EPISODE 189

 

[INTRODUCTION]

 

[00:00:05] RS: Welcome to Talk Talent To Me, a podcast featuring the most elite talent leaders on the front lines with modern recruitment.

 

[00:00:12] SPEAKER 1: We actually want to understand the themes of someone’s life. We want to understand how they make decisions. Are they willing to take risks? And what it looks like when they fail.

 

[00:00:22] RS: No holds barred, completely off the cuff interviews with directors of recruitment VPS of global talent, CHROs, and everyone in between.

 

[00:00:29] SPEAKER 2: Once I went through the classes and the trainings and got the certifications through diversity inclusion, I still felt like something was missing.

 

[00:00:39] SPEAKER 3: Talent acquisition, it’s a fantastic career. You are trusted by the organization. You get to work with the C suite and the security at the front desk and everybody in between and everybody knows you.

 

[00:00:52] RS: I’m your host, Rob Stevenson, and you’re about to hear the best in the biz. Talk Talent To Me.

 

[EPISODE]

 

[00:00:59] RS: Well, folks, out there in podcast land, I am very excited for today’s episode, because we are again outside the Talk Talent To Me norm where I sit down with VPs of TA and the like. Today, we have a Chief Technology Officer, Diane Yu, on the podcast. Diane, welcome to the show. How are you today?

 

[00:01:17] DY: Good. Thank you. It’s my pleasure to join the show.

 

[00:01:20] RS: Yeah, I’m so pleased to have you here. And part of the reason that I wanted to have you on is because you have this really, I think thoughtful approach to the talent organization and you’re very mindful of your relationship with the talent partners and with the whole recruiting team, and we hear enough from the talent department on this podcast. I wanted to kind of learn a little bit about what it’s like on your side of the house. So, excited to get into all that.

 

Before we get too deep in the weeds here, Diane, would you mind sharing a little bit about your company? And then we can get into your role and your background too?

 

[00:01:52] DY: Yeah, absolutely. My name is Diane Yu, I’m the Chief Technology Officer of Better. Better is a digital first home ownership company. It offers mortgage, real estate, title and homeowner insurance. So, what’s unique about our platform is basically using our [inaudible 00:02:11], technology that we build in house and better is much cheaper and faster, and also offers a transparent, fully digital experience for our customer, which is very unique.

 

Then, we often joke about ourselves and be in the largest unknown startup out there. But because of our current headcount at 8,900, and growing, growing tremendously. We’re still proud of ourselves, being the startup. We’re still proud of ourselves basically being the entrepreneur, but the fact that matters is we’re in a large company that employs a lot of employee nationwide. So, talent is always the key and on top of mind of the entire executive team, especially for me as well.

 

[00:02:55] RS: Good. Yeah, I love to hear that. So, you are the chief technology officer, how would you kind of conceive of your role? What is it that you do every day?

 

[00:03:03] DY: Yeah, it’s very interesting. Even though as a chief technology officer, I often proud myself not being the one that running the technology platform. I actually think, what’s driven the company is not about the technology, it’s about the people who build the technology. It’s the people who actually operate the platform. So, for me and the company, whether the company can make it or become basically a successful company, it largely depends on the talent that they bring in.

 

[00:03:36] RS: Yes, I love hearing that approach. I know my audience does as well, that is music to the years of recruitment folks, because you want to have that buy in from the sea level. And a lot of them share that with me that it really needs to come from the top down, you need to have that investment, from leadership in the company to really, really prioritize hiring and make sure that you are getting the best people as possible. So, I would just love to hear more about your approach to talent. And maybe we can kind of go like weave through your career a little bit, how has hiring throughout your career developed into this space where you have made it a point to really prioritize talent as you grow the company.

 

[00:04:13] DY: So actually, it has to go back since when I started my career. I started my career as an entry level software engineer. So, as an entry level software engineer, and my first job was at DoubleClick, I built and rebuilt a lot of capability for the DoubleClick ad platform. And then later on, I grow and become a manager and I realized the difference a manager can make to build a very strong team, to amplify the impact to the company. That’s when I started in my management career. Once I got further in the management career, the larger the team I manage, the significant impact – the type of talent you’re bringing into the team. It will make to the entire team and to the company as a whole and that’s why I actually build – always have my respects to the talent partners, HR partners in a very unique way, especially in the word that talent is the key.

 

Later on, after I left DoubleClick and I started, co-found a company called FreeWheel with my two other co-founders, and I was the co-founder and the CTO. I built a team from scratch. Since day one, my HR partner worked as my right-hand person who always basically sit down with me and then we figure out what type of talent we need to recruit based on the culture that we want to build. We know that we’re going to get the talent. And we have a specific criteria on how many junior talent we need to get, from what universities, with what education background, and then to what type of interview process that we need to select them to join our team.

 

In addition to that, where we get the experienced talents, and how we get them, so that they actually balance out as a team, they can grow together, they also build a unique culture and bonding together as a team that they can work and behave, and then basically marching forward for execution.

 

That’s what basically what I’m always proud of myself. At the time at FreeWheel, even though it’s a small team as a startup, and our customers are actually global media companies, and our competitors, our company like Google, where we uniquely win to be able to provide the technology platform for those large global media companies that can compete, out compete companies like Google, is because of our unique culture, unique talent. I see that whenever the leadership actually puts an extreme focus on talent, you can build the best execution focused team that can win out against large competitors and they say probably the most respected competitors that my company in the world.

 

I started basically take that for my entire career. Here, I want to replicate the same at Better. Better is a similar thing, as I mentioned. Better is a small startup, but with a lot of employees, actually pretty large startup in a unique field, in financial, where we are actually in the area of focus, where we could actually change the entire financial industry, how people own a home, how people get mortgage, and how people basically use the home to actually grow their financial wealth. In order to do that, when you don’t have a culture of being – everybody’s an entrepreneur, so we need to actually think through what type of talent we want to bring in to make sure that as company grow exponentially, we can still maintain that type of culture. That’s why we’re unique.

 

[00:07:47] RS: Yes. I’m curious, when you were at FreeWheel, and you are building this team, as you said, from scratch, you rattled off all these great examples of how you were being thoughtful about the folks you were interviewing and hiring. I’m curious, what about that process was surprising to you? What did you kind of learn about recruitment as you were sort of building this company and finding the right people that maybe you didn’t know about talent before?

 

[00:08:11] DY: So many ways that when you start off, you have a staff, and you’re saying, “Hey, this is my ideal characteristic of the talent.” When you go down to execution, you’re awfully realize and not everything is based on what you plan for. The key is you don’t have to get, you cannot get everybody cookie cutter in the same way. You have to look at the team in a different way, where you have to bring people from different perspective. That’s where I am a key supporter of diversity in the inclusion, which is very important because at anywhere, any level of the organization, in order to build a healthier organization, you need to make sure that you have well balanced diversity, you need to have a well-balanced talent that come to the table. So, that they bring in a different cultural background. They put bring in different perspective, so that when you make a decision, and then everybody will contribute their perspective, you’re making the best decision. That’s most beneficial to the company.

 

Instead of everybody come in with the same cookie cutter. Typically, a lot of time a lot of managers probably gone off with this ideal type of talent. They’re hiring everybody that look like the same. My approach is also via learning. Realize that it’s very critical to have people think differently come to the table. Hopefully those type of team come up winning.

 

[00:09:33] RS: Yes, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You had this experience building the team from scratch at FreeWheel and now strikes me that the scale is much larger. You probably have way more open roles, more people reporting to you. So, I’m curious how some of those early lessons from building the team at FreeWheel have sort of informed your current approach and also you perhaps now have the luxury of having a talent partner that maybe you didn’t before. So, what is your relationship with a talent partner? What is the ideal working pairing of you and them?

 

[00:10:06] DY: So, yes, I always like to work with my talent partner, and to actually strategically think too, what’s going to happen in the future. Because when you think about talent, it’s not just about bringing the talent that can meet and grow with you today. It’s also about future. As an example, at Better, as I mentioned, Better has a culture, everybody is an entrepreneur. And we appreciate the culture of how quickly you can innovate. Based on that culture, you need to design your target of talent, and how you bring the type of talent that I can pass and represent hustle, and great, and also treat the customer first.

 

That’s pretty unique in the way that a large company because many companies when you grow beyond, basically 1,000 people, you start to have this bureaucracy building. But Better is very different that we hold pride to our culture, and everybody being entrepreneur, and we still behaving and acting as a startup. We’re not worried about basically maintaining the legacy. We’re here to actually recreate the legacy ourselves every day.

 

With that type of culture, basically, I sit down with my HR and recruiting partners, and they have most of my talent. They say every week, I sit down with them, and we talk to what’s the existing team talent and what’s their compensation? Are they the right type for us to maintain our entrepreneur culture? If they’re not, where we’re missing, where we need to add? And we need to think about the talent for this year, and for next two years, and for five years down the road. And then once we bring them in, how do we grow them and grow them so that they can grow along with us? Those are very critical and the key strategic directions, and you cannot just basically treat this as an afterthought. You actually have to treat this as a top of the mind priority in order for these to be successful. That’s basically how I would like to work with my talent partners, on day in and day out base.

 

[00:12:14] RS: I love this entrepreneurial value that you seem to look for in candidates. How do you boil down that desire to hire everyone an entrepreneur? How does that turn into specific competencies that you can kind of screen for?

 

[00:12:28] DY: It’s very interesting you ask that question. We are in the process of actually revamping our interview process again. We’re always revamping that just because our company have grown tremendously in the past year, past 12 months, we actually grew 5x in our team, which is tremendous, and then basically right now, we’re actually looking that in order to grow to the next stage, how we do that, how we do that properly. We decided that it’s actually very critical for us to maintain this entrepreneur type of mentality, which means we want to hire people who never take no as the answer.

 

When we look at that, we look at their past experience, of course, as a technology engineering team. And then first of all, we need to make sure that they have the really solid technology background, for sure. We go through a slew of interview questions to detect, basically detect their technical expertise, their skill set, or whether those are the ones that we want in the dish and on top of that. It’s very important for us to look for the entrepreneur mindset for the people, the type of talent with that type of mindset.

 

We specifically design questions, and they’re trying to identify whether they are the people who can always within a complex situation, they can always find the answer, or never stop until they find the answer. We also look at their past experience, whether they have a track record of doing that. Those for us is actually, on the top of the mind. It’s not about how well-spoken you are. It’s about whether you have that mindset to be able to find a solution. If you believe something, you’ll actually do whatever it takes to get there. Not letting anybody stop you on the way.

 

[00:14:11] RS: Well, if you’re not optimizing on being well spoken, I don’t know how much of a chance I have getting hired at Better. Maybe I can bring other things to the table. We should circle back. I love also how you mentioned, it’s not just about the roles you have immediately in front of you to hire but you’re thinking about the long term, one year, two years, five years down the road. I’m curious how you balance that approach, because of course you do need people immediately, right? You have goals and products you need to hit. But then you are thinking a couple years down the line, is that a factor of product roadmap? Is that a factor of expected growth? How do you balance that need to hire people today for your existing goals but then also be thinking, “Okay, but in 2023 we want to launch this and we need these people for that.” What does that balance look like?

 

[00:15:01] DY: It’s actually in this fast-moving environment. It’s literally impossible to put down five-year roadmap, saying, “In five years, we’re going to do this”, and probably most likely is to, it’s actually incorrect, right? So, you end up having to come back and change that. When we hire talent, one of the key things we look for, we always say, and focus on is we’re hiring for potential, not hiring for the past experience. In many ways, your past experience is a reflection of your past capability, it does not mean whether you have the potential to grow. So, whenever we can, we look for the type of talent that can grow with us. We often call that internally, whether that’s candidate has a growth mindset, meaning, they can quickly learn, they can absorb, and it can come back and build on top of what they just learned.

 

We value that very much, which means that we can bring a team. The team can grow to whatever the company takes us to the next stage. When we have a new opportunity come up, we look at the existing folks, whether we have existing leaders and the teams can actually take on that new challenge and then own it from there. That’s the key. We’re not basically sitting here [inaudible 00:16:18] the type of talent we’re going to need for five years from now. We’re making all the type of talent with the potential, can grow with us for the next five years.

 

[00:16:28] RS: Yes, that makes all the sense in the world, because like you say, you can’t plan for five years out, but you can plan for someone who is adaptable to be able to succeed five years out. I do love that approach, the hiring for potential, because you want someone to be able to grow into a role and learn more things and wield their expertise in lots of different ways. If you aren’t hiring for that, then from the candidate’s point of view, it’s not really an opportunity, right? You’re just saying, “Hey, can you do the exact same thing you did before? Why would I do that? Why would I take that job unless I was being paid a lot more money, or unless my existing company was so toxic that I just needed to get out? It wouldn’t be an opportunity.” In air quotes.

 

When you are screening for potential, I’m just really curious how you look at that, how you sort of assess whether someone has that ability. Let’s say I was just interviewing for your team and then afterward, you were like, “Well, Rob really seems like he could grow with a company. I think he has potential over time.” Well, what I have said in that interview to make you believe that was the case?

 

[00:17:27] DY: So, typically when we look at that, well, first of all, we look at your past record, and whether you are – basically, you have a track record that take on new challenge quickly, rather quickly. And then sometimes in personal, it’s a red flag if I look at someone that basically their career has stalled for the past 10 years. They’re in the same job, and they’re just getting comfortable. And then to us, it’s very important that in order to maintain the entrepreneur mentality, and they remain hungry, they learn new things. Every other year, they do different stuff, they try it out, even when they fail, there’s a reason why they fail.

 

We’d like that type of mentality and we like people that who always be curious about learning. The fact of the matter is, and even though we’re pretty big company, by headcount, but within the industry we’re in, we’re very tiny. So, there are many new adjacent fields we need to explore. We need people that are naturally curious, and are getting excited about learning new stuff and you can see that from the interview. You can see that via the conversation. So why, and then, their approach about them doing pick up the new challenge, and the getting excited about new opportunity, getting excited to learn about new things, those are all the characteristics we look for in a candidate, which is a big indication whether they can grow or not. 

 

[00:18:56] RS: I love that those examples you just gave are not specific to the technology department. You could really apply that to any role you are hiring for. It’s noteworthy because you are Chief Technology Officer, and it would be reasonable to expect you to catch all of your assessment in their technical ability, in their own expressed mastery of this. I’m sure you have that in there. You need to meet all these bars of the skill you have. But that last piece like okay, being able to do the function is that’s the first box you check.

 

[00:19:31] DY: That’s the minimum requirement.

 

[00:19:32] RS: That’s the minimum, yeah, but now there’s all these additional things that are arguably more important. There are million engineers out there. But how many are there who can meet all of those really important values to you? It seems like you’re optimizing less on mastery and more on like someone’s personal growth and ability.

 

[00:19:49] DY: Exactly. And then I always tell my team that it’s not our goal to actually just grow the team. We need to grow properly. We need to grow is the right type of talent. If I have a magic wand, I would much rather have a small team, but everybody was the same, mentality, they can grow from there, and then they proud themselves about how quickly they can learn new stuff, because that’s what matters, especially as a startup. You want people with that type of mentality to be able to grow along with you.

 

It is critical that you know about programming language. It is critical that you know how to do our job. But in addition to that, when you look for potential, you want to look for people like that, basically, with the growth mentality, to quickly learn and adapt.

 

[00:20:37] RS: So, when you are explaining these expectations to the talent team, because presumably, they’re going out and sourcing these individuals, what is your expectation for them? Are they bringing this stuff up in the phone screen? Do you want an amount of this sort of screening already done by the people that come to you? So, by the time they’re meeting you and your team, it’s like, “Okay, they’ve expressed this curiosity and its growth.” How much of that do you expect from the talent team?

 

[00:21:00] DY: We count a lot on them to actually look for the right type. So, what we typically do is we do that actually, frequently as a practice, where we look for the resume of candidate. And then my recruiting team, my management team, I actually sit together with all the type of talent from the talent department. And then based on their resume, and then we basically pick out how I view the individual maybe because we don’t have the luxury to always have a committee to actually interview the candidate. And then we learn by you know, basic reading through their resume, and then basically, get every action. How you view a talent like this. Based on their past experience, what you can read out of that. And then correlate that back to the people who actually met them, and then to make sure that we all have the same view on the talent is very critical that we put together a set of criteria.

 

But it’s also very critical that, not only with a set of criteria, because when you read the talent, it’s not just about an Excel, and the checkbox, whether yes or no. It’s all about basically something else, in addition, that you read out of those set of basic experience and a candidate. We use that as a training mechanism to get everybody on the same page. We take the feedback and the recruiting team will take the feedback, and then tune, and tune their direction looking for similar set of candidates and coming back saying, “Hey, what do you think about this type?” And then, a lot of times what I find – once we go through several rounds of that, for a particular role, it will be a lot easier to get people on the same page. And then the post recording process, and the interview process will go a lot smoother afterwards.

 

[00:22:55] RS: Yeah, that makes sense. It strikes me that if I were a recruiter, if I were hiring for roles on your team, and I did a good job, and I did right by you, someone like you, any C level, that would be like a career accelerating kind of thing for me to deliver over time for someone very high up in the org. So, I’m curious, what does the talent team do to impress you? When you work with a recruiter, anyone in the talent team, and they’re just really crushing it, what does that look like from your point of view?

 

[00:23:25] DY: Those are the basic type of recruiter I will pay attention and then I will personally look after their career growth. I want to make sure to get the best review and then I want to make sure that the manager is aware of they’re doing a good job. And we have actually a set of criteria to evaluate the value of a recruiting team. We have a pretty large recording team, the company wide. And then when we look at basic talent within the recording team, we’re always looking for whether the recruiter is bringing the right type of talent, not just by the sheer quality number of the candidate they bring in, it’s actually the right type of talent can meet into our stage and that’s pretty critical criteria for us. And I’m sure that a lot of company using the similar type of criteria.

 

I pay personal attention to my top performer in the recruiting team and I think that’s very key because you need to have the right type of recruiter to help you to bring in the right talent.

 

[00:24:23] RS: When you say top performer, is that ultimately just how many hires they made? Or how also do you kind of assess them?

 

[00:24:29] DY: Also, we’re looking at basically, the selection rate. Out of the candidate they put in the pipeline, how many of them actually got accepted the offer. If you could go in put in a lot of candidate and percentage wise, you still end up being a higher amount of offer, but what we’re looking at is how effective they are in terms of filtering all the candidate only presents the candidate meet the best criteria. Also, how long it takes in average to the hire from an old job opening to close the candidates on site.

 

[00:25:02] RS: Interesting. So, it’s almost like an accuracy measure, right? How aligned are you with the team? Because when the people you’re bringing are, we agree that yes, we want to hire these people.

 

[00:25:12] DY: Yes, exactly.

 

[00:25:14] RS: Yeah, that makes sense. Because like you say, you can have a huge funnel and maybe get those hires but that’s more time. It’s more time for very expensive engineers. So, really, the fewer people you interview to get to a higher the better, right?

 

[00:25:25] DY: Exactly. So, it is the opposite. You think that’s pretty obvious. But a lot of company probably don’t pay attention to that. They only look at the accepted offers. But for us, it’s very critical, just because we grow very quickly. And then what’s the amount of effort it takes to get the accepted offers even more critical for us.

 

[00:25:45] RS: Right, because it’s expensive, spending all that time. I want to go back to something you said earlier, because I’m a very naughty interviewer. And there’s no cohesion whatsoever to the questions I asked. But I wanted to make sure we covered your approach to DE&I because I know that’s something that’s important to you. I’m curious how you look into recruiting approaches to make sure that pipelines are representative in a way that’s satisfying to you. Of course, you expect the talent team to be thinking about this kind of thing, but the more people who are paying attention to it and holding themselves accountable, the better. What is your process for making sure that you’re getting the sort of representative pipeline, you need to build a diverse team?

 

[00:26:28] DY: Yes, I often take the approach that I believe, in order to make that successful, and then to truly build a diverse and inclusive team, you have to have a strong conviction, that’s going to help you. Otherwise it would just won’t work. Because today, the fact of the matter is your pipeline are not bringing the right and it doesn’t have enough reps in the patient. If you’re starting from that pipeline, if you don’t work hard, you will end up with the result of saying that it’s impossible to hire them. Therefore, let’s not – I don’t even pay attention. A lot of companies start from they truly want to hire a diverse team, but ended up settling with something lesser just because they couldn’t get enough people in the pack.

 

I heard those arguments, you know, many times over, many companies and a lot of recruiting team will tell you the same. I’ll just give you a one story. So recently, this year, as Better is starting the college recruiting program, and when we started with the college recruiting program, and we have a list of the criteria, we study stuff criteria. My recruiting team originally, initially, they were worried, “Hey, with this list of criteria, we won’t be able to meet our diversity goal.” And I said, “No, I will not settle.” And they asked, “Hey, when you have to choose, and which one do you choose?” And I said, “I want to choose both, I will not settle. Let’s figure out. I want to be able to meet our diversity goal, and the ratio, and I want to be able to meet my criteria.”

 

We actually go back and revamp the target pipeline, the target universities we have, and then type of talent we target and making sure that we can bring enough, agree upon a percentage of the diversity student coming in, so that we can meet our goal. One of the examples, I pay personal attention to female software engineer. So, we look at female software engineer number. The original pipeline doesn’t show that and the other team come back saying, “Hey, what’s the type of you know criteria put in, it’s very hard for us to meet a goal.” I told them not to expand university, just to add female graduate student so that we can meet our percentage in the pipeline.

 

With that type of rigor, we were able to form the pipe from the entire pipeline. We can get to the accepted offer with a much better representation of our DE&I ratio across the board for our team. So, I will call that the success. But the success does not automatically happen type of success. It actually takes someone who would never settle until we see the right pipeline to be able to bring in. So, that’s what I call, it actually takes the conviction. You cannot just stop at, “This is what I want and then let’s see how it goes.” You actually need to look through every step along the way.

 

I also, in addition too, basically making sure the pipeline has the enough representation. In addition to that, I also earmark a few folks. I track them along the interview process, figure out whether they got unexpected dropped during the process and figuring out why. And that way, can help us to identify any type of implicit bias may happen during our interview process to fix them, so that people with the diversity representation can successfully mix through the pipeline, and they can get to the offer stage.

 

It takes a lot of work, it doesn’t come easy, but it can be done. And with a strong conviction, you can build a strong team like that. That team will be super effective than the product for the company.

 

[00:30:25] RS: What is an example of an unexpected drop?

 

[00:30:28] DY: There are places, and to be honest, these days, even with all those media coverage, there’s still a lot of implicit bias happening. I’ll give you another story. It’s a story about my daughter. So, my daughter, she’s nine now. When she was growing up, she was like five years old, and she really loves to play ball. There’s not anything wrong she love. So, she wanted to play soccer. And I got her a program, basically, for the the soccer team. She was so excited. If you wear a pink princess dress, to go to the soccer field. I did not know and I did not pay attention to that, which was my fault.

 

But I remember, even to this day, I remember she was wearing that pink princess dress, running forward the soccer field and don’t realize that everybody running on the field are boys, and wearing dark t-shirt and shorts. She stopped at the border of the field, and then stood there, silently, watching the boys running around. In a few seconds, she turned around, said, “Mom, let’s go home.” I still remember vividly that picture. She stopped trying just because everyone else running on the field doesn’t look like her. She feels like she’s so different and that’s the reason she stopped. Who knows, she may be a great soccer player. But she stopped trying just because no one else looked like her.

 

From that point onward, I always have that picture in my head when I think about talent. And that’s why I feel so strongly that you do, you have to have people who can support each other, who can look like each other, to join the team and being supportive of each other for their voice to be heard. So, it is critical when we look at talent. We want to make sure that nobody’s unique, nobody is actually just [inaudible 00:32:34] so that they are prospective, their voice doesn’t have the level of support. And then when I look at building a team, I work super hard to make sure that there is no one outlier in the team and then their opinion, their experience doesn’t get shared with others. And therefore, their voice is being surprised, so that their voice never get hurt.

 

[00:33:01] RS: That’s a remarkable story. Thank you for sharing that with me, Diane. And it strikes me that the coach could have come over to your daughter, noticed her reluctance, or even another player, anybody and said, “Hey, I know you’re in a princess dress, that doesn’t mean you can’t kick a ball. That doesn’t mean you can’t be successful here. It doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy this.” And that perhaps is what a candidate needs if they’re in a scenario where, “Oh, no one in this interview process looks like me, or can I succeed at this company, there’s no one else – there’s a representation of people who look like me.” If it’s up to them, they’re going to say, “Let’s go home.” Right? They’re going to say, “I don’t want to be a part of this.” So, you have to be deliberate about identifying people who may not feel as though they can succeed in an area and telling them that you can succeed. That’s not the case.

 

[00:33:51] DY: Exactly. So, a lot of people probably don’t even realize it’s happening. And that’s why in the interview process, a lot of times, just because the people don’t talk like you, doesn’t look like you, they may think that they’re not competent in certain way. And then those people may automatically shut off. That was the reason why, in addition, I want to make sure the pipe, the coming in, part of the funnel, has the right representation of all the different underrepresented groups. That’s also the reason why I actually earmark people and attract them alongside of the interview process, just to ask questions, and did they get dropped off? Why? What’s the reason? What type of question you ask to drive that conclusion? If you don’t have that type of rigor, and a you will be the victim of the unconscious bias, which is still happening today in our society, to be honest. We have to face that and we have to make sure that we design the process and making sure if those type of candidates indeed drop off, it’s for the right reason. It’s not because of unconscious bias.

 

[00:35:07] RS: Yes, such an important approach. This has been such a wonderful conversation. Thank you for joining me today and sharing your whole approach. The rigor you bring to hiring and how thoughtful and mindful you are about it is really encouraging to hear. So, I am just so grateful that you were a part of the show and shared your expertise and experience with me today.

 

[00:35:26] DY: Thank you so much. It is my pleasure.

 

[OUTRO]

 

[00:35:32] RS: Talk Talent To Me is brought to you by Hired. Hired empowers connections by matching the world’s most innovative companies with ambitious tech and sales candidates. With Hired, candidates and companies have visibility into salary offers, competing opportunities and job details. Hired’s unique offering includes customized assessments and salary bias alerts to help remove unconscious bias when hiring.

 

By combining technology and human touch, our goal is to provide transparency in the recruiting process and empower each of our partners to employ their potential and keep their talent pipeline full. To learn more about how we can help you find your next great hire, head to hired.com/tt2m.

 

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