Last month we recorded a live version of the show as part of The Recruiting Automation Conference organised by recruiting tech vendor Wade and Wendy. The theme of this virtual conference was diversity and inclusion, and I was delighted to get to do another interview with recent podcast guest Anna Chalon Director or Recruiting and Diversity and Inclusion at Frame.io.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Understanding stereotypes and challenging preconceived ideas
• Four steps to improving D&I within your organisation
• Building an inclusive culture
• Dealing with unconscious bias
• Recruitment marketing for diverse hiring
• Increasing diversity in referrals
• Diverse interview panels
• Culture add versus culture fit.
• Measuring and reporting
• What improvements have Frame.io seen happen as a result of their focus on D&I
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Transcription:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:00:54]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 293 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Last month we recorded a live version of the show as part of the Recruiting Automation Conference, which was organized by recruiting tech vendor Wade and Wendy. The theme of the virtual conference was Diversity and Inclusion and I was delighted to get to do another interview with recent podcast guest Anna Chalon, Director of Recruiting and Diversity and Inclusion at Frame IO. In this conversation, Anna talks about the four step methodology Frame IO has adopted to improve diversity and inclusion within their organization and some of the results they’ve achieved. Now I’m delighted to have Anna Chalon from Frame IO as my guest on this live edition of the show. Anna, could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Anna Chalon [00:01:59]:
Of course. Thanks Matt for having me on the podcast. So my name is Anna and I’m the Director of Recruiting and Diversity and Inclusion at Frame IO, which is a video collaboration platform and I’m based in New York.
Matt Alder [00:02:15]:
Fantastic stuff. Now I know as part of your role you’ve done a lot of work exploring conscious and unconscious bias. Tell us a bit about what you’ve learned.
Anna Chalon [00:02:25]:
Yeah, so I feel like I’ve learned a lot, but I still have a lot more to learn because it’s a fascinating subject. But something I’ve been really interested in is realizing how little we tend to question things that are presented to us as being facts but are really just stereotypes. And a simple illustration of that would be gendered colors like pink and blue. Most people don’t ask themselves why pink is for girls and blue is for boys because most of us were born into a society that fed us this belief. And we tend to not question most things that we feel have just always been like this. Right? And the other reason is also because it fits nicely into our preconceived notion that boys and girls are so fundamentally different. But the reality to continue on this specific example is that until the 50s there was no real gender color. And even in the twenties in some magazines you can see articles saying that boys should wear pink because it was more of a strong colors and girls should wear blue because it’s more discreet. But the idea of gender color didn’t really stick until the 40s with the rise of really marketing initiatives to drive to consumption because it was an effective way to get parents to buy very specific things for one child and then they would have to buy it all over again if the next child was of a different. So basically this was just a marketing initiative that was clever enough to just stick for decades. And this is again a very small example. But I think it shows clearly how easily we accepted as a society that I guess girls must like pink and boys must like blue, even though it wasn’t actually grounded in any reality. And we’ve done that with a lot of other things. And so the real learning for me is that in order to drive change in mentalities, we have to start questioning things a lot more and really dismantle all the preconceived notions we have about entire groups of people just because of the way they were born.
Matt Alder [00:04:33]:
Absolutely. I mean, I think that’s a great example as well. And it kind of really shows how bias shapes the way we think and so many things that we do. And I’d never heard that story before you sort of told me about it. So it’s interesting and terrifying at the same, at the same time, basically, diversity and inclusion is a big focus for you in your, in your role. And I know you’ve developed a four step process to help organizations be better at D. And I. Tell us about the first step.
Anna Chalon [00:05:01]:
Yes. So yeah, I’ve tried to break it down into four steps because there’s a lot about it. But the four steps are, the first one is to conduct an audit. Then you move on to just set a baseline. The audit is important just so you set a baseline. The second step is really around improving the culture to make sure it is inclusive and conducive to DNI initiatives. The third step is around hiring for diversity. And then the last step is around measuring and reporting on progress. So the first step specifically I talked about auditing, so it’s a good place to start, is just to review your current employee demographic to understand what’s your starting point. Is it fairly equal already? Do you have a huge disparity? So that’s really helpful. And then it’s also helpful to take a pulse within your employees. So sending them a survey can be helpful. If you think people will be honest, you can talk to them directly. But to me, that’s really the first step is Just what are you starting.
Matt Alder [00:06:02]:
With and where do you move on to from. From there? Where’s the, where’s the, what’s the second stage?
Anna Chalon [00:06:07]:
So once you have kind of a baseline, then I think you can start thinking about how to build an inclusive culture. And the reason I put this as a second step is I find that when talking about diversity and inclusion, I noticed that a lot of people will jump straight to hiring as a first step. And in my experience, this isn’t the right order because you can work really hard on building this great diverse pipeline. But if you don’t have the right culture, these people will either not get hired at all or if they do get hired, they might not stay. So I find it’s important to focus on the culture first. And here are a few ideas. There’s a lot you could do. One is unconscious bias training. I think it can be really eye opening and just raise awareness. At Frame IO, we do unconscious bias training for every new hire within their first three months, even if they won’t be part of an interview process. You could also look at creating a D and I committee. And I find it helpful because that way it can be more employee led and feel more organic than if it’s just like, oh, that’s an HR initiative. You can think about ERG groups. So employee resource groups depending on company size. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense, but something as we scale and then events. How do you celebrate pride? What do you do for Black History Month? And there are a lot. I know often people say they don’t have resources, but you can do really small things like watching a TED Talk together, even remotely. We’ve been doing that and then followed by a live discussion like what did we learn? Or you could host a panel with internal. Just your internal employee. Learn more about their experience or external. And then it’s really about having open, honest conversation and feedback around the office. I know it sounds broad, but I think it’s really a good place to start. Is really just telling each other if we have the wrong behavior. Easy example. I know when we can kick off a new role and the hiring manager will refer to this potential hire as he or him. When we haven’t even started the hiring process. I think it’s really important to call it out and ideally it would happen organically because we have the right culture. And then it’s thinking about taking a stance. With everything happening over the last few months around the Black Lives Matter movement, I’ve seen a lot of different reaction from company and employees will Remember what stance their company took. And I think the message you send as a company is just so important, especially for the people most concerned. So that’s really important. And then the last bit is reviewing what I call the little things, because they can seem little, but they’re so meaningful to some people. And it can be anything from the bathroom science. Is it inclusive? The name of your conference rooms, your slack channels, or all of these little details? I know on our end, we’re even reviewing our code base to look at the terminologies like whitelist and blacklist, or words like master and trying to really remove that. The takeaway here for me is that building an inclusive environment is really a succession of little things, actually, and messages that makes it clear that everyone belongs and that everyone at the company has equal opportunity to succeed. And it can be done at little to no cost, honestly, by just being thoughtful, being curious, and taking steps to really understand the experience that employees from all backgrounds have at your company specifically and in the workplace overall.
Matt Alder [00:09:48]:
Before we sort of go on to the next stage, there’s so many things that I want to follow up and ask you about. I’ll ask you about there, but we are operating under a time constraint, so I’ll just pick up on one thing which was you mentioned unconscious bias training. Talk us through that. What have you done? What does that mean? What does that look like? What does it achieve?
Anna Chalon [00:10:06]:
So we’ve built the program in house. We try and make it really interactive. So we go just go through a deck. Some like funny exercise. Like for example, we just give this example of if there’s a bat and a ball equals dollar and ten cents, you know that the bat equals a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Most people, if you don’t think will come up with 10 cents, which is the wrong answer. Just going through this exercise shows how the unconscious mind works, not as it relates to people, but just getting awareness of how our mind works to make those quick snap judgments that could be wrong. We try and just have those moments of, oh wait, I didn’t know that, or that’s funny, which I think are really helpful. And then we encourage people, which anyone doesn’t encourage, to take the Harvard Implicit Bias Test online. Doesn’t take a long time. Most people will feel like they’re awful humans after taking the test. But I think it’s really eye opening because again, it just confirms that we all have biases because that’s just impossible to not have any. And there shouldn’t be any judgment Attached to it. I think that’s an important factor is removing the shame from, oh, I’m not biased because it can feel like an attack versus recognizing. No, I’m probably unbiased because I’m human, but what can I do about it? I think that’s a lot more productive.
Matt Alder [00:11:36]:
So moving on to the next stage in your process, which was recruiting, I think talk us through that.
Anna Chalon [00:11:41]:
Yeah. So once, hopefully you have an inclusive culture, then you can think about hiring. So I think it starts with employer brand. So to actually be able to attract diverse talent. And that goes from really everything. The pictures you post on social media, the language you use, the employees you feature, and then really thinking about your job description. I still often see words like ninja or rockstar which are really gender coded. And so I recommend removing that. I personally also feel strongly that college degrees should almost never be a requirement. So I push to remove this from all of our job description and then to increase diversity and referrals. That’s a question I often get thinking like how if you don’t have diversity, how do you have more diversity in referrals? And for that I would say something as simple as reminding your employees how much you care about diversity can be enough. I find that just saying like, hey, as you’re referring, people in your network try and think of people who don’t look like you and that’s sometimes just enough. And then the interview process, that’s very important. So it’s critical to have a diverse interview panel if you want, first of all to remove bias and second, to attract this diverse talent. It’s not really exciting as a woman, and it’s happened to me before in technology to interview with an all male panel. So I think that’s really important. That’s the minimum rule I would say is never an all male panel and hopefully more diversity than that. And I also recommend having really structured interview process to avoid this whole gut feeling which tends to result in do I like this person versus do they have the right skills? So trying to be structured. And the last bit of that would be, I still often hear culture fit. And I would really recommend thinking about culture ad because when we think about culture fit, we think, how is this person fitting with our existing culture, which actually hurts diversity? We tend to be like, is this person the same versus culture ad is what is this person bringing in that we don’t already have a new perspective, a new background, which is a lot more valuable to a business, honestly.
Matt Alder [00:13:55]:
Absolutely. It makes perfect sense. So talk us through the final stage. It was the review stage.
Anna Chalon [00:13:59]:
Right. So once you’ve done all of this, it’s helpful to know how are you doing? Are you making improvements? Improvement, Are you not? And then communicating is really important, I think. So the first step is probably to actually set goals. And for that I highly recommend setting those goals at the company level with leadership buy in because it makes it so much more effective and then reporting on progress. So I like to share quarterly DNI reports around representation per gender, per level. And I share it with the whole company, not just a small specific group of people. So that way there’s full transparency. This is how we were last quarter. This is how we are this quarter, which I think people really appreciate. I also report on a yearly basis on salary increases and promotion per gender. What was percentage of men promoted, percentage of women promoted? To track that we have equality, for the most part, we tend to improve, but sometimes results might go down. It’s difficult and it’s not always comfortable to report on it. But I think people still appreciate the transparency and it also helps keep all of us accountable. And then the last piece you want to track is how are your employees feeling, actually? So thinking about the survey results around dni, is it increasing, decreasing? What are the trends? Talking to employees, making sure they feel like this is the right environment? Because as I mentioned, that’s really the key to success, even more than hiring is first the right environment. I know it was a lot of information with these four steps, but that’s how I like to think about it in terms of the cadence for how to roll out DNI initiatives if you don’t already have some. And then if you’ve already have some steps, maybe you can focus on other steps.
Matt Alder [00:15:47]:
Final question to you. Talk us through the successes you’ve had at Frame IO in terms of improving diversity and inclusion.
Anna Chalon [00:15:54]:
Yeah. So we still have a lot more work to do, of course, but we’ve seen some encouraging trends. So just to give you some specific numbers, from February 2019 to July 2020, we increased the percentage of women in management from 19% to 47%, which is really great to see to be almost at 50 50. And in our most recent survey results, our DNI questions were actually some of the most highly rated questions of the survey. For example, one of the question is around if people think we have an inclusive culture and we receive 94%, which is obviously really high. So again, we still have a lot more work to do. Especially the higher up you get, the less diversity you have. So that’s probably our top focus at the moment. So we keep setting ambitious goals at the leadership company level and then try and make tangible progress that we can report on and stay accountable.
Matt Alder [00:16:52]:
I can see one question in the comments which was about removing the education requirement. Could you, could you speak to that?
Anna Chalon [00:16:57]:
Yeah. So I read a lot about this actually something I’ve talked about with my CEO when I first joined. He didn’t go to college and started and built this pretty great company. And so I was just thinking of narrowing the requirements because we know the more requirements we have, the less diversity of application you have because men tend to apply for roles when they meet 30 to 60% depending on studies of the requirements and women 100%. So the more requirements you have, the less women you’ll have. It’s pretty straightforward. So I was trying to pick apart and started seeing a college degree and I was thinking does it really matter? And thinking of the people we had in the company who didn’t go to college, who were self taught. Maybe you went to boot camp and realizing read more about it. There’s no real pattern that shows that college degrees any predictor of success. Even some companies have specific college degree requirement with looking at top schools and there’s again no predictor of success. It’s a great book I recommend called Grit and it’s just really thinking about the attribute of the person instead of what background they have. Because again not everyone can afford to go to college but they might. They could still be very sharp and capable and good hire.
Matt Alder [00:18:16]:
And that is a fantastic book. I read it a few months ago and it’s well worth a read I think. Unfortunately that is us out of time. So thank you very much Anna for I should say coming on the show. I suppose you are on the show and in the conference at the same time. Thank you very much for sharing all that stuff with everyone who’s come in. If you’re interested in subscribing to the podcast, you can find it wherever you find your podcasts. And a final thank you to everyone who’s come along to listen to us and enjoy the rest of the rest of the conference.
Anna Chalon [00:18:44]:
Yeah, thanks everyone. Thanks Matt.
Matt Alder [00:18:46]:
My thanks to Anna and also my thanks to Wade and Wendy for letting us be part of the Recruiting Automation Conference. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow us on Instagram. You can find the show by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search through all the past episodes@www.on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the podcast. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time, and I hope you’ll join me.
