, whatever balance may mean for XYZ, for all right.
00:26:41.342 --> 00:27:01.240
If you have that balance at the top of the funnel and if you have that equitable process throughout, then you should start seeing that, that, um, those uh numbers of diverse candidates trickling through your funnel, um, and you want to be able to say at the end of the day that you hired the best person for the job.
00:27:02.142 --> 00:27:33.310
Um, at the point in time that you can't say that, I would be questioning whether you're doing something for the wrong reasons, like whether you are being tokenistic, I think, like, personally, I don't like the idea of changing your scoring system for diversity, system for diversity, because, again, it's like that objective assessment right.
00:27:33.310 --> 00:27:40.756
Like, if you're keeping the assessment the same for everybody, then you can say that you've hands down, got the right person for the job.
00:27:41.395 --> 00:28:17.021
That said, also the other thing on that is again kind of bringing it back to this like what can breed resentment and what kind of shoots you in the foot when you're doing diversity, equity, inclusion work is when you make moves like that and people then start thinking and this is something I've heard time and time in my career like we don't want to lower the bar, which is kind of offensive to me because it's like why do you think that you know a diverse candidate is going to be less than um?
00:28:17.021 --> 00:28:26.868
You know there's so many amazing um, you know people out there who come from different walks of life, who had just as much skill, just as much ability.
00:28:26.868 --> 00:28:37.246
And like the fact that people think you need to quote, unquote, lower the bar to get in different perspectives like no, like you just need to look harder.
00:28:38.166 --> 00:28:39.529
They exist, they're out there, um.
00:28:39.529 --> 00:28:52.095
And again, like, if you are quote unquote lowering the bar, then you're like like sorry, you're lazy, that was a bit rough, but you're taking an approach that, yeah, it's just kind of a bit lazy in my opinion.
00:28:52.095 --> 00:28:59.821
Like go out there and find the right person, because they do, they'll be out there, um, and you want to be able to say they're the best person for the job.
00:28:59.821 --> 00:29:20.894
That said, like, I feel like there could be a scenario where you do need to look for, like, transferable skills if you can't find the folks that you're looking for in an industry.
00:29:20.894 --> 00:29:22.878
I'll give an example here.
00:29:22.878 --> 00:29:30.942
So I'll give a hypothetical example, examples yet.
00:29:30.942 --> 00:29:34.494
So, um, I'll give a hypothetical example.
00:29:34.494 --> 00:29:43.362
So let's say you are hiring, um for a.
00:29:43.362 --> 00:29:53.713
Let's say you're hiring for a car sales's not a lot of auto sales people out there who are women.
00:29:53.713 --> 00:30:10.682
So true, yeah, but there are so many women sales people out there whose transferable skills can come really nicely into that role, really nicely into that role, um.
00:30:10.701 --> 00:30:24.522
So I think there are, there are cases where you have to be more open-minded in terms of bringing people on board with transferable skills, and what I'll just say there is if you're being open-minded for one group of people, you are open-minded for everybody, right?
00:30:24.644 --> 00:30:44.580
it doesn't just apply to that diverse group, because, again, that's when you start getting yeah this like again, this is like all my opinion, right, like I'm sure there'll be people like who take a different approach and like yeah, I'm always open for, like different perspectives as well.
00:30:44.580 --> 00:30:51.441
So maybe maybe we'll be having this conversation with you at the time and I'll have a different yeah you know, we're all a journey, we're all learning.
00:30:51.480 --> 00:31:07.192
But I think from my experience of what has served me well um in my profession and where I've seen mistakes made that can hurt um the culture or the business like, those are kind of my takeaways.
00:31:07.192 --> 00:31:10.722
No fair call, fair call how do you think locally?
00:31:11.163 --> 00:31:12.306
so we talk about locally.
00:31:12.306 --> 00:31:16.682
In particular, what can we do to actually fix our top of the funnel issues that we have in the tech industry?
00:31:17.885 --> 00:31:19.028
yeah, it's a tough one.
00:31:19.028 --> 00:31:21.874
Um, it does.
00:31:21.874 --> 00:31:23.481
It does start there for sure.
00:31:23.481 --> 00:31:40.702
Um, because you see, like I was, I was looking at this the other day, so don't quote me on this because I don't have it in front of me but looking at the gender makeup of the engineers going through I'm pretty sure it was auckland university that I was looking at that is really balanced.
00:31:40.702 --> 00:31:45.952
Like people going through those degrees, um, it's quite balanced.
00:31:45.952 --> 00:32:04.960
And then you watch it drop off at different career stages till you get to the point, like at the moment, like you know, we're looking for staff and principal engineers and it's really hard to to find gender balance in that really same group of engineers.
00:32:04.960 --> 00:32:08.730
So you've got to think right, like what's going on here?
00:32:08.730 --> 00:32:10.463
Where do we have?
00:32:10.463 --> 00:32:21.430
You know, obviously it was probably a different story when people who are at that level of seniority were going through, but you still see that trend happening of people dropping off.
00:32:21.430 --> 00:32:46.945
You know, like what's going on here that's actually causing that, because if we're getting I I mean we can talk about different types of representation, right, but for this case, like gender, like if we're getting that gender balance at that early stage, um, I think it's less about, like getting people into the educational system, but how do we keep them there?
00:32:46.945 --> 00:32:51.786
And I think that's where, like, equity and inclusion is really an interesting conversation.
00:32:51.786 --> 00:33:04.865
Um, okay, I know like two points I can go down here, but, like, I think there are a lot of areas where we need to do a better job of getting different groups into, like, tech roles.
00:33:04.865 --> 00:33:30.020
Like there is a huge lack of Maori and Pasifika going into those careers, so there are definitely areas where we just need to get more people into um, you know, interested and excited um, but I think we also just need to build more inclusive cultures that are welcoming for people from underrepresented groups, so we don't see that drop off.
00:33:30.903 --> 00:33:37.102
Um, what does it look like you can be you right, like that's ultimately what people want when they go to work.
00:33:37.102 --> 00:33:40.710
The amount of effort it takes to put on a mask every day.
00:33:40.710 --> 00:33:59.327
Um, and I've been in those roles, right, like I, I'm myself not technical, but I've been in positions where I'm the only woman in the room of 12 men and you do feel like you have to play a slightly different game or like say something different.
00:33:59.327 --> 00:34:16.132
Like you feel you're not 100 authentically you, I, I, I will say that I am not in those scenarios or have not been in those scenarios, and that's uncomfortable and I've left roles because of that.
00:34:16.132 --> 00:34:22.893
Like I can't get past, like needing to be something other than authentically myself to feel like I belong.
00:34:24.036 --> 00:34:27.635
It's exhausting and I think that's ultimately just what people want.
00:34:27.635 --> 00:34:33.820
They want to be able to come to a place and not put on a mask, um, and that's when you get the most out of your people as well.
00:34:33.820 --> 00:34:55.628
Because when like again, like, talking about the, the, all the goodness and diversity and why we have, um, you know, such a focus on, well, why there's so much evidence around diverse teams, outperforming homogenous teams, is because those different perspectives that people bring.
00:34:55.628 --> 00:35:08.297
However, if you don't have a psychologically safe place where people can bring their perspective and and speak out and have a different opinion, and then like, like it's all in vain.
00:35:08.297 --> 00:35:17.766
You've got all these diverse people trying to like, conform to this culture that you know they're not bringing their full selves and all the goodness that they could bring.
00:35:17.766 --> 00:35:30.675
So you know, again, it's kind of just like we need to do a better job of building an industry that is more inclusive for folks who are coming from different backgrounds.
00:35:31.800 --> 00:35:33.425
No, definitely, I totally agree with that.
00:35:33.425 --> 00:35:35.110
No, thank you once again.
00:35:35.110 --> 00:35:37.786
All right, that's all, folks.
00:35:37.786 --> 00:35:38.851
Thank you for tuning in.
00:35:38.851 --> 00:35:41.188
We'll have another episode out for you in two weeks time.
00:35:41.188 --> 00:35:42.074
Bye for now.
00:00:00.100 --> 00:00:00.781
Hello and welcome.
00:00:00.781 --> 00:00:10.195
I'm Anuj, host of the wayforwardtv podcast, where, in season three, we dive deep and focus on the evolving world of human resources, DEI and talent acquisition.
00:00:10.195 --> 00:00:14.210
But before we begin, I'd like to talk about our sponsors, Piquaio.
00:00:14.210 --> 00:00:23.975
Piqua is a tech recruitment agency that helps hire tech talent 40% faster using Gen AI and unorthodox methods across local and global talent pools.
00:00:24.260 --> 00:00:32.332
To learn more, visit picquadio I was in a career that I wasn't happy with and I was kind of at a loose end for you know what to do.
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Um, I went to a recruiting agency and I said, hey, like these are my skills, these are my qualifications, what can I do with them?
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Do I have to go study something again?
00:00:40.771 --> 00:00:53.981
Or is there some sort of job out there where I can take my transferable skills and someone will hire me and they turn around and say, well, we've got a job here and voila, um, so that was my first taste.
00:00:53.981 --> 00:00:55.947
That was in a recruiting agency here in New Zealand.
00:00:55.947 --> 00:00:58.031
Um, going back a while now.
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Um, but very much my first flavor.
00:01:00.484 --> 00:01:05.061
Um, there were things I liked about that job and things that I didn't like about that job.
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Um, I didn't like the agency recruiting agency culture, where it felt a little bit like revenue was more important than placing the candidate in the right place, and so I loved the kind of engagement with people and, you know, helping them find their right role and likewise helping businesses find the right people.
00:01:26.646 --> 00:01:30.507
But I kind of figured out pretty early on their agency life wasn't for me.
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But not long after that I decided to move to the Netherlands and so that was a massive move.
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That was really just random, to be honest.
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I wanted a different experience and different culture and we had recently gotten married and it felt like a good time, and that's when I first discovered tech.
00:01:49.852 --> 00:01:59.361
So the first role that I got in the Netherlands was with Bookingcom, during a time where Airbnb was kind of just taking off and Bookingcom was like, uh-oh, what are we going to do about this?
00:01:59.361 --> 00:02:05.073
So I grew the department that looked after their private homes.
00:02:05.073 --> 00:02:10.051
We started off as eight people and I just took on a contract there.
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In eight months we grew that team up to a sub-department of 120 people.
00:02:13.395 --> 00:02:17.147
Yeah, it was pretty quick moving.
00:02:17.147 --> 00:02:34.445
And at that point in time I got a little chat from a startup and that was my entry into the startup world and that was very much where I found like, okay, here's, here's my place, here's my people, like the fast pace, the the kind of where you need to get like something done.
00:02:34.445 --> 00:02:35.968
Yeah, just the.
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The nature of like high growth and excitement and high risk was very rewarding.
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Unfortunately, that startup didn't quite, you know, go down the startup route, dream the dream route where you IPO or you sell out, and so they ended up closing the Amsterdam office.
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They were a Silicon Valley based startup.
00:02:55.405 --> 00:03:01.382
They ended up closing the Amsterdam office because they couldn't quite get the product off the ground in Europe.
00:03:01.382 --> 00:03:05.204
But yeah, when a door closes and you open it.
00:03:05.204 --> 00:03:07.264
And that took me to Uber.
00:03:07.264 --> 00:03:15.911
So Uber in the Netherlands at that point in time was the headquarters for Europe, middle East and Africa.
00:03:15.911 --> 00:03:28.358
We had, I guess, just under 200 people in the office and in the four years that I was at Uber, by the time I ended I think, we had a few thousand people across three different campuses in Amsterdam.
00:03:40.145 --> 00:03:43.288
So very exciting period of growth.
00:03:43.288 --> 00:04:00.377
The super pumped experience being on his written book or watched the show, and I got to see, kind of like black and white, day and night, the flow on effects from different types of leadership.
00:04:00.377 --> 00:04:19.492
So leadership under Travis Kalanick, who was the co-founder, who ultimately got ousted by the board, and the culture that was built under his leadership and the culture that was built under Dara's leadership and the business impact it had as well.
00:04:19.492 --> 00:04:33.836
So it was a very interesting time but it really shaped the way that I think about building cultures, building teams, building, you know, forming businesses really.
00:04:33.836 --> 00:04:41.471
And from there I decided well, at some point in time, I decided that it was time to come back to New Zealand.
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That it was time to come back to New Zealand and after a short kind of little contract that I had with Tesla kind of tidying over I ended up at a Kiwi startup called Holter.
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We were about 60 people at that point in time, with 120 in the first six months that I was there.
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Where was this At Holter?
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Yep, and then I started there as a talent manager and moved into the head of people role and decided to wrap up there I guess it was just about a year and a half ago now and start my own thing, which is Be Heard, which came about from a place of, I guess, frustration, you could say, at the Kiwi tech sector.
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I loved coming back to New Zealand after seven years abroad and seeing the progress that had been made in the Kiwi Tech sector.
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I was really excited by the start-up scene and all the kind of opportunity and exciting things that were happening.
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But at the same time I felt like there was maybe not a lack of responsibility, but how would I put this like a lack of the understanding of the responsibility that we have in the tech sector to be building products that serve society equitably.
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So diversity, equity, inclusion was and, I guess, still is in a lot of ways, a bit of a diverse group of people at the table when we're building products that shape the way that we do things in the future and shape the way you know we're disrupted right In the tech sector.
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We're disrupted and so we can be tech for good or we can make things worse, and, in my opinion, the only way that you're going to have a product that truly serves society equitably is if you have a diverse group of perspectives who are creating and building that.
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Um, and that's what I felt was kind of missing when I was talking to people with different businesses across the kiwi tech sector and so be heard.
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Um was a journey that I didn't really know what it was going to look like, but I wanted to do something in the New Zealand tech industry to help move the dial in terms of like, not just kind of surface level conversations about you know how do we increase diversity in our talent pool, because you know that's a lot of what I was hearing, but really kind of the why we do this and more about the equity and inclusion as well, because I think part of the annoying thing about acronyms is you can sometimes lose the meaning behind the individual words, right, and I think quite often we hear DEI or DNI or EDI, whatever, and people think, oh, diversity, but what about equity?
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What about inclusion?
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And I see so many businesses put a lot of effort into thinking about how they're going to diversify their talent pools and their make-up of their, their employees, but very little thought behind how they're actually going to build equitable systems and processes of operating procedures that truly create equal opportunity within the company and how they build inclusive environments so that when those people from underrepresented groups get into their business, they want to be there, they want to stay and they can bring their full selves to work.
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Because you know, it's one thing to attract the talent to your company, it's another thing to have them engaged and, um in, retain them.
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So sorry that was a very long-winded answer about my journey um, but that's kind of the the journey that I've been on and and how I kind of got here and more recently I joined Aura.
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So Aura was business that I got to know through my work with Be Heard and, to be honest, they're a Kiwi business that I admired for a long time because of the way that they were approaching diversity, equity and inclusion.
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It was very intentional and they were very transparent about it.
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So coming on board and working with them through BeHeard was very much.
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It was great because, you know, I got to see that it wasn't just talk, it very much walked the talk, and having the opportunity to come on board as their director of talent was, yeah, something that I was super excited about because we're very well aligned values-wise and, I think, had a huge impact there as well.
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So yeah, what does DEI and practice look like at Aura?
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That's a good question.
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I'd say at Aura we have created kind of an approach or a framework where we're listening, we're learning and unlearning and then we're actioning.
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The listening is how we understand from our people how we're doing, and that's really key to make sure that you know we are not making assumptions and you know we're really understanding, beyond kind of the numbers and the data, what people, how people think and feel about working at ORA and the learning and the unlearning.
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They kind of come hand in hand.
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I think one thing, when we're talking about diversity, equity and inclusion, there's a bit of a journey that everybody goes on.
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I've been on that journey myself.
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Like I think a huge part of what has shaped my journey is was my experience moving overseas and being part of a culture where, you know, I wasn't part of the, the dominant cultural group, for the first time in my life and a lot of things that I just kind of believed as truth were.
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Those things were challenged because I was surrounded by people who had different life experiences to me.
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Um, so I think something that we've always acknowledged um is that you know everybody's on a journey, um, everybody will be learning as they go, um, and we just need to kind of embrace curiosity to understand different perspectives, um, and there's a lot that you have to unlearn as well, and that was something again that I kind of took from my journey.
00:11:15.849 --> 00:11:24.740
I very much kind of grew up in a very kind of like sort of environment.
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I didn't have a lot of diverse people around me growing up and I very much took, like my parents' values and beliefs and just adopted them and, if I'm honest, I had to unlearn some of those beliefs along the way as I.
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It's kind of like that thing like you know, the more you know, the less you know, to unlearn some of those beliefs along the way.
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It's kind of like that thing like you know, the more you know, the less you know.
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Like the more you learn, the less you realise you know.
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So unlearning is a huge part of it too, and then we just make sure that we're actioning from there.
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I always like to take an approach of knowing your baseline, knowing where you're at, and then focusing in on where you have opportunities for improvement.
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I think another thing that I see a lot of in DEI and all of this comes with good intent is these kind of long laundry lists of initiatives that people have thought up, because you know it seems like a good thing to do and maybe it is but maybe it isn't.
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But ultimately there's so much that you can do.
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When it comes to reverse deep conclusion, like to the point where a lot of people I talk to almost feel like in this state of inertia because it's like where do I even start?
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And they're kind of sort of paralysed.
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But if you can just understand your baseline and you can kind of pack a couple of focus areas and hone on those, like you will be able to see outcomes as a result.
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So I think that's just another thing that's really kind of important about the way that we approach things.
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We're very intentional about looking at, hey, where are we, um, where do we want to be?
00:13:04.775 --> 00:13:22.275
and then, once we've got that baseline and then we'll start we figure out what comes in between so diversity to me and I want you to school me um is gender, cultural and maybe even religious differences as well.
00:13:22.596 --> 00:13:23.498
Yeah, what am?
00:13:23.498 --> 00:13:25.299
I missing Everything else.
00:13:25.921 --> 00:13:26.120
Yes.
00:13:27.950 --> 00:13:58.298
I mean, there's so much to it, right, and again, I think you know you could cut this so many ways, but there's age, there's, you know, disability status, there's just socioeconomic factors, there's just diversity of thought and experience, like something that was really interesting that I saw at a previous company who were working with a team who were very what should I say?
00:13:58.298 --> 00:14:00.813
They had a strong bias towards certain schools.
00:14:00.813 --> 00:14:02.326
What should I say?
00:14:02.326 --> 00:14:04.009
They had a strong bias towards certain schools.
00:14:04.009 --> 00:14:11.240
There's so much that makes up who you are and there's almost no limit to what makes somebody diverse right.
00:14:15.892 --> 00:14:17.318
It could be many, many things.
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One thing, it's just a question I have.
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So people with disabilities let's just say, for example, some people who are deaf might be very strong coders but it's difficult for them to communicate with a team, because maybe the entire team I mean not maybe, let's just say in this scenario, the entire team they can speak, they can hear as well.
00:14:38.952 --> 00:14:44.149
How would you go about having a conversation with the company?
00:14:44.149 --> 00:14:50.366
And also, what sort of formula would you have of trying to bring that person into the workforce?
00:14:51.327 --> 00:15:02.695
like something that I've always, something that we try and do um at aura is is kind of be mindful of the way that we work beyond.
00:15:02.695 --> 00:15:04.538
Just like being in the office.
00:15:05.666 --> 00:15:32.711
So having different tooling, having different ways people can communicate, you know having flexibility and you know where you work, how you work, and I think, honestly, it's just that it's just it's not assuming that you know what that person needs, yep, but rather you know letting them tell you, like how do you want to be supported, like what tools do you need?
00:15:32.711 --> 00:15:36.535
What is it that we can do to make this successful for you?
00:15:36.535 --> 00:15:42.005
And then, a lot of the time, like it might not even be a heavy lift I think this is the other thing.
00:15:42.005 --> 00:15:53.538
People kind of get into this um mindset that like, oh, we can't go there, that's going to be such a such a thing, but, um, it might not be, um, and we can't make those assumptions.
00:15:53.538 --> 00:15:56.308
Like we always need to test our assumptions to.
00:15:56.690 --> 00:16:01.879
You know, get past that like what we think versus what is actual fact.
00:16:01.879 --> 00:16:06.513
I don't know if I have a formula, but it would probably just be a little bit more like hey, what?
00:16:06.513 --> 00:16:09.148
What would you need to for this to be successful?
00:16:09.148 --> 00:16:27.798
Um, and then I think you know, if that person is amazing at their job, then you know, I guess it's probably going to differ from business to business, but I really like to believe that people would do the right thing to help that person get on board.
00:16:28.743 --> 00:16:29.205
That's what I'm like.
00:16:29.205 --> 00:16:31.831
I totally agree.
00:16:31.831 --> 00:16:39.398
One question what's your thoughts on street smart versus academically smart?
00:16:48.445 --> 00:16:48.826
Oh my gosh.
00:16:48.826 --> 00:16:50.447
Okay, so I feel strongly about this.
00:16:50.447 --> 00:17:05.711
Uh, I am not university educated, um, and I so perhaps, like perhaps I'm a bit biased, but in all of the businesses that I've been in, I can say, like there is also, there's obviously value to education.
00:17:05.711 --> 00:17:06.615
Don't get me wrong.
00:17:06.615 --> 00:17:25.826
I'm not saying that there isn't value to education, but I can also say that there have been people I've worked with who don't have formal education qualifications and they are bringing just as much, if not more in some situations, to the table.
00:17:25.826 --> 00:17:48.605
Um, so I just don't think like your, what, what you've studied or where you've studied, is necessarily an indicator for whether or not you're going to be able to perform, with exceptions, of course right, you know there's obviously some roles, like if you're a lawyer, you need to be a lawyer and you need to.
00:17:48.805 --> 00:17:51.035
You know your degree and pass the bar, whatever.
00:17:51.557 --> 00:18:11.240
Uh, if you're a doctor, you don't want somebody operating on you if they haven't done their training, so you know, take that with a grain of salt but the businesses that I have worked in in the past, there isn't necessarily a strong correlation between success and the impact the individual can have based on the schooling that they've had.
00:18:11.240 --> 00:18:35.855
So again, like it's something that I just try to keep a real open mind about, I know there's this huge halo effect that happens when somebody's been to a certain school and you're looking at a CV you're like must be smart, yeah, but you know probably are smart, not necessarily the right person for your team or your business, and you can't let that detract from what you're looking for.
00:18:35.855 --> 00:18:44.924
Again, like you can bring in a bunch of smart people, but do you want a team of smart individuals or do you want a team of smart individuals or do you want to like a team of high performers or do you want a high performing team?
00:18:44.924 --> 00:18:46.788
Those are two different things.
00:18:48.291 --> 00:18:52.526
So I personally don't get caught up in schooling.
00:18:52.526 --> 00:18:54.587
Yeah, that makes sense.
00:18:54.587 --> 00:19:00.913
Equity what does that actually mean?
00:19:02.154 --> 00:19:02.875
Good question.
00:19:02.875 --> 00:19:11.308
I feel like equity is like the E in DEI just doesn't get the same airtime as probably the other two.
00:19:11.308 --> 00:19:33.025
So equity is your systems, your operating procedures, procedures, your processes and the way that you build your functions to serve people equitably.
00:19:33.025 --> 00:19:40.231
I was just about to say something.
00:19:40.231 --> 00:19:41.034
What was I about to say?
00:19:41.034 --> 00:19:45.684
Yeah, I had a conversation with somebody recently who was asking about my work with Be Heard and they were like what do you do?
00:19:45.684 --> 00:19:48.775
And I'm like it's kind of like what do I not do?
00:19:48.984 --> 00:19:56.759
Like I feel like equity is so, like it touches everything.
00:19:56.759 --> 00:20:28.130
It's not just like this thing that you can do in isolation, like oh, you know, you know, sometimes you see that there is like a function within a business which is like diversity and inclusion, but I wonder that how much that achieves in the equity piece right, when it's not baked into the business.
00:20:28.130 --> 00:20:38.695
Like equity, you're talking about your, how you think about compensation, how you think about progression, how you think about giving feedback.
00:20:38.695 --> 00:20:49.354
There's so much and it's really something that you need to ingrain in pretty much every single process that you have that touches the people in your business.
00:20:49.354 --> 00:21:09.710
So, yeah, I think it's something that you can't really do off in this silo and this little vacuum, like I think it's just something that your leadership need to be on board with and obviously your people functioning to be on board with, because, yeah, it just attaches everything.
00:21:10.961 --> 00:21:24.531
If we were to break it up, I guess maybe I'm not asking the right question, but let's just say that if we wanted to ensure that we're equitable during our hiring process in particular, what are signs we are and what are signs we're not?
00:21:25.075 --> 00:21:25.858
Yeah, okay, cool.
00:21:25.858 --> 00:21:32.207
So, like an equitable recruiting process, you're putting everybody through the same process.
00:21:32.207 --> 00:21:37.412
Yep, first of all, you have the same steps and the same process for everybody.
00:21:37.412 --> 00:21:40.279
You have the same questions that you're asking everybody.
00:21:40.279 --> 00:21:46.148
You're not chopping and changing for different people so you can actually get a proper.
00:21:46.148 --> 00:21:51.086
You can properly benchmark candidates against one another because you've asked them all the same thing.
00:21:52.009 --> 00:21:58.088
Um, it's about making sure that there's equal, like opportunity for people to come into the funnel as well.
00:21:58.088 --> 00:22:03.369
Um, speaking like recruiter lingo here, but like coming and entering into your recruiting process.
00:22:03.369 --> 00:22:19.377
Like you know, there's something that I see a lot of um, and it's never lived ill intent and this is a thing right, like, I feel like I preface a lot of things with that, but a lot of the time you know people, people aren't intrinsically bad.
00:22:19.377 --> 00:22:21.844
Most people right, they want to do the right thing.
00:22:21.844 --> 00:22:27.635
Um, these are just things that we do without thinking that have negative consequences.
00:22:27.635 --> 00:22:36.497
So you have to be so intentional when you are thinking about diversity, equity, inclusion, um, you have to kind of stop and think and pause and think about what you're doing.
00:22:36.497 --> 00:22:49.443
But the example I was going to give there was like um, I've seen situations where there is a new position that's been discussed at like a leadership level, like oh, we need a we need somebody over in a new market.
00:22:49.463 --> 00:22:50.807
We need somebody over in chile.
00:22:50.807 --> 00:22:56.707
Um, and somebody pipes up oh, I'm the perfect person, sandra, sandra would be great at that.
00:22:56.707 --> 00:23:00.167
Next thing you know, sandra's on a plane and like her whole team's going.
00:23:00.167 --> 00:23:01.231
Wait a second.
00:23:01.231 --> 00:23:17.330
Like never heard about that role, never had the opportunity to put their hand up little do you know, tom is fluent in spanish and spent two semesters there like maybe there was a better person for the job, but you didn't even stop because you, just, you just acted without thinking.
00:23:17.330 --> 00:23:29.981
Um, so it's also like giving people equal opportunity to get into to put their hand up, um, and then that you know the equity throughout the process, making sure the process is fair.
00:23:29.981 --> 00:23:31.986
It's the same as objective as well.
00:23:31.986 --> 00:23:45.508
Um, objective interviewing, like again, this kind of blows my mind, but I guess I am, you know, fit in the game for a while now, so maybe it's just because I'm I'm so in it, but it blows my mind.
00:23:45.508 --> 00:23:49.196
How few people have ever actually been trained to interview?
00:23:49.878 --> 00:23:50.118
Yep.
00:23:51.663 --> 00:23:53.633
This was a question I asked people when.
00:23:54.075 --> 00:24:03.048
I was starting to be heard and I talked to a bunch of leaders in tech, did some discovery work, because I just came to understand where is what's the landscape here?
00:24:03.048 --> 00:24:03.932
Where are people at?
00:24:03.932 --> 00:24:07.109
And one of the questions I asked was how did you learn to hire?
00:24:07.109 --> 00:24:15.001
Nobody had an answer to that.
00:24:15.001 --> 00:24:16.546
Um, perhaps like two people who had like a people background.
00:24:16.546 --> 00:24:29.521
I had like an answer that everybody was some form of well, I was kind of flung into a leadership position for the first time I had to hire, so I just did it and I kind of watched what everybody else was doing.
00:24:29.521 --> 00:24:31.326
So I just did what they were doing.
00:24:31.407 --> 00:24:35.685
Maybe somebody says, oh, like you know, I read an HBR article or something Like.
00:24:35.685 --> 00:24:40.241
But that is really the extent that people are like trained in interviewing.
00:24:40.241 --> 00:24:49.769
So again, it's like it's not necessarily that people are coming at things with ill intent, but when you're not trained to objectively assess somebody's ability, it's very hard to do right.
00:24:49.769 --> 00:24:58.643
It could take years and years to for you to perfect that because you have no sort of guardrails as to like what, what does good look like, what does best practice look like?
00:24:58.643 --> 00:25:03.558
Um, so that's something that I always kind of like hone in on it as well.
00:25:03.558 --> 00:25:07.690
Like do do we actually know how to objectively assess somebody?
00:25:07.690 --> 00:25:09.161
What does that look like?
00:25:10.564 --> 00:25:32.265
Something that I see happening a bit of like that makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable is when people say, okay, our team is lacking xyz, so we're only going to look for this, and that can have really negative flow-on effects.
00:25:32.265 --> 00:25:36.416
It can be really like tokenistic.
00:25:36.416 --> 00:25:38.143
It can come across very tokenistic.
00:25:38.143 --> 00:26:06.884
It can cause a lot of resentment in the team with the people who identified with the group that you said that you're no longer going to look for um, and there is huge chance that when that person comes on board eventually it's going to get to them that oh, you were our woman higher um, and then they're going to be questioning whether they're there because of their gender or whether they're there because of their skills.
00:26:07.724 --> 00:26:19.074
So the way that I like to approach things is to focus on the balance pipeline at the very beginning of the process.
00:26:19.074 --> 00:26:32.259
So making sure you have a very balanced type of funnel and then from there, making sure that you have that very kind of fair, equitable and objective assessment process.
00:26:32.259 --> 00:26:41.342
And if you have a, you know, if you have a balance, whatever balance may mean for XYZ, for all right.
00:26:41.342 --> 00:27:01.240
If you have that balance at the top of the funnel and if you have that equitable process throughout, then you should start seeing that, that, um, those uh numbers of diverse candidates trickling through your funnel, um, and you want to be able to say at the end of the day that you hired the best person for the job.
00:27:02.142 --> 00:27:33.310
Um, at the point in time that you can't say that, I would be questioning whether you're doing something for the wrong reasons, like whether you are being tokenistic, I think, like, personally, I don't like the idea of changing your scoring system for diversity, system for diversity, because, again, it's like that objective assessment right.
00:27:33.310 --> 00:27:40.756
Like, if you're keeping the assessment the same for everybody, then you can say that you've hands down, got the right person for the job.
00:27:41.395 --> 00:28:17.021
That said, also the other thing on that is again kind of bringing it back to this like what can breed resentment and what kind of shoots you in the foot when you're doing diversity, equity, inclusion work is when you make moves like that and people then start thinking and this is something I've heard time and time in my career like we don't want to lower the bar, which is kind of offensive to me because it's like why do you think that you know a diverse candidate is going to be less than um?
00:28:17.021 --> 00:28:26.868
You know there's so many amazing um, you know people out there who come from different walks of life, who had just as much skill, just as much ability.
00:28:26.868 --> 00:28:37.246
And like the fact that people think you need to quote, unquote, lower the bar to get in different perspectives like no, like you just need to look harder.
00:28:38.166 --> 00:28:39.529
They exist, they're out there, um.
00:28:39.529 --> 00:28:52.095
And again, like, if you are quote unquote lowering the bar, then you're like like sorry, you're lazy, that was a bit rough, but you're taking an approach that, yeah, it's just kind of a bit lazy in my opinion.
00:28:52.095 --> 00:28:59.821
Like go out there and find the right person, because they do, they'll be out there, um, and you want to be able to say they're the best person for the job.
00:28:59.821 --> 00:29:20.894
That said, like, I feel like there could be a scenario where you do need to look for, like, transferable skills if you can't find the folks that you're looking for in an industry.
00:29:20.894 --> 00:29:22.878
I'll give an example here.
00:29:22.878 --> 00:29:30.942
So I'll give a hypothetical example, examples yet.
00:29:30.942 --> 00:29:34.494
So, um, I'll give a hypothetical example.
00:29:34.494 --> 00:29:43.362
So let's say you are hiring, um for a.
00:29:43.362 --> 00:29:53.713
Let's say you're hiring for a car sales's not a lot of auto sales people out there who are women.
00:29:53.713 --> 00:30:10.682
So true, yeah, but there are so many women sales people out there whose transferable skills can come really nicely into that role, really nicely into that role, um.
00:30:10.701 --> 00:30:24.522
So I think there are, there are cases where you have to be more open-minded in terms of bringing people on board with transferable skills, and what I'll just say there is if you're being open-minded for one group of people, you are open-minded for everybody, right?
00:30:24.644 --> 00:30:44.580
it doesn't just apply to that diverse group, because, again, that's when you start getting yeah this like again, this is like all my opinion, right, like I'm sure there'll be people like who take a different approach and like yeah, I'm always open for, like different perspectives as well.
00:30:44.580 --> 00:30:51.441
So maybe maybe we'll be having this conversation with you at the time and I'll have a different yeah you know, we're all a journey, we're all learning.
00:30:51.480 --> 00:31:07.192
But I think from my experience of what has served me well um in my profession and where I've seen mistakes made that can hurt um the culture or the business like, those are kind of my takeaways.
00:31:07.192 --> 00:31:10.722
No fair call, fair call how do you think locally?
00:31:11.163 --> 00:31:12.306
so we talk about locally.
00:31:12.306 --> 00:31:16.682
In particular, what can we do to actually fix our top of the funnel issues that we have in the tech industry?
00:31:17.885 --> 00:31:19.028
yeah, it's a tough one.
00:31:19.028 --> 00:31:21.874
Um, it does.
00:31:21.874 --> 00:31:23.481
It does start there for sure.
00:31:23.481 --> 00:31:40.702
Um, because you see, like I was, I was looking at this the other day, so don't quote me on this because I don't have it in front of me but looking at the gender makeup of the engineers going through I'm pretty sure it was auckland university that I was looking at that is really balanced.
00:31:40.702 --> 00:31:45.952
Like people going through those degrees, um, it's quite balanced.
00:31:45.952 --> 00:32:04.960
And then you watch it drop off at different career stages till you get to the point, like at the moment, like you know, we're looking for staff and principal engineers and it's really hard to to find gender balance in that really same group of engineers.
00:32:04.960 --> 00:32:08.730
So you've got to think right, like what's going on here?
00:32:08.730 --> 00:32:10.463
Where do we have?
00:32:10.463 --> 00:32:21.430
You know, obviously it was probably a different story when people who are at that level of seniority were going through, but you still see that trend happening of people dropping off.
00:32:21.430 --> 00:32:46.945
You know, like what's going on here that's actually causing that, because if we're getting I I mean we can talk about different types of representation, right, but for this case, like gender, like if we're getting that gender balance at that early stage, um, I think it's less about, like getting people into the educational system, but how do we keep them there?
00:32:46.945 --> 00:32:51.786
And I think that's where, like, equity and inclusion is really an interesting conversation.
00:32:51.786 --> 00:33:04.865
Um, okay, I know like two points I can go down here, but, like, I think there are a lot of areas where we need to do a better job of getting different groups into, like, tech roles.
00:33:04.865 --> 00:33:30.020
Like there is a huge lack of Maori and Pasifika going into those careers, so there are definitely areas where we just need to get more people into um, you know, interested and excited um, but I think we also just need to build more inclusive cultures that are welcoming for people from underrepresented groups, so we don't see that drop off.
00:33:30.903 --> 00:33:37.102
Um, what does it look like you can be you right, like that's ultimately what people want when they go to work.
00:33:37.102 --> 00:33:40.710
The amount of effort it takes to put on a mask every day.
00:33:40.710 --> 00:33:59.327
Um, and I've been in those roles, right, like I, I'm myself not technical, but I've been in positions where I'm the only woman in the room of 12 men and you do feel like you have to play a slightly different game or like say something different.
00:33:59.327 --> 00:34:16.132
Like you feel you're not 100 authentically you, I, I, I will say that I am not in those scenarios or have not been in those scenarios, and that's uncomfortable and I've left roles because of that.
00:34:16.132 --> 00:34:22.893
Like I can't get past, like needing to be something other than authentically myself to feel like I belong.
00:34:24.036 --> 00:34:27.635
It's exhausting and I think that's ultimately just what people want.
00:34:27.635 --> 00:34:33.820
They want to be able to come to a place and not put on a mask, um, and that's when you get the most out of your people as well.
00:34:33.820 --> 00:34:55.628
Because when like again, like, talking about the, the, all the goodness and diversity and why we have, um, you know, such a focus on, well, why there's so much evidence around diverse teams, outperforming homogenous teams, is because those different perspectives that people bring.
00:34:55.628 --> 00:35:08.297
However, if you don't have a psychologically safe place where people can bring their perspective and and speak out and have a different opinion, and then like, like it's all in vain.
00:35:08.297 --> 00:35:17.766
You've got all these diverse people trying to like, conform to this culture that you know they're not bringing their full selves and all the goodness that they could bring.
00:35:17.766 --> 00:35:30.675
So you know, again, it's kind of just like we need to do a better job of building an industry that is more inclusive for folks who are coming from different backgrounds.
00:35:31.800 --> 00:35:33.425
No, definitely, I totally agree with that.
00:35:33.425 --> 00:35:35.110
No, thank you once again.
00:35:35.110 --> 00:35:37.786
All right, that's all, folks.
00:35:37.786 --> 00:35:38.851
Thank you for tuning in.
00:35:38.851 --> 00:35:41.188
We'll have another episode out for you in two weeks time.
00:35:41.188 --> 00:35:42.074
Bye for now.
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