E30 – HR Famous – Is Johnny Taylor good for @SHRM and HR?

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(Shout to the Tim Cook, Ivanka, Johnny selfie above – I had to put that one because it’s totally a pic I would have gotten if I had the chance!)

In episode 30 of The HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Kris Dunn, Tim Sackett, and Jessica Lee link up to discuss Senator Tom Carper’s senate hearing mishap, Tim’s most embarrassing leadership moment, and Johnny Taylor’s time at SHRM. In this episode, KD talks about the worst boss ever and the crew answers the question “is Johnny Taylor good for HR?”. 

Listen below and be sure to subscribe, rate, and review (iTunes) and follow (Spotify)! 
1:30 – Do you like “what’s up?” or “how are you?” better? HR Famous prefers what’s up as a greeting!

2:30 – Do you have any monster.com swag from an HR conference? Tim still has it on his desk! KD isn’t a swag guy and wants to avoid the lines at all costs. 

5:00 – First topic of the day: tech mishaps in US Senate hearings! Senator from Delaware Tom Carper didn’t realize he wasn’t muted and was caught using some profanity in this video. KD wrote about this occurrence on his blog and called him the worst boss ever. 

9:15 – Tim calls this the most embarrassing leadership moment that a leader can have around their staff. What is your most embarrassing moment as a leader?

11:30 – KD thinks the abrupt nature of Senator Carper’s three f-bombs to a staffer gives the signal that he’s the worst boss ever. He thinks the nature of the interaction gives off bad boss vibes. 

14:00 – Second topic of the day: is Johnny Taylor good for HR? Business Insider discusses the reign of the CEO of SHRM in their new article and the cutthroat culture he has created for SHRM employees. 

17:00 – Although some may call Tim a Johnny Taylor fanboy, he praises him for turning a company around and helping SHRM start to turn a profit again. Tim says that the out of touch SHRM of the past is being transformed under Johnny and the new culture he’s creating is trying to update the company.

19:20 – JLee thinks that it’s important to try and bifurcate some of Taylor’s accomplishments from some issues that have arisen at SHRM. She says that it’s hard to deny some of his results even though there have been issues with SHRM’s work culture and their handling of certain situations with their employees. 

22:00 – So, is Johnny Taylor good for HR? KD mentions a past potential book that Taylor was going to write called “Fire half your staff then hire and keep the staff you need”. Tim is glad that the title is up for grabs!

25:00 – Johnny’s wins: financial turnaround, diverse leader of an organization, speaking out about recidivism, DEI programming among others. Tim comments on his charisma and how his dynamic presence may positively affect membership. 

29:15 – Johny’s losses: alignment with the Trump administration, SHRM’s slow response to the Black Lives Matter movement and the killing of George Floyd, and a relationship with the Koch brothers on issues of recidivism. 

32:00 – Tim thinks the messaging about police brutality and the BLM movement is something that SHRM could’ve clarified in order to create a more clear message. 

35:15- The crew answers the question of the segment. What do you think?

HR’s Worst Enemy!

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I’m always amazed to hear about all of the Enemies that HR has!  You have employees, and hiring managers, and the EEOC, and employment attorneys, and staffing firms, and insurance firms, and HR software providers. I mean, if I hadn’t been in HR, I would think that everyone is against HR!

It feels like that some days, doesn’t it?

HR’s real worst enemy, though, doesn’t get that without your organization’s service or product being successful, no one is successful.

HR’s worst enemy doesn’t get that more hurdles to jump through, just means less time for operations to focus on the real business at hand.

HR’s worst enemy doesn’t get that treating everyone the same way, doesn’t create a high-performance culture.

HR’s worst enemy doesn’t get that having employees fill out open enrollment paperwork just so you have a document to prove what they filled out, spends more resources then it saves.

HR’s worst enemy doesn’t get that adding five additional steps to a process doesn’t make it simpler, it makes it more complex.

HR’s worst enemy doesn’t get that not leaving your department to go out and build relationships in other departments isn’t a good thing.

HR’s worst enemy doesn’t get that eliminating all risk isn’t something that is possible nor should it be a goal.

HR’s worst enemy…is itself.

Why are HR Generalists Winning During Covid? #HRFamous

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In episode 29 of The HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Tim Sackett, Kris Dunn, and Jessica Lee discuss how HR Generalists are rapidly becoming the preferred choice for HR Leaders with shrinking staff/team size due to their “do it all” mentality, and discuss how specialists in the HR field can protect themselves vs further cuts as furloughs turn into layoffs.

The gang also provides a “hot take” round of reactions to recent workforce announcements from Salesforce. We learn JLee doesn’t want a stipend for a printer or a Chromebook.

Listen (click this link if you don’t see the player) and be sure to subscribe, rate, and review (Apple Podcasts) and follow (Spotify)!

SHOW HIGHLIGHTS

3:00 – First topic of the day: Salesforce has come out this week with a list of announcements including that all employees can work from home until July 31, 2021, the plan of the slow reopening of their many offices, an expansion of benefits for those working from home, and an additional 6 weeks of PTO for parents. KD asks JLee and Tim to react with hot takes on each of the announced benefits.

6:00 – Salesforce is giving their employees $250 to help them buy supplies to work from home. JLee doesn’t think it’s enough to buy too many things of actual value. Hello, Chromebook.

8:00 – JLee says she is not able to use all of her current PTO so she doesn’t need more time and would prefer a subsidy for childcare rather than more time. KD thinks that Salesforce is trying to create a monopoly being an employer of choice for people with kids after the trendy period of their lives “inside the perimeter”.

13:30 – Second topic: KD and Kathy Rapp talked on his podcast Best Hire Ever about the current phenomenon of HR Leaders looking for HR Generalists over specialists as teams are shrinking and people are getting cut. Tim says that to get noticed by an HR Leader you typically have to have deep knowledge in one area and it’s very hard for new people to the HR world to have a lot of knowledge in many areas as required to be a great generalist.

16:30 – JLee shouts out boss president at HRQ, Kathy Rapp! She also comments on how many people working in HR don’t want to be a generalist and they want to specialize with something they’re more fascinated by.

19:00 – Tim thinks that in a low unemployment world, HR generalists are undervalued and are often passed up for promotions due to their lack of specificity in one area. Do you think HR generalists value changes with time?

20:00 – KD asks JLee and Tim to comment on how difficult/easy it is for different HR specialist types to broaden their role and avoid being laid off in a recession. Tim thinks it’s possible for a modern compensation/benefit person to prove themselves because they’re often driven by data.

22:00 – JLee thinks that employee relations specialists have a lot of opportunities to broaden out their experience but think they need to be proactive rather than reactive in their actions.

23:00 – Tim says that recruiters must be knowledgeable about where the money is coming from in their organization and bolster that area to the best of their ability to protect themselves.

24:00 – JLee says that OD/talent management folks need to be seen on the forefront of bringing in talent in order to show their value.

25:00 – KD thinks the ultimate skill for any HR employee to possess right now is the ability to communicate. Tim says that all VP’s and Directors of HR right now need to be driving performance right now in order to stay important within their company.

31:30 – KD thinks that a great HR generalist can come from anywhere and they rise to the top via their ability to analyze data, communicate, and ship actual products rather than talking about it.

Resources:

Jessica Lee on LinkedIn

Tim Sackett on Linkedin

Kris Dunn on LinkedIn

HRU Tech

The Tim Sackett Project

The HR Capitalist

Fistful of Talent

Kinetix

Boss Leadership Training Series

Happy Global Talent Acquisition Day! #GlobalTADay

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September 2, 2020, marks the third annual Global TA Day!

Global TA Day was an event started by the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (of which I was a proud founding board member!) and it’s a day to celebrate our profession!

Recruiting is hard! What we do in talent acquisition is difficult! Also, what we do has an extremely positive effect on our organizations! Every single day, we impact our organizations by improving talent. That talent will lead our organizations into the future, and we are the first step to making that happen!

Never discount your role in talent acquisition. So many of our peers in HR don’t want to do recruiting because they know how difficult these roles truly are. In recruiting, your performance can’t hide. We either find the talent or we don’t, and there’s no way to hide from that fact. Our level of accountability is in our face with every single requisition we work.

So, I salute you my fellow TA pros! Take a moment today to stop and celebrate yourself, your team, and your profession. Use the hashtag #GlobalTADay on social today and put up a picture of you and your team doing the work you do! Join along with the celebrations online that are going on across the globe! There will be live presentations and panels throughout the day, all free, for you and your teams to enjoy and learn.

Want to join the movement in TA? Sign up and join me as a member of ATAPGlobal and support your profession throughout the year, and not just this one day! The top TA pros across the world work on their craft all year long, and ATAP supports our development!

What if we only hired based on job interest? A Job Lottery!

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I heard about a very cool way that some schools are beginning to select student governments. Think about how the normal student government is selected. Some student government advisor, usually the school’s government teacher, makes an announcement for student government elections. Any student interested can throw their name into the hat, and start campaigning.

Then, reality hits.

The most popular girl decides she wants to run, and then the star quarterback decides he will also run, and the drum major of the student marching band puts her name in, it becomes a whos-who of the student body, all looking to butter-up their college applications. If you’re not popular or have a built-in voting base (school marching bands have a way of swinging elections if they elect in mass), you have zero shot at getting elected.

Now, if we changed from elections to a lottery system, every single person who has an interest in being a part of the student government now has an equal chance of being a part of the student government. Do you like this idea or not? (Listen to Gladwell’s podcast to see how this really plays out, it’s fascinating!) 

Most people’s initial reaction is not positive about a lottery. We want to have our vote. Our say! A lottery seems random. The very worst person might win the lottery and then we are stuck! Truth be told, we are awful at selection! We are bad at selecting politicians. We are bad at selecting employees. Humans are just bad at knowing what’s best for them.

Think about how we select our President. If we had used a lottery to select the President all these years, half of the U.S. Presidents would have been female! A good portion would have been African American, way before Obama! We probably would have had a Hispanic President!

What Hundred.org found is that selecting student governments via lottery actually has produced a ton of leaders that school teachers/administrators, and students didn’t even realize could be great. We never gave them a chance, and they lived ‘down’ to our expectations. But, when chosen via lottery, they rose to the occasion. Also, just because we ‘elected’ the Prom Queen to be Student Class President, doesn’t mean they’ll be good, in fact, just as many that are good, suck!

Now, let’s take this in another direction. What would happen if we did a “Hiring Lottery”? Instead of going through all the interviews and such, we just have people show interest, and then we pull a name out of a hat? Do you think it would work?

Let’s add one thing. What if we had AI go through each person who showed interest and made sure they met our qualifications to do the job? Would you have buy-in then? We had 100 applicants who meet the criteria of the job, we spin the ping pong balls and pick one, and Welcome to ACME Inc., Mary! You won the job lottery!

What do you think Mary’s chances of being successful are? 50/50? Lazlo Bock, in Work Rules, says Google was only 1% better than 50/50 in their selection, so it would seem like 50/50 would be a really strong success rate for your hires!

I have a strong belief that with many of our roles, especially those that are low-skill, no-skill jobs, a hiring lottery would actually be considerably more efficient and eliminate all bias, and would probably produce more applicants for organizations. Also, when considering lower-skilled jobs, “job interest” might be the most important criteria to consider!

Could it work in skilled professions? I think it would probably work exactly the same, it’s just a harder sell to executives since they have skills and want to desperately believe those skills matter over someone with similar skills!

Tell me what you think! Would you be willing to hire via a Job Lottery!?

How many people in your profession actually know what they are doing?

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I asked this question recently to a number of people. On a normal distribution curve of performance it should look something like this:

-20% are Top Performers

-70% are Average Performers

-10% are Not Performing at all

So, my belief would be if I asked an individual in any professional occupational role, “Tell me what percentage of pros in your field actually know what they are doing?” That I should get a very similar distribution. But I didn’t!

Ask yourself this question right now. How many of your peers, doing the same job you are doing right now, actually know how to do the job?

If you are a plumber, and I put ten plumbers in front of you, are you confident 80-90% can do the job? No? Then how many? If you are an HR Professional, what percentage of your peers are actually good at our profession?

Here was the breakdown I received, in terms of what percentage of peers in your field can actually perform at an acceptable level, as rated by their peer group:

Only 1% of the 394 people surveyed felt like over 90% of people in their field knew what the heck they were doing! 18% of people felt like less than 10% of the people in their field knew what they were doing! 

What does this tell us?

Almost everyone overrates their own performance and underrates the performance of those around them doing the same job. It’s really hard for us, in a peer setting, to look at others and go, “yeah, Mary is way better than me!” It’s way easier for us to look at a peer and go, “Oh, Tim? Yeah, he’s an idiot! We don’t let him get near the Happy Meals!”

What I actually tend to find when auditing various functions within an organization is that most people can actually do the job that is requested, when it takes lower-level skills. As you ramp up the skill difficulty is when you see larger variations, which isn’t very comforting.

What are the professions that take high skill? Medical, legal, accounting/finance, technology, etc. Most of these professions, to be really good, you need a combination of a strong education, experience, continual learning, and high attention to detail. Because most of these professions are high paying and have high hiring needs, many people are trying to get into the field, but don’t have all four of the requirements mentioned!

Anyone who has gone through a frustrating medical issue where doctors couldn’t find out what was wrong, only then to go to a more well-known medical facility and immediately get a real diagnosis and treatment, understand this perfectly.

If you’ve been through a difficult legal battle you understand the difference between a $300 an hour lawyer and a $1000 an hour lawyer! There are certain things in life you don’t cheap out on. I don’t want the cheapest brain surgeon or tax accountant or criminal defense lawyer. I’m okay with the cheapest quote to cut my lawn.

The difference in skill and performance levels amongst peers is probably greater than we think. I don’t think 20% of people in the same profession are top performers, it’s probably closer to 1%. We know rock stars in a profession when we see them, and it’s rare. You don’t have 2 or 3 on every team.

That’s why it’s critical that if you have high performing talent, at any level, you do almost anything to retain them. Most will outperform a handful of average to low performing peers doing the exact same job.

 

6 Things That Make Great HR Pros Great!

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The one great thing I love about going to HR and Talent conferences is that you always get reminded about what really good HR should look like.  It doesn’t mean that your shop will be there, but it gives you something to shoot for.  I’ll admit, sometimes it can be frustrating listening to some HR Pro from a great brand tell you how they ‘built’ their great employment brand through all their hard work and brilliant ideas.  All the while, not mentioning anything about “oh, yeah, and we already had this great brand that marketing spends $100 million a year to keep us great!”

Regardless, seeing great HR always reminds me that great HR is obtainable for everyone. Great HR has nothing to do with size or resources. It has a lot to do with an HR team, even a team of one, deciding little by little we’re going to make this great!

I think there are six things you need to know to make your HR department great:

1. Know how to ‘sell’ your HR vision to the organization and your executives.  The best HR Pros I know are great storytellers and in turn great at selling their visions.  If you don’t have a clear vision of what you want your HR shop to look like, how do you expect others to get on board and help you get there?  Sit down, away from work, and write out exactly what you want your HR shop to look like.  Write it long-hand. Write in bullet points. Just start.  It will come.

2. Buy two pairs of shoes: one of your employees and one of your hiring managers. Try them on constantly.  These are your customers, your clients.  You need to feel their joys and pains, and truly live them.  Knowing their struggles will make you design better HR programs to support them.  Support them, not you.

3. Working hard is number 1.  Working smart is number 1A.  Technology can do every single transaction in HR.  Don’t allow tasks and administrative things to be why you can’t do great HR.  Get technology to do all of this busy work so you can focus on real HR deliverables.

4. Break something in your organization that everyone hates and replace it with something everyone loves.  This is usually a process of something you’ve always done, and people are telling you it still has to be done that way. Until it doesn’t, and you break it.  By the way, this doesn’t have to be something in HR.  Our leaders and our employees have so many things that frustrate them in our environments.  Just find one and get rid of it.

5. Sometimes the path of least resistance is the best solution. HR people love to fight battles for the simple act of fighting the battle. “NO! It has to be done this way!” “We will NOT allow any workarounds!”   Great HR finds the path of least resistance.  The path of greatest adoption.  The path which makes our people feel the most comfortable, even if it isn’t the path we really, really want to take.

6. Stop being an asshole. You’re in HR, you’re not a Nazi.  Just be nice.  We’re supposed to be the one group in our organization that understands.  Understands people are going to have bad days and probably say things they don’t mean.  Understands that we all will have pressures, some greater than others, but all pressure nonetheless. Understands that work is about 25% of our life, and many times that other 75% creates complete havoc in our world!

Great HR has nothing to do with HR.  Great HR has a lot to do with being a great leader, even when that might not be your position in the organization.

What Is Your 3 Minute Interview Monologue? This is mine!

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Right now, with high unemployment and seemingly endless competition for jobs, nailing your interview is critical! Almost every failed interview can be traced back to the first three minutes. Experts will tell you the first ten seconds, but these are the same experts who have never interviewed or haven’t interviewed in the past twenty years. The reality is a little longer, but not much.

An interview doesn’t really start until you’re asked to open your mouth. And, not the small talk crap that you do while people get settled and wait for Jenny to get her coffee and find your resume.

When you get asked that first question, “So, tell us a little about yourself.” Bam! It’s on. Start the clock, you have 180 seconds to show them why they should hire you.

Here’s what I would say:

“I was raised by 6 women. My grandmother is the matriarch of our family. I was raised by a single mom, who had four sisters, my aunts, and my sister was the first grandchild born into the family. As you can imagine, I was dressed-up a lot! The women in my life love to laugh and I have always had a stage with them to make this happen. 

The other thing it taught me was to cook, sew, and iron. All of which I do to this day. My wife is a baker, but I’m the cook. Mending and ironing fall in my chore bucket around the house.

The real thing it taught me was the value of women in the world. I did my master’s thesis on women and leadership. My mother started her own company in 1979 when no women started companies. Not only that, but she also started a company in a male-dominated technical field.  I was nine years old, and she would pay me ten cents to stuff envelopes for her. We would sit on her bed and she made calls to candidates, and I would stuff envelopes with the volume off on the TV.

Living with a single mom, who started a business during a recession was a challenge. I learned the value of work and started my first real job the day I turned sixteen. I paid my own way through college, my parents who could afford to help, but believed I would get more out of college if I found a way to pay for it on my own. I did. In hindsight, I’m glad they taught me this lesson. It was hard but worth it.

All of these experiences have helped shape my leadership style. I set high expectations but work hard to ensure people have the right tools and knowledge to be successful. I hold people accountable for what we agree are our goals. I believe hard work leads to success, and in business when you are successful you have way more fun! 

What else would you like to know about me?”

That’s it. I shut up and wait for a response.

What did I tell them in my three minutes?

I told them my story.  People don’t hire your resume, they hire your story.

If you want to get hired, you need to craft your story. A real story. A story people want to listen to. A story people will remember when it comes time to decide whom to hire.

Once you craft that story, sit down with as many people as possible, and tell them that story. You need to perfect it. You need to be able to “perform” that story in the interview so that it’s 100% natural. Pro tip: try and get people that don’t like you very much to listen to your story and give you feedback. They’ll still be nice, but you’ll get more honest feedback from them, then your fans.

You have 3 minutes! How are you going to use that time?

The Top Six Figure Jobs with Lowest Competition! And California AB5 Breakdown! #HRFamous

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In episode 27 of The HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Tim Sackett, Kris Dunn, and Jessica Lee discuss 100K jobs with the least competition (spoiler – that means only really smart people should apply) and break down California going after Uber and Lyft with California Assembly Bill 5, which seeks to classify more contractors such as Uber/Lyft drivers into full-time employees

Listen (click this link if you don’t see the player below) and be sure to subscribe, rate, and review (Apple Podcasts) and follow (Spotify)!

2:30 – Tim and Kris decide Jessica is beginning to fall in love with Hamilton because her kids are watching and singing the songs all the time.

4:05  – The crew breaks down $100,000 salary jobs with the least competition, and most are technical and medical, except for the number one job.

6:30 – Tim is ranking doctors on which ones are the dumbest even though he could never be a doctor and passed out at the birth of all three of his kids.

10:30 – The crew decides which six-figure jobs should have been on the list but weren’t, and Tim shares how a used car salesman in his town has a way bigger house than he has, so he believes the best six-figure job with the least competition is probably great sales jobs because not many want to do sales, and very few are great at sales.

13:35 – KD wants the crew on a future episode to break down the best jobs for liberal art school grads. Also, Tesla, KD is open for an HR Famous sponsorship! KD has Tim break down what makes a great salesperson.

16:22 – The crew digs into California Assembly Bill 5 lawsuit by Uber and Lyft that puts in a three-prong test to determine is a person an employee or contractor, which has a major impact to Uber and Lyft drivers moving them from contractors to employees. Both Uber and Lyft have threatened to end operations in California if AB5 goes through.

18:45 – KD believes that ultimately the customers of Uber and Lyft will end up paying for this bill in the end, but Jessica disagrees and believes the market will answer the challenge to fill the void. Or that Uber and Lyft will find a middle-ground to continue business where they can have both employees and contractors.

21:55 – Californians will vote in November on an amendment to exempt rideshare companies from AB5 anyway, so does it really matter? Well, it might not for rideshare, but it could national impact on tech contractors, over the road drivers, etc.

22:30 – Tim hates California and believes doing business in California is the biggest pain in the ass in the entire world.

24:00 – The voice of reason Jessica comes in and explains how California should create a safety net for its citizens versus forcing companies to create the safety net by changing their employment status.

31:00 – KD asks the HR Famous crew what do we think Californian’s will do when voting in November in terms of amending AB5 and letting Uber and Lyft off the hook.

33:00 – Tim tells the crew he has to go because he’s having a Spirit Painting being done and has to go, but will update everybody next episode on the experience!

Is it okay to be biased for underrepresented communities in hiring?

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I’m a big podcast listener. It’s one of the reasons we started HR Famous because we loved the format! One of my favorite podcasts to listen to is The Prof G Show with Scott Galloway.

If you aren’t familiar with Scott Galloway he’s a New York University professor of marketing and hugely popular. He’s a liberal and rails openly against Trump and also his own industry, Higher Education. I’m a moderate and he’s so freaking smart, I could care less about his political leanings, I just get smarter listening to him.

Besides being a professor, he has started and exited a few technology companies, sits on boards, has school-aged kids, and talks a ton about the stock market.

On a recent pod, Elitism: Money vs. Influence, he gave his top 3 attributes the top-performing employees of the companies that he has started. These are:

  1. Most likely Female. “First they were female. If they were male I couldn’t say this but it’s okay because as long as you are biased for underrepresented communities your okay, but we try and ignore that…” (42:03 in the pod)
  2. Graduate from a world-class university. Ivy League, Penn, Michigan, Stanford, Berkley, Vanderbilt, etc. “Better schools matter…more applicants…start with better core human capital…better screening.”
  3. Athletes are very successful. They understand teamwork, discipline, they can endure and push themselves harder. “Someone who can finish an Ironman isn’t lazy”, says Galloway.

So, Professor of NYU, former business owner, and thought leader says it’s okay to be biased in selection.

I’m not sure I agree we should ever be biased in our hiring selection practices, but Galloway points out a reality in our culture. As long as we aren’t biased towards the majority, we will look the other way and ignore it.

What Galloway is saying is not different than how the vast majority of hiring managers are making their final selections. They take a look at past and current performance and they make some educated inferences about what those top performers have in common. Based on this knowledge, it will shape their hiring selection. Does this, or could this, lead to bias? Yes.

Does it make it wrong?

That’s the big sticky question, isn’t it?

We want to say, no, it’s fine, continue to hire the females if those are your best performers. But, just because your current females are your best performers doesn’t mean they’ll be your best moving forward, or that maybe one of the males will be even a better performer.

Flip the scenario.

Galloway now tells us that one of the three attributes for high performance is they are “male”. Do we have a problem with this now? Most likely, you do have a problem with it based on hiring equity issues, broadly, but it’s hard to say specifically since maybe this organization doesn’t have gender equity issues.

Want to know what Inclusion is difficult when it comes to organizational dynamics? It’s because what Galloway laid out is exactly what every organization lays out. The difference is, it isn’t always friendly to the underrepresented community.

Like I said, regardless of your feelings on this one subject, Galloway’s podcast is money! It’s on my must-listen to pods each week.

Give me your thoughts on this in the comments?