The latest McKinsey Women in the Workforce report illustrates that there is still a very long way to go before we get to gender equality in the workforce. McKinsey identifies a “broken rung” in the career ladder with only 72 women promoted or hired to manager level for every 100 men promoted or hired to manager level.
So how do employers fix this situation, what support is required, and how do mindsets need to change? To help answer these questions my guest this week is Addie Swartz, CEO of reacHire. Addie has been on a three-decade-long mission to change the trajectory for women at work and has some extremely practical insights to share.
In the interview, we discuss:
- Addie’s background and motivation for starting reacHire
- Fixing the broken rung
- The bottom-line impact of workforce equality
- Investing to support women in their early careers
- Why women leave the workforce and the challenges they can face when trying to return
- Changing employer mindsets
- Bias in recruiting
- Reverse mentoring and the benefits of a multi-generational workforce
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Social Talent. Social Talent is the training platform for hiring teams, giving you the knowledge and skills you need to find, hire and develop great talent. Designed for everyone involved in the hiring process, this market leading platform provides training through a comprehensive library of video content delivered by the world’s best hiring experts. Trusted by the likes of IBM, intel and Siemens. Social Talent has trained over 80,000 people across 100 countries and 1,000 organizations. Last year alone they enabled a million hires worldwide. Find out more@www.socialtalent.com. that’s www.socialtalent.com.
Matt Alder [00:01:11]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 248 of the Recruiting Future podcast. The latest McKinsey Women in the Workforce report illustrates that there’s still a very long way to go before we get to gender equality at work. McKinsey identifies a broken rung in the career ladder with only 72 women promoted or hired to manager level for every hundred men promoted or hired to manager level. So how do employers fix the situation, what support is required, and how do mindsets need to change? To answer these questions, my guest this week is Addie Swartz, CEO of reacHire. Addie has been on a three decade long mission to change the trajectory for women at work and has some extremely practical insights to share. Hi Addie and welcome to the podcast.
Addie Swartz [00:02:06]:
Hi there Matt, how are you?
Matt Alder [00:02:08]:
I’m very well, thank you and it’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just quickly introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Addie Swartz [00:02:16]:
Sure. So my name is Addie Swartz and I am CEO of reacHire. We’re all about changing the trajectory for women and work, partnering with corporations to do that.
Matt Alder [00:02:27]:
Fantastic. And sort of before we dig a bit deeper into that topic, it would be great to get some more background about you and your story and really how you got to do what you’re doing now.
Addie Swartz [00:02:39]:
Sure. So I have been on a mission for the better part of three decades focused on women and work and have started three different companies aimed at three different problems that are focused on women at different stages of their growth and development. I started my first company, Bright Ideas when I was on attorney leave with my first daughter and I was working in the tech industry feeling like there needed to be more opportunities that were flexible part time and really played to my tech skills. So I created an army of stay at home moms that were Tech savvy that sold educational software to schools, parents and teachers. That company was called Bright Ideas and it was all about educational software and having a brighter future at your child’s fingertips. I started it from a spare bedroom and sold it four and a half years later to a division of Pearson Education. But what was really seminal about that was that that was in 1992, before the advent of the Internet. Any video technology or ability for people to work from home or even laptops. So having a flexible work opportunity for a tech savvy professional that was flexible and part time really spoke to the needs of early, you know, women early in their career that were young mothers who needed more flexibility. Fast forward to having two children, two young girls. I felt that there weren’t enough positive role models and healthy messages for girls at that seminal point between toys and boys, which is the ages of 9 to 13. So I created the Beacon Street Girls, which was 22 full length novels, bags, backpacks and all kinds of bling and a virtual junior high to create a world for girls that was safe, positive and was really focused on building their self esteem and helping them through the challenges of adolescence. That company I sold to Simon and Schuster took a break and then interestingly enough to start Reach Hire, which is the company we’re talking about now. We had a major personal event happen. I had a car accident with my whole family in the car and we got out of the car upside down and I found that my young daughter, who was in high school teenager, suffered a pretty serious head injury as a result of that. The good news is eight years later she is almost back to herself. So it wasn’t life damaging in the end, but it took me to be on the sidelines with her while she recovered for a year and stayed out of a seminal year of education. When I was offline with her, I realized that there were all these mothers, women that had invested some significant time in their careers and that then had off ramped and as a result of the off ramping could not get back into working in a corporation. And so I set about looking at that problem while I myself was on the sidelines and created Reach Higher, which is all about two ends of the pipeline. One is reinserting great talent back into corporations and moving more females up that pipeline that are experienced once they get retrained as well as thinking about how early career women do a better job of growing and sustaining their careers at the companies that they start with.
Matt Alder [00:06:31]:
Amazing, amazing stuff. I suppose digging deeper into this and starting with women at the start of their careers. You talk about fixing the broken rung. What do you mean by that?
Addie Swartz [00:06:42]:
Well, the latest McKinsey Lean In Women in the workplace report that came out just recently showed that for every 100 men that get promoted, only 72 women get promoted from individual contributor to manager. Why that is frightening is that women are entering the workplace in droves at equal rates as men, but they’re still not even able to get up to that first level of promotion at equal rates. If you look at that trajectory, it’ll take a couple hundred years at the same rates for us to even get on par with women at more equal levels at that rate. And so what is happening between entering a corporation and getting to that first level of promotion? Well, lots of things. And those things are really blocking the ability to have more gender equity even at the lowest level of the organization. And if you can’t get equal representation at that lowest level, then you’re never going to ever be able to get more equal representation at any other level in the organization, let alone senior levels. And that’s important because there’s been so much research that shows that gender equality and diversity really move the needle in profitability for an organization and drive innovation in different ways. So it’s not just about, you know, women should be equal to men for philosophy’s sake. It’s because it has bottom line impact that drives, you know, innovation, profitability and performance.
Matt Alder [00:08:21]:
You mentioned that at the current rate, it will take sort of 200 years to fix that problem. What can be done about it or what is being done about it by more forward thinking organizations?
Addie Swartz [00:08:32]:
Well, there’s a lot of conversation about sponsors and mentors and how do we give women more. I feel it has to be a partnership with the corporation and the individual. Right. The individual needs to want to grow and invest in themselves. And the corporation needs to determine that more things that they are able to provide will help those individuals navigate around or through organizations. If you look at millennials and Gen Zs, they get dropped into companies and many times they don’t have a lot of training or support. And we did a survey of 440 women recently and it showed that the number one thing that women want isn’t more money. They want more training, they want more skill development. They want and are hungry for growth and achievement. And so as a result of that, we’ve developed something that we’ve done a lot of learning from, from reinserting women back into organizations to creating something called Aurora, which is a digital platform, first ever of Its kind to really partner with the organization to help women thrive and grow. And it’s virtual, it’s delivered seamlessly. You can get going in as quickly as 10 days to two weeks. And it comes with a live guide that brings a group of women in your organization through a journey over six to nine months and then sets them continuing on their journey together. So very excited about Aurora because we are really trying to create a system and a toolkit for companies to lean on to provide that little bit extra level of support both virtually and digitally enabled by a live professional female executive that’s been there and done that, that can then help guide that woman as she begins her journey.
Matt Alder [00:10:51]:
That sounds like an absolutely fantastic initiative. Are there any sort of employers already using it or employers who are on your radar who are doing a good job in this area?
Addie Swartz [00:11:02]:
Yeah, I am so excited to say that we have a host of companies that are really embrac Aurora even as we’ve just recently launched. We have Vertex Pharmaceuticals that is a major participant with us in the Aurora platform. Irobot company called Everbridge, which is the critical communications space, especially right now in the world. It’s a growing industry and Sage Therapeutics. So we are growing our list of customers. We just launched the product February 11, so recently. We just launched the product recently. So having a host of customers that are forward thinking that are all about investing in this population early, where there’s much more risk of people leaving within the first year and also over, you know, the first three years, it’s significant. So very excited about these corporations that are all about investing early with something that’s a light touch in the language of millennials and Gen Zs right where they are. And it’s all about building community, being on a journey with your team, having a guide to guide you along the way, although you also are driving your own success. So I call it, it’s all about we. And together as we, you know, the individual can grow and thrive.
Matt Alder [00:12:43]:
Moving on to another career stage. Why? Why are women leaving the workforce and what kind of issues do women who want to return to the workforce after a break, what kind of issues are they facing?
Addie Swartz [00:12:57]:
So women leave the workforce for a variety of reasons. One is to have family. But I think that all the research recently shows that women leave for other reasons. Not being promoted, hostile work environment, feeling that they’re not challenged enough. But I think historically there have been women that have been trying to manage many different things and with inflexible work environments, having a family or managing elder parents or Even being sick or deciding that you’re going to go off and, you know, change the world and build houses in, you know, a needy country. So different people have reasons for wanting to leave. In fact, a statistic I saw recently shows a statistic I saw recently showed that 84% of millennials, both men and women, are thinking that they want to take, are going to take a career break. So of that 84%, that’s huge, and that’s of millennials and Gen Zs. So they’re all planning on them. And they might not even know who their spouse is or significant other, or they might not know what they want to do with their life, if they want to travel or take time off to do something in the nonprofit space. The key thing is that by 2025, 75% of our workforce are going to be millennials. And if 84% of them are going to plan career breaks, we as a society are going to need to figure out ways for everyone to off ramp and on ramp. But it’s not just about family, right? You take time off for a variety of things and elder care is a really important thing right now, taking care of yourself. And if we’ve had a variety of individuals who have been sick and have conquered an illness and then want to get back, and then the problem is when you get back, you invariably might be older because technology moves so fast, your skills may be perceived as out of date. And some functional areas like marketing, marketing is very different than it was even five years ago. So if you’ve been out for a chunk of time, it’s harder for you to get those skills back. The good news is there’s lots of online things that you can do to do that. But employers continue to be very risk averse about that. And that’s why Reach Hire was born. Because we partner with companies, we bring women in in groups together, we actually handle and partner with the company to handle finding the women, creating the training program and the upskilling program so that they can build new skills and, and then go into jobs for six to nine to 12 months while they are retire employees. So the companies get to test drive them and the individual also gets to see if they are ready to go back, how they can build their skills and in a less risky fashion, really get back in the game.
Matt Alder [00:16:10]:
I’ve seen for myself from things that have happened to members of my, my own family that a lot of employers are still stuck in a very, very old thinking, old way of thinking around this. And sometimes, despite what they might say publicly they’re very, very close minded about people who have career breaks for whatever reason and getting them back into the workforce. What can we say to those employers or what evidence can we give those employers to change their minds and really move things on from where they are?
Addie Swartz [00:16:44]:
So we’ve had a great track record in the last six and a half years of working with major corporations, Fidelity T Mobile, Wayfair, Sarepta, a variety of companies of different sizes and different industries and really helping them programmatically drive change and bring in great talent that fits this population. The biases are age, technology, you know, comfort and, and when people interview. I mean, I think the problem with the latest way that we have the technology is the applicant tracking systems. You know, throw somebody out if they have a break on the resume, they throw someone out of the pile if they have a date on the resume that looks too old, or if they don’t have their resume optimized SEO wise, then if you actually are an individual that’s able to make it through that applicant tracking system and get selected for a video interview, there’s a whole bunch of bias on a video interview because you can see the individual and if they are an older individual, there’s a bias that, well, you aren’t tech savvy, you’re not in the digital world. How are you going to contribute? Which is why I created Reach Higher, because companies can take a look at the individuals without having the risk of formally bringing them on. And our success rate has been so high. So over 90% of the women that have gone through a Reach Higher program are back at work. That is awesome. It doesn’t matter what age they are or where they came from. That’s great. And we’ve had an over 80% success rate where those individuals actually are doing so well in the company that we place them in. So over 90% back at work in general after they’ve done their quote, quote, you know, return to work or internship program and then over 80% back at that company. Loyal, motivated, contributing and soaring. And we’ve even had examples where Reach Higher women have earned awards, you know, multiple industries, different functional areas where they’ve come in and they’ve been so eager to do a great job and you know, learning and absorbing everything like a sponge and building lots of new tech skills on top of their EQ skills and really driving home change in the organization so that they get awards and awards over people that have been in the organization 15 and 20 years. So the proof is in the pudding and, and These individuals are so driven to succeed for themselves and to show the companies that they made a good bet. And it really is something beautiful to see because it really positively impacts the organization. Even the women and the men that are in the organization that are nowhere near having taken time off see that the commitment level is there for companies to meet women at every age and stage. And that endorsement and commitment and support of that in a, in a significant way makes a huge impact.
Matt Alder [00:20:13]:
I think that’s really interesting and I think you’re right that there is, I think you’re right about the bias that kind of exists in the recruitment process. And I think that, you know, some of that is in the technology, but actually a lot of it is in, is in attitudes of recruiters and maybe even more so hiring managers and even more so hiring managers. And that may be conscious, that may be unconscious or even conscious bias. And it’s great to see that you’re on a mission to, you know, you’re on a mission to help fix that. I suppose leading on from that, it seems crazy to me that these biases and these, this kind of sort of narrow minded thinking exists in a world where we have massive skill shortages. People need more capable business people into their business. You know, they’re upskilling their workforce, looking forward to the future. Do you think this is something that’s going to drive better equality and more open thinking in this area?
Addie Swartz [00:21:09]:
Absolutely. I was just thinking about it, Matt. You raised something that I hadn’t thought of before, which is that the tools that we rely on so heavily do present bias without our even thinking about it. Used to be that when you submitted a resume, you didn’t have a picture. But now with tools like LinkedIn you can check somebody out and see exactly what they look like. And with a video call, with video interview, so many companies do video screens, you see the person. And so it’s not even the ATS system that obviously that is one barrier, but then people’s bias about how people present themselves and what they look like and if that translates to an age bias to you’re an older worker and you can’t live in this digital fast paced world. But the thing that people are missing with that is the amount of life experience that these individuals can bring to a corporation. And we’ve seen a lot of reverse mentoring. So you know, the women will come into, in a program, but then they’ll be working on a team with people that, you know, could be their children and yet they’re doing a lot of reverse mentoring. Of these millennials and Gen Zs, you know, providing a little bit of that extra support, support and guidance in an offhand informal way to show them what it’s like to manage someone and being able to troubleshoot for those individuals. Similar to Aurora, that platform that I was telling you about. So there’s a lot of benefits for multiple workforces or multiple generations being in the workforce, and there’s a real power there.
Matt Alder [00:23:00]:
So final question, where can people find out more about you and your company?
Addie Swartz [00:23:04]:
So to learn more about Reach Higher and Aurora, you can go to www.reachhire.com and it’s one HRE A C capital H I R E dot com the idea of reaching higher but hiring people.
Matt Alder [00:23:22]:
Addie, thank you very much for talking to me.
Addie Swartz [00:23:24]:
Thank you so much for having me.
Matt Alder [00:23:27]:
My thanks to Addy Swartz. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow us on Instagram. You can find the show by searching for Recruiting Future. If you’re a Spotify or Pandora user, you can also listen to the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.recruitingfuture.com. on that site, you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about Working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
