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foreign
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thank you for joining us today we're going to be talking about a topic that's very dear to me and very important to me
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personally and important to wrap book as a whole which is related to diversity Equity inclusion and belonging
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my name is Zaid I'm the VP of engineering at trapbook I'm based in Toronto and Canada my pronouns are here
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and hi my name is Jess and I'm a senior engineer at Rap Book my pronouns are she
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her and I'm based in Alabama unfortunately
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today we will be talking about our journey at trapbook with building and diverse teams
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we'll go over what we tried how it didn't work
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and what eventually worked for us in making progress on our diversity goals
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but first before we dive in I'm going to give you some background about what crap book is and the context for our
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diversity inclusion and belonging efforts
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Rap Book is the easiest way to onboard workers pay them and insure them
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for entertainment production companies for example commercial Productions
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TV film and and the sort
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rapid was founded in 2018 we have 127 million dollars in funding
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from and recent Hollywood's tiger Global and other like katzenberg from the
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entertainment industry the team is 170 people strong with 68 in
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engineering and growing when I first joined Rap Book in 2020
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engineering was a five person team the company total was 20 company
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and we had plans to grow the company to 40 people as engineering sorry to 40 people by the end of 2021. that's a lot
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of growth for one year it means that getting the right people
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on the team is critical so many new people joining means that
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they will be shaping our values our culture and how we operate getting it right is non-negotiable
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at the time we identified a few main challenges that we would need to address in order to succeed at doing that
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the first one is as a small startup with no name out there behind us it's going
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to be hard to stand out we need to be bringing in
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talent and compete with much larger companies and well-established players for the
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same pool of talent the other challenge is building a
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diverse team in a not so diverse industry doing that
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was a key priority for us from the beginning
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turns out that standing out is not so hard uh
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you just have to get the fundamentals of the experience right so provide that positive interview
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experience whether the person joins the company or not
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they're going to be talking about that experience and putting putting a either
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positive name or a bad name for for the company we were able to structure our interviews
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so that they're faster than everyone else with a lot less time commitment in fact you can interview uh in a single
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day for and do the whole interview process
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and the other thing is it's important for the interview to reflect what is happening on the job
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so there are a lot of interviews that I like to call the battle of the egos the
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interviewer is trying to assert Supremacy intellectually or otherwise over the person being interviewed by
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asking them questions that have no relation to what's happening on the job we absolutely did not want that to be
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part of anything we do the interview especially the technical interview had to reflect what's happening on the job
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we also adopted remote first which means we can meet Talent where they are
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and we're not restricted by the diversity of the main Tech hubs in San
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Francisco or New York or Toronto so we find people where they are and we
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get a more diverse talent pool in the process
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the other question is why why should we care about building a diverse team
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I want to say it's just the right thing to do and that should be enough we shouldn't
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need to give other reasons but uh it's also been shown that diversity
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leads to better outcomes why is that you know diverse teams have
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diverse perspective shaped by different life experiences
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which means we're thinking of problems from more angles and coming up with
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better Solutions as a result the team will also reflect our customers
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so we will understand the customer mindset and the problems that they would be facing and be able to better
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anticipate them and provide them with better Solutions
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also underrepresented groups face additional challenges and hurdles in the
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industry so if we're able to provide them with a an environment where they can succeed
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we can actually help make the industry itself more diverse
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and as a result more resilient and provide a better outcome for everyone because the industry itself has wider
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sets of perspectives
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okay so how did we go about doing this um starts with the fundamentals
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basically a key point is we need support from the leadership
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when I joined drop book uh there were no questions about whether we're going to be building a diverse
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team or not we talked about it from day one and decided to go ahead with it uh
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you can do some individual efforts on local teams to try to build a diverse
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team but it's always going to be localized and what happens if you know the people you hire and move to other
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teams or they're trying to work with other teams which should be happening here you should be you shouldn't be silent into a diverse Island in a not so
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diverse company uh it doesn't scale you cannot repeat this process you're not going to get
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very far in an island so you need whole company buy-in to
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diversity efforts the second part is to reduce bias
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throughout the process and throughout the company so as much as we'd like to eliminate
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bias we all have some internalized prejudices based on our life experiences based on
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the messages we hear including against people who look like us and behave like us
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the other thing is you know if if we don't care to we don't put the effort to
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reduce the bias it's very easy to negotiate against ourselves and through the interview
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process I like this person they were we had such a good conversation
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therefore let's hire them without thinking of maybe other aspects that
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were overlooking just because we like the person and vice versa
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we need to establish a standardized hiring processes with clear rubrics
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clear success criteria so that we're evaluating everyone from the same Baseline
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we need to establish job levels and expectations for everyone in the company so that we're also measuring people from
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the same set of expectations we need objective hiring criteria we
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need inclusive job descriptions that are not off-putting to certain groups
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also bring in multiple interviewers into the panel so that you have varying the script perspectives in the interview
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this way if everyone agrees that the candidate should be hired no problem if one person says higher and the other one
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says not then we need to have a conversation understand you know are we
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overlooking something uh is the rubric that we're using missing a key piece or
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maybe some unconscious bias went into into into that decision and
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reflect record record that come back to it and
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improve for the next candidate and the next candidate experience
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one key piece of advice that I see out there is that all candidates should see
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people from underrepresented groups on all interview panels
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um and this is great if your company is already hit its diversity targets you already
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have a diverse team and it's just happening naturally but what if you're starting from a place
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where you're uh there are challenges and and diversity you have a lot of groups
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that are heavily underrepresented in your team what happens if there are two women on
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the team in a 30 person engineering team and you're you're asking them to be in every single interview so that you
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present a diverse image how are they going to perform their core job duties
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how are you gonna how are they going to advance in their career what impact will that have to their
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ability to become senior engineers and staff engineers and and managers and and
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leaders that represent the group uh so I'm I'm not a fan of this if we're
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not there let's build a diverse team and and show the diversity and the interview panel that way and if you are going to
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ask them to do interviews use that time strategically
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the second part is we need to make sure that the environment the people we
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interview and hire uh is inclusive that
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your the people you're bringing in are not going to create a hostile environment for the underrepresented
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groups that you are interviewing and that means we need to filter out people during the interview process
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on their attitude towards diversity and inclusion
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how ask about it at trapbook when the recruiters meet
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with the person for the very first time they asked them about their views on diversity
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why do you think there are less underrepresented why do you think there
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are underrepresented groups in Tech while using that problem exists and a lot of candidates are say to us
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that's the first time I've ever been asked this question in an interview
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we ask it again during the hiring manager interview and we talk about it in the final stage
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interviews and yes we have said no to technically brilliant candidates that
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would have created uh unwelcoming environment for our under represented groups we absolutely have to
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filter on that so the interview process is as much for
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us as candidates as it is for companies seeking new hires it's our chance to determine is this company and its
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culture the right fit for me will this company provide me with the opportunities to fulfill my current or
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even future career goals so while I was interviewing several months back I was struck by rap book's emphasis on
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inclusion It Started from the first interview and stayed consistent through each interview round
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but I was wondering was my experience unique so I talked to a friend of mine who's in the audience and happened to
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the mail to compare our experiences to see if we were receiving the same types of
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questions in the same positive experience and we were so this really sent the message to me
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that rap book was prioritizing an inclusive team at the company level and
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as a byproduct it would create a team of like-minded individuals and I wanted to be a part of it
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so I received an offer what happened then on my first day I received an onboarding
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checklist specifically tailored to me with all all the details of like
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specific Milestones I should hit for each Benchmark of my first 90 days information to ramp up on all things rap
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book so I wasn't left with that typical uncertainty as a team new team member of
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when should I be shipping my first story because I think that's a feeling we all have and also am I ramping up quickly enough
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I was also assigned an onboarding buddy from my team who helped me acclimate to things of the company its culture the
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product and its Tech stack and it was a person I could go to with any questions ideas uncertainties in my case my
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onboarding buddy for my team was a woman but I later learned that for anybody who joins Rap Book if they identify as
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non-binary or as a woman they may get an additional onboarding buddy to make sure
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that they have somebody else from that group to pair with so why why do they do that I don't
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actually know the actual answer but the reason that stands out to me is imposter
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syndrome and studies show that imposter syndrome is much more prevalent amongst
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underrepresented groups in Tech such as women so a little bit about me I was the only
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woman in my software engineering program at my University and they didn't really know my name they
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just referred to me as the chick and now more than a decade later I've
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spent most of my career as a senior engineer even spent some time as a tech lead both as an em and as a staff
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engineer so people actually know my name although my name is Jessica Lawrence so sometimes
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people have a Freudian slip and call me Jennifer but it's okay I understand what they mean
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uh but you would think after all that I would have tons of confidence and few
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self-doubts right but no I battle some form of imposter syndrome on such a regular basis and it
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gets heightened anytime I have a major change like joining a new company but from my experience having an
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onboarding buddy somebody who likely had the same feelings as me gave me that
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support system I needed so I was better able to battle my imposter syndrome and prevent my self-doubts from manifesting
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into my reality now I've only been here a few months but
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now I've assumed the role of onboarding buddy for a new team member and with this experience I've seen how it's
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iterated and improved with each new hire um and really I think that's due to the
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encouragement we see receive from day one that we should improve this process
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for the next person we should be a part of it and that signals something to me in particular which is going to sound
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super cheesy but I think it's true uh that I immediately have an impact
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so how did this all work out for us you know we had strong
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feedback from candidates they had a great experience regardless of success in the interview process
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engineering Grew From 5 to 21 by October of last year
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but we were not making progress on gender diversity
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in fact we were moving backwards we started the year with 20 percent uh women and non-binary representation
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and by October we were at 11 percent but this was supposed to work if you
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search on Google and look at the recommendations on how
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to build a diverse team we were doing it all it was supposed to be working
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um so did we give up
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of course not we decided to Double Down we decided to set a top level okr for
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the engineering department to for our diversity numbers and we thought about it should we set it
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at 20 didn't feel right that's way too low 30 30 percent
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uh that seems to be where the industry targets between 20 and 30 percent
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but that still did not feel right so we decided to set it at 50 percent
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and why 50 because it matches the census of the general population
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we have a chance to not only improve diversity at rap book but to contribute
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to improving diversity in the industry as a whole we want Rap Book to be a force to making
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the whole industry a better place for underrepresented
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groups and I want to talk about the key Point
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here which is improving diversity does not mean you
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compromise on rubrics and lowering expectations you give
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everyone the same bar the same interview process the same set of standards
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uh if you if you start playing favorites with certain groups because of their
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background you're going to create a backlash and that backlash is exactly is not
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something we want we don't want to be moving backwards we want to create a Level Playing Field for everyone and help people succeed
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regardless of their Background by providing them with the environment where they can do their best work
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we also need to be aware of unconscious biases we all have them all the time pretending otherwise doesn't do us any
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good we need to service them to be better equipped to prevent them from impacting our feedback or decisions to learn from
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them to grow because ultimately we don't want to replicate the status quo of the industry and I'm going to make an
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assumption here that everybody in the room is going to agree with this next statement we want to be a part of making it much more diverse and much more
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inclusive okay so what did we try this time around
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to actually make progress on our goals
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the first one was to partner with organizations that represent under uh underrepresented groups
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whether it's gender or bipark organizations
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and this helps you know gets our name out there we might get a couple applicants here and there or a couple
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people to talk to but it's not enough on its own
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the next thing we thought about is perhaps we can reserve a role that would
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be for underrepresented groups the problem with this is it doesn't
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scale you can't apply it across the whole department
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uh and more importantly it actually is discriminatory what happens if you get
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an applicant and they get through the interview process they
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pass at for for that role do you say no to them I don't think that's fair
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so we decided against taking that approach
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the other idea that got floated around is the Rooney Rule the policy comes from the NFL and the
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idea is to require that for every hire that you make that at least one
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candidate from an underrepresented background gets interviewed
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and this was challenging for us to think of how to apply it when we're hiring 30 40
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50 engineers uh if we hired one underrepresented candidate doesn't mean we can fill the
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rest with non-under represented groups it doesn't quite work it works well when you're
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trying to fill one or two roles perhaps in an industry where competition for talent is not as
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intense and you have the time to tell people to wait while we interview others
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so at some point we figured we can Leverage uh sourcing efforts that our talent team
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is doing the Outreach that they do uh to to find people and
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we decided to try it out for a month just say Focus your efforts on finding
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underrepresented candidates to go through the interview process
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we saw some success we were able to make some some great tires that way
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the big problem we run into is our the top of our funnel dried up uh the
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response rates to our Outreach dropped drastically and we didn't have as many candidates to
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interview in that month as you can guess we did not give up uh
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in fact the talent team got together put their heads together
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and came up with a new strategy for reaching Talent
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the big idea that they had was to actually create a database of names gather thousands of female names
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include names that are more common in different ethnic backgrounds and use that as part of the Search terms
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and suddenly we were finding candidates that were not coming up in any other
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search the algorithms were probably search algorithms were probably excluding them
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in the first place and we were starting to have conversations with them
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and it actually worked we were seeing better
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response rates were getting candidates and we were making hires as a result of
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this so we decided to make the strategy permanent
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the talent team focuses 100 of their efforts on improving representation of
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underrepresented groups um anyone who applies any of you in this
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room if you apply you're going to go through the process we're not stopping any of that
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if you if anyone is referring anyone in the company we're not stopping any of that it goes through so we're not
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discriminating against anyone we can repeat the process for as long as we need to as long as we want to and it
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scales so these are three key things that we wanted to achieve and we have a we have
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a way now for building a diverse team
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so what is the result
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our gender representation group
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over 32 percent today and it's continuing to grow in fact we had a goal to hit 30 by end
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of June and we just smashed through that I'm very confident that we will hit our
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Target for 50 at some point
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so I'm going to just recap the learnings that we've had from this
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uh the time to start working on diversity is from the beginning
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it's never too early to pay attention to it the conventional wisdom for what works
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and doesn't work uh might not work in your company so it will take iteration
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it will take trying um we need to build processes tools and an
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organization that strives to reduce bias throughout it
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we need to focus on inclusion so that we don't lose underrepresented folks from
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the company after they join and create an environment where anyone who does not look like the majority of
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the people feels excluded and they're going to leave the company and if they see another company like that they're going
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to leave the industry we want to be good stewards of the the
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industry the whole company and Leadership of the
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company needs to buy in this is key to enabling Swiss Key and
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enabling wrapbook to double down and actually find the strategy that works for us
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it's also important to acknowledge that without that whole company buy-in the
00:27:15.480
talent team might have not agreed to double down on that strategy it's a team effort we all have to think
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together and work together in finding uh diverse talents and improving the
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industry we've grown our diversity numbers from
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11 to 32 percent today and on our way to 50 percent
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and one thing I want to stress is that we've only covered a tiny portion of diversity equity and inclusion and what
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it means to do it in a company we can probably talk about this for hours at a time
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um things like how do we do promotions How We Do Performance Management how would we do hiring
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how do people deal with conflict in the company how are decisions being made all
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of these play Big factors in creating a space where everyone can Thrive
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regardless of their background I hope that you find these lessons
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helpful and that you can apply them wherever you work
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if this resonates with you uh come talk to us
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there's many of us in the conference 18 I want to say of us if I'm counting
00:28:35.880
right you can visit our booth as well we have Polaroid cameras you can get a picture
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taken there's popcorn there or hang out on the couches we would love to talk to
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you can also learn more on our career website we're hiring for many different
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roles so looking forward to chatting with you thank you for listening and enjoy the
00:29:01.020
rest of the conference
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we have one minute if there are any questions the question is have we thought of
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including neurodiversity in our diversity efforts uh absolutely you know gender diversity is only one
00:29:23.760
one dimension there there's a bias against age neurodiversity like
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backgrounds and and we we like to make the effort to uh to accommodate whatever
00:29:38.039
people needed we've had we've uh we've had interviewers that uh you know said
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they prefer written communication they don't want to have the camera on during the interview
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so we'll do the pairing exercise with no camera and then talk about it and then they can present whatever they do in the
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pairing exercise as they're ready at different points so we'll make accommodations to whatever is
00:30:02.159
needed in terms of style it's not relevant to how you conduct your job as
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long as you're able to conduct it and collaborate with the person
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so the question is how do you provide tools to make people feel safe when
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they're coming in uh I think this one is again is a multi-faceted aspect like there is uh it
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applies to everyone who's joining you want to have uh teams where you provide
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the psychological safety and Trust across the board for people to be able to bring issues forward and talk about
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them so it's fundamental across the board that managers and and teammates
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are are providing that environment and you also want to think of what
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happens if there is a an environment where that's not happening
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uh uh like um you you made about higher for for one reason or another like the
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interview process didn't didn't filter and the environment is not there you want a safety
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hatch to escape and have the person find someone to talk to that they Trust
00:31:13.080
uh and this is you know where having those safe spaces for underrepresented groups maybe a private slack channel the
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second onboarding body being part of it uh and all of that uh all of those
00:31:27.659
mechanisms so that uh there is a group of people who can speak on your behalf
00:31:33.840
if something is not going right you kind of have to think about it from
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all of those angles and unfortunately in some companies HR does not represent
00:31:46.080
the employees that represents the company and is protecting the company so and a lot of places people don't feel
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safe going to HR so you have to create those alternative mechanisms and
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alternative channels for someone to speak on your behalf
00:32:06.299
thank you for listening thank you for the great questions