Eerlijke, rechtvaardige werving vereist een retentiestrategie (S2E14)

Anita Chauhan (00:16)

Hallo allemaal en welkom bij onze nieuwste aflevering van Looks Good On Paper, mogelijk gemaakt door Willo. ⁓ Ik doe verslag vanuit Toronto en het is hier erg koud. We werden vandaag wakker met een dikke laag sneeuw en ik zit hier een beetje te rillen naast het raam, maar ik ben erg enthousiast en verwacht dat ik het zeker warm zal krijgen van dit gesprek met onze nieuwste gast. Ik heet Gillian Emerson welkom in de podcast. Gillian is hoofd talent en partnerschappen bij Toast, waar ze helpt om de manier waarop techbedrijven personeel aannemen te hervormen door gelijkheid als concurrentievoordeel te gebruiken. ⁓ Gillian was een van de eerste medewerkers van Toast en heeft vanaf het begin meegeholpen aan het opzetten van de recruitmentafdeling. Ik ben zo enthousiast. Ik vind het geweldig wat Toast doet in Canada en Noord-Amerika. Gillian, voordat we begonnen, heb ik al gezegd hoe moeilijk het is om als vrouw in de techwereld te werken, en daar kunnen we nog verder op ingaan. Ik vind je missie geweldig. Ik hoor graag van je. Wat heb ik gemist in de intro?

Gillian (01:10)

Mm-hmm.

Anita Chauhan (01:16)

Wat heb je vandaag hier gekregen?

Gillian (01:18)

Ja, absoluut. Bedankt voor de uitnodiging. Het is erg zonnig en warm in Calgary. Ik weet niet waarom we zijn geruild. Normaal gesproken is het koud en ijzig, maar vandaag is het erg zonnig en aangenaam in Calgary. Ja, bedankt voor de uitnodiging. Ik kwam eigenlijk bij Toast toen we net begonnen, een beetje bij toeval, zoals veel mensen in talentacquisitie zeggen.

Anita Chauhan (01:22)

Wat?

Gillian (01:39)

⁓ Ik heb mijn bachelor in Ontario gedaan, in psychologie, en ben daarna teruggegaan naar Calgary, waar ik mijn master in management heb gedaan. Daarna deed ik een beetje alsof ik bezig was en dacht: oké, consultancy lijkt een logische keuze voor iemand met een master in management, maar dat pakte helemaal niet goed uit. ⁓ Ik deed een stap terug en dacht: oké, laten we eens nadenken over school, laten we ons daar weer op richten. En toen kwam er een project voorbij. Toast was net van start gegaan en ze namen deel aan een project genaamd het Propel Project via de Universiteit van Calgary. Ze kregen een project van 50 uur met een student. Ik zag hun website. Het was nog maar een basisversie van een website. Ze hadden nog geen lidmaatschap gelanceerd. Het was allemaal nog erg vaag, het hele project in het algemeen. En ik dacht: schrijf me maar in. En dus...

Ik schreef me in, stuurde mijn cv en sollicitatiebrief en al dat soort dingen op, en werd gelukkig geselecteerd. En ik hielp gewoon met alles, van de

Alle projecten waar ze hulp bij nodig hadden, het opzetten van enquêtes en vragenlijsten, feedback, het groeide al snel uit tot recruitment, uiteraard met mijn achtergrond in psychologie. Ik had altijd al interesse in talentacquisitie of recruitment. Dus ik ben me daar echt in gaan verdiepen. En toen... escaleerde het en groeide het uit tot iets anders. En dus zijn we de afgelopen drie jaar erg succesvol geweest in het helpen van bedrijven om meer vrouwen aan te nemen in hun technische teams. Ik ben samen met April Hickey, onze CEO, gegroeid om die wervingsfunctie aan de ene kant van het bedrijf op te bouwen. Aan de andere kant van het bedrijf hebben we een lidmaatschap dat vrouwen in de tech-sector ondersteunt.

Anita Chauhan (03:30)

Dat vind ik geweldig. Het doet me weer terugdenken aan 10, 12 jaar geleden, toen ik net begon. Ten eerste kom ik uit een niet-technische achtergrond en ze stapten over vanuit de overheid en ik wist niet wat me te wachten stond.

Gillian (03:44)

Ja.

Anita Chauhan (03:45)

En nu weet je het waarschijnlijk ook, toch? Je bent er gewoon niet op voorbereid. Ik denk dat het tien jaar geleden heel anders was, maar ik denk dat we hopelijk meer vrouwen in STEM zien die deze rollen gaan vervullen. Maar je zei eigenlijk al iets voordat we daarop ingingen, dat je een kleine terugval ziet, of dat Toast dat heeft opgemerkt bij tech, vrouwen in tech.

Gillian (03:54)

Mm-hmm. Ja, ik denk dat het in het algemeen geweldig is om vrouwen aan te trekken, maar uiteindelijk moet je ze ook zien te behouden. Wat we nu zien, is dat vrouwen de tech-sector binnenkomen, maar na een paar jaar weer vertrekken, waarschijnlijk rond een bepaalde leeftijd, wat erg jammer is. We zijn dan ook zeer gemotiveerd om systemen op te zetten, uiteraard van bovenaf, zodat er vertegenwoordiging is in het management, maar ook door diversiteit in te bedden in processen. Dit geldt voor het hele traject, van de sollicitatie tot het sollicitatiegesprek en het aanbod, en vervolgens tot langdurige ondersteuning om dit voor vrouwen nog meer te bevorderen.

Anita Chauhan (04:42)

Ik vind het geweldig. We zullen straks wat dieper ingaan op dat proces. Maar laten we eerst eens naar de eerste vraag kijken. Wat is de grootste fout die bedrijven blijven maken bij het aannemen van personeel, ook al is het duidelijk dat het niet werkt?

Gillian (04:50)

Het is cool.

Ja, om daarop voort te borduren, denk ik dat mijn korte antwoord natuurlijk is dat er niet genoeg vrouwen worden aangenomen en dat er geen diverse pijplijnen zijn, maar dat is een veel groter probleem dan alleen het niet aannemen van die mensen als je naar al je kandidatenpools kijkt.

Een deel van onze bestaansreden is dus om bedrijven te helpen hun pijplijnen te diversifiëren. We beginnen altijd met een intakegesprek, zodat ik beter begrijp wat er verder nog bij de functieomschrijving komt kijken, wat u echt zoekt. Maar ook hoe uw team is samengesteld. Wie vervult deze rol? Hoeveel vrouwen zitten er in het team? Hoe zien de promotiecycli eruit, enzovoort.

dat vervolgens in ons proces integreren, zodat we ervoor kunnen zorgen dat onze kandidaten vanaf het begin goed geïnformeerd zijn. Het grootste probleem dat we momenteel bij onze klanten zien, is dat zij en bedrijven in het algemeen naar ons toe komen en zeggen dat ze echt meer vrouwen willen aannemen. Ik heb een team dat volledig uit mannen bestaat, mensen nemen ontslag, wat dat ook moge zijn. En dat is geweldig om in eerste instantie de behoefte en de wens te hebben om meer vrouwen aan te nemen, want dat is wat we nodig hebben om met een bedrijf te kunnen samenwerken.

Er zijn bedrijven die naar ons toe komen en zeggen: "Ik heb moeite om vrouwen aan te trekken. Ik weet niet waarom ik ze niet kan behouden of aannemen." Maar dan zeggen ze dat hun werkweek 60 uur is en dat dat de absolute norm is, zonder enige flexibiliteit. En vrouwen zitten daar dan en denken: oké, flexibel werken is belangrijk voor mij. Wat als ik mijn kinderen wil ophalen?

En dat is waar ze uiteindelijk betere resultaten kunnen zien. Dus hoewel het geweldig is dat bedrijven in eerste instantie meer vrouwen willen aannemen, zorgt het feit dat ze die processen niet ook in het retentiemodel opnemen, voor een deel van het verloop dat we zien.

Anita Chauhan (06:37)

Jij ⁓ absoluut. Ik denk dat een belangrijk punt is dat dit een wereldwijde podcast is en we met mensen van over de hele wereld praten, maar gezien wat er in Canada gebeurt, zoals de terugkeer naar het kantoor, zie ik nu al dat dit veel verandert in de manier waarop ⁓ vrouwen op de werkplek werken, mijn vrienden, collega's, het verandert gewoon hoe je met je werk omgaat. En dat zien we ook bij sommige grote technologiebedrijven in Amerika. Ik denk dat het in sommige gevallen bijna een truc is om een aantal van die mensen kwijt te raken, omdat mensen dan vrijwillig vertrekken.

Maar als vrouw in de techwereld weet ik dat dit juist de drempels voor het aannemen van meer diverse teams verhoogt door dit soort dingen te eisen.

Gillian (07:22)

Hmm. Ja, absoluut. Ik zeg altijd dat het om de keuze gaat. Als mensen verplicht worden om het ene te doen in plaats van het andere, dan krijg je volgens mij een soort ongemakkelijk gevoel. Ik vraag me altijd af of ik naar het kantoor van Toast zou gaan als ze dat hadden. Ik denk dat ik dat af en toe zou doen, maar gezien het sociale karakter van mijn werk als recruiter, als iemand die
‍

Anita Chauhan (07:43)

Ja.

Gillian (07:50)

an extroverted introvert, get exhausted by the social interaction all day every day. So being at home is my saving grace. I think as long as you give people the choice in how they want to set up their working model, that implies more trust as well. As long as you're hitting your KPIs and what you need out of your job, it shouldn't matter where you're doing that from. So I think the choice is what's really important. It's also very interesting when we've hired internally for our own Toast team,

Anita Chauhan (08:18)
Yeah.

Gillian (08:19)
I've often gotten applications from people that are like, oh, I'd love to work from Toast to work from home so I can be there for when my kids get home from school and I can start dinner. And they say that in cover letters and they think that that's a negative connotation. And to me that speaks volumes of that person being like, yes, I can work my butt off throughout the day and fulfill my day and then...

also be there for my kids and do what's important. That balance is something that we inherently value. And I think companies that don't see that as a valuable thing of allowing their employees to have choice in how they engage in their work every day, it can be really harmful and it can show that they don't trust their employees to be able to

Anita Chauhan (08:49)
Yeah.

Gillian (09:04)
do their best and do what they need to.

Anita Chauhan (09:07)
It's really interesting what you said just there, right? About like flexibility. I find a lot of people almost hide the reason they want it. One, it's not their employer's business, I do want to say. Like you have a life outside of the workplace. How you choose to spend your time, outside of work hours is not really their business. But this is so important and it's really also part of, I find it's very gendered in some aspects where like you're almost ashamed or

Gillian (09:21)
Mmm, yeah.

Anita Chauhan (09:30)
you're like, well, I need to pick my kid up. I almost don't even want to mention that when I'm looking for a new job. So I find it really cool that like, Toast has fostered that environment where they felt empowered enough to actually share that. So kudos to you guys on that. You know, at Willo we have a lot of candidates who are in different life circumstances and it's actually the whole point. Like how we're able to actually now remove like the barriers to interviewing has removed some of the time. Like not just women, folks, you know, that have like a disability, neurodivergent, like,

Gillian (09:35)
Mmm.

Anita Chauhan (09:58)
all these different barriers. And I think it's really cool to see you guys actually have an entire company that fosters that.

Gillian (10:02)
Yes, 100%. I think it's interesting being in recruiting and seeing kind of like the norms that we all think we're supposed to do or what everyone's told me that I'm supposed to do when I apply for a job. And so then I've had a lot of those conversations. If they mention that upfront, I'm like, oh, that's totally fine. You don't need to worry about that.

Anita Chauhan (10:15)
Yeah.

Gillian (10:20)
It's okay. Take my feedback and kind of take it for how it is. I think too on this topic, one of the questions you ask later is what does removing the CV look like? And we do this for a lot of our recruitment processes with our clients where it's like, we scrub the name, we scrub where they went to school, we scrub what company. If they worked at Google, we won't tell our client that they worked at Google or any of the kind of like well-known companies.

All of that is not of pertinence to the actual capabilities and abilities and skill set of the candidate. And there's so much socioeconomic bias and the school you went to and there's foreign work experience bias. So often I talk to talented people who have been in the industry for 10 years and they're like, I have hundreds of applications and I've yet to get an interview. And they're like, I worked in X country.

Anita Chauhan (10:50)
Hmm, wow.

Anita Chauhan (11:02)
Yeah.

Gillian (11:08)
And if that wasn't Canada, that company doesn't think that that is relevant or valuable. And so as part of kind of our process, all of that is totally anonymous. And it's really interesting when you ask our clients, hey, like how did this person stack up? And they give us feedback. Then we tell them, hey, they were the ones that you thought had their work experience at Google.

That person was the person working out of Brazil. That person was the person that has a stay at home parent and that's all they've done for the past three years and now they're coming back into work. That kind of stuff they didn't know or weren't aware of and now they're like, oh my god. And so they have to reset what a great candidate is.

Anita Chauhan (11:41)
Absolutely. So my next question is like, you know, what signal do people use or overlook all the time? And, you know, I like the second part of that question because it's about, you know, what do, what are they missing? Because you said you scrub it. Like, what do you think that people actually need to be looking for? Because I think like, again, like we all default to the CV, default to the name, default to the school, the gender, all the sort of things that shouldn't matter at all. Really, we should be looking for what they're capable of.

So like, what do you think are like some of those signals that you've started to see people overlook or look towards when they do the hire? Because they didn't have that scrubbed CV.

Gillian (12:16)
A lot of it is self-taught and so one of the kind of like examples, most frequent things that I hear from people is I'm self-taught, I'm a bootcamp grad and I am not getting interviews. If I'm a computer science degree graduate, I have a job. If I'm self-taught, I'm just ignored. And like

Anita Chauhan (12:27)
Yeah.

Gillian (12:37)
When all comes down to it, I've worked with amazing self-taught and bootcamp grads that I have placed in jobs where they thrive, they do amazing, they have the skill set. And so to your question around what are the important skills that people should be looking at instead and being a little bit more of an out-of-the-box thinker, it's people that are passionate, that show proof of their learning, proof of their application.

Anita Chauhan (12:52)
Hmm.

Gillian (13:05)
and looking beyond the resume and saying like, a they said that they did this thing for two years and they gained this skill, that's what they developed, but now how did they do that? How can they prove that they know what they're talking about and what they can do? And that doesn't just apply to people that are self-taught or bootcamp grads, that also applies to people who have bachelor's or master's degrees.

Trust that they're the right person to get the job done and figure out the different ways in which you can evaluate that through kind of like the unheard of stuff that like what you wouldn't think about or the non-technical skills or maybe it is the technical skills that come through not through schooling by being self-taught and kind of just like expanding the out-of-the-box thinking.

Anita Chauhan (13:19)
All right. And on to our third question, which we kind of touched upon already. But if you were suddenly to remove CVs or resumes from your current hiring process, what would that look like?

Gillian (13:31)
Yeah, so that's an interesting question. Obviously for us, for like our own Toast process, we were moving that already for working with our clients. When we're hiring internally, I then have to take that hiring manager standpoint and be like, okay, what am I really looking for here? What is the most important? What I always like to do for when we're doing an internal hire is think about the top three things that we're looking for, not to get attracted by the shiny stuff. And that a hundred percent has happened to me.

Anita Chauhan (13:36)
Yeah.

Me too!

Gillian (14:00)
⁓ in the past, especially

when we did our first hire on the talent team of being like the FAANG companies and my God, they worked here. They want to work for Toast What? ⁓ but taking a step back and really understanding like what's important. For example, for one of our recruiters having contingent recruitment experience we have found has been very important for us just in recognizing like the speed, ⁓ and understanding the general

process involved with recruiting contingently. ⁓ And then other parts of examples, like some form of like seniority with it, examples of past success with time to hires, how many hires, cadence that we've seen, and then otherwise trying to just like limit the noise. We try and do something different each time we hire someone.

The last one, for example, we put out a LinkedIn post and wanted to just like extend it to the network. If you know a kick-ass recruiter, sorry, I don't know if I'm allowed to swear. ⁓ If you know a kick-ass recruiter, tag them below, something like that. Just to bring in kind of like those different perspectives, we want the tried and true of working with them in the past and recognizing those really awesome people that might not be out there.

Anita Chauhan (14:58)
when you're a little bit.

I always love that network effect as well, by doing that where it's like friends of friends might even include, bring someone in. Hopefully you're not like hiring with that bias of like, oh, I know this person through this, but it does open up that wider net to people that you might not have already been able to get in front of, right?

Gillian (15:32)
And we were shocked, like, we were shocked at the amount of people and the interest that came through with that. And I was like, oh my God, there's so many amazing people out there that we have never worked with, come across, and they might be even be in the same city as us. And so ⁓ just kind of taking a different approach with it has been important. I challenge people to...

rethink how they evaluate resumes and how they typically look at those kinds of things when they're going through these processes to take a step back and question, why do I look for certain companies? What am I looking for out of those? What are the true needs that I need out of those companies? And then go from there.

Anita Chauhan (16:05)
you

Yeah, no, I really appreciate that so much. It's such an interesting place that Toast sits, right? So you're seeing internally, you're seeing all these other companies. So I think it's, I just really already applaud the system that you have been building with the companies you're working with because, for some people, and this is one of the things that we've seen, it's like the idea of decentering the resume or the CV from the practice is kind of scary, right? We are just so used to it, along with all the other things you talked about, like scrubbing the name and understanding, like, you know,

Gillian (16:21)
This is.

Anita Chauhan (16:40)
where they come from, all this stuff. I think what's really interesting to see is that Toast has done this in practice and that's scaled out and it is actually working. And I love that type of story. I love that we were able to tell that here.

Gillian (16:52)
With every single first submission that we have, we have a detailed explanation of why we do it the way that we do. What are the biases that come up? Socio-economic bias, ⁓ foreign work experience bias. Why are we doing these things?

Anytime that you can attach a why to it, it helps people expand their minds and their thoughts around it. So that's what's been really helpful with us, I would say.

Anita Chauhan (17:18)
Really quick, what type of trends do you see in hiring and recruiting and sourcing for 2026?

Gillian (17:26)
So we chatted briefly about this at the start. The obvious answer that everybody is saying right now is AI. How are you using AI? How is it like better serving you and your process? And for sure, there are so many amazing ways that we have used that. However, what we have been having a lot of conversations about internally within our Toast community on LinkedIn, all of that, is this AI

Can we bring back personalized approaches to hiring while using it in the best way possible? We are also looking into, for this year it's gonna be of top of mind for us, is how our AI hiring process is affecting women as well. So I read a really interesting article recently about how using AI to hire,

Anita Chauhan (18:07)
you

Gillian (18:15)
is hiring people based off of previous successful hires. And when your previous successful hires are white men from these certain backgrounds, then your AI is going to specialize towards that in picking those resumes that demonstrate the kind of matched background of skills experience ⁓ to making those hires. And who does that limit?

Anita Chauhan (18:27)
⁓

Gillian (18:38)
people that aren't there already. And so ⁓ we want to bring it back to making it a people first approach always. Use AI tools to like help speed up your process for sure. Understanding at the core of it, why aren't you hiring women? Why aren't you retaining women? And how can we help introduce you to great people through people? ⁓ But really the AI fatigue is becoming very real.

across the board, I think.

Anita Chauhan (19:05)
I know ⁓

working in marketing, a lot of pushback. There's a big shift. I think it's just, you know, it's in everything. And we see the positive. It's interesting though, as well, at Willo as well, we see a lot of companies asking for, you know, AI, but they don't think they really understand what it means. So I think there's both ends of it. I think that the human things are going to get more human this year. The intentionality of AI usage is going to change significantly. I think you've touched upon that brilliantly as

Gillian (19:13)
Mm-hmm.

Anita Chauhan (19:32)
like I love that Toast is thinking about those types of things and how it actually impacts already, you know, marginalized candidates, right, and giving them access in such a different way. ⁓ Jillian, this has been so lovely. I don't know how the time flew so fast. Thank you so much for your thoughts and insights. I'm so excited to share this with the world. Thank you.

Gillian (19:52)
Thank you. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.