Una contratación justa y equitativa necesita una estrategia de retención (S2E14)

Anita Chauhan (00:16)

Hola a todos y bienvenidos a nuestro último episodio de Looks Good On Paper, patrocinado por Willo. ⁓ Les hablo desde Toronto, donde hace mucho frío. Hoy nos hemos despertado con una gran nevada y estoy un poco helada junto a la ventana, pero estoy muy emocionada y seguro que esta conversación con nuestra última invitada me calentará. Me gustaría dar la bienvenida al podcast a Gillian Emerson. Gillian es la directora de talento y asociaciones de Toast, donde está ayudando a remodelar la forma en que las empresas tecnológicas contratan personal, haciendo de la equidad una ventaja competitiva. ⁓ Gillian fue una de las primeras empleadas de Toast y ayudó a crear la función de contratación desde cero. Estoy muy emocionada. Me encanta lo que Toast está haciendo en Canadá y en toda Norteamérica. Creo que, como mencioné antes de empezar, Gillian, y podemos profundizar más en esto, es muy difícil ser mujer en el sector tecnológico. Me encanta el mandato que tienes. Me encantaría escucharte. ¿Qué me he perdido en la introducción?

Gillian (01:10)

Mm-hmm.

Anita Chauhan (01:16)

¿Qué has comprado hoy aquí?

Gillian (01:18)

Sí, totalmente. Gracias por invitarme. Hace mucho sol y calor en Calgary. No sé por qué hemos cambiado. Normalmente hace frío y helada, pero hoy Calgary está muy soleada y agradable. Sí, gracias por invitarme. Básicamente, ⁓ llegué a Toast justo cuando estábamos empezando, casi por casualidad, que es lo que dicen muchas personas que se dedican a la adquisición de talento.

Anita Chauhan (01:22)

¿Qué?

Gillian (01:39)

⁓ De hecho, hice mi licenciatura en Ontario, en Psicología, y luego volví a mi ciudad natal, Calgary, donde hice un máster en Gestión. Después, seguí adelante con mi vida pensando que la consultoría parecía el camino natural para alguien que había hecho un máster en Gestión, pero no tuve ningún éxito en ese campo. ⁓ Di un paso atrás y pensé: «Vale, pensemos en estudiar, centrémonos en eso». Y entonces surgió un proyecto. Toast acababa de lanzarse y participaban en un proyecto llamado Propel Project a través de la Universidad de Calgary. Así que consiguieron un proyecto de 50 horas con un estudiante. Vi su página web. Era como la base de una página web. Aún no habían lanzado la membresía. Todo el proyecto en general era muy vago. Y yo dije: «Apúntame». Y así...

Me inscribí, envié mi currículum y mi carta de presentación y todo eso, y por suerte me seleccionaron. Y simplemente ayudaba con todo, desde el

Cualquier proyecto en el que necesitaran ayuda, creando encuestas y cuestionarios, recabando opiniones... Muy pronto, eso se convirtió en reclutamiento, obviamente gracias a mi formación en psicología. Siempre tuve en mente la adquisición de talento o la contratación. Así que realmente empecé a involucrarme en eso. Y luego... se convirtió en algo más. Y así, hemos tenido mucho éxito en los últimos tres años ayudando a las empresas a contratar a más mujeres para sus equipos técnicos. He crecido junto a April Hickey, nuestra directora ejecutiva, para ayudar a desarrollar esa función de reclutamiento en una parte del negocio. Y luego, en la otra parte del negocio, tenemos una membresía que apoya a las mujeres en el sector tecnológico.

Anita Chauhan (03:30)

Me encanta eso. Me hace recordar hace 10 o 12 años, cuando estaba empezando. En primer lugar, vengo de un entorno que no era tecnológico y me incorporé desde el gobierno, sin saber muy bien en qué me estaba metiendo.

Gillian (03:44)

Sí.

Anita Chauhan (03:45)

Y ahora probablemente tú también lo sabes, ¿verdad? Es solo que no estás preparada. Y creo que hace diez años la situación era muy diferente, pero creo que cada vez hay más mujeres en el ámbito de las ciencias, la tecnología, la ingeniería y las matemáticas (STEM) que están accediendo a estos puestos. Pero antes de entrar en ese tema, dijiste que estás observando un ligero descenso o que Toast ha notado que, en el ámbito tecnológico, las mujeres en la tecnología...

Gillian (03:54)

Mm-hmm. Sí, creo que, en general, es fantástico incorporar a las mujeres, pero al final hay que retenerlas también. Y lo que estamos viendo es que las mujeres se incorporan al sector tecnológico, pero luego lo abandonan al cabo de unos años, quizá al llegar a cierta edad, lo cual es realmente lamentable. Por eso nos apasiona crear sistemas que, obviamente, vayan de arriba abajo, como ver la representación en los puestos de liderazgo, pero también incorporar la diversidad en los procesos. En todos los ámbitos, desde la solicitud hasta la entrevista, la oferta y el apoyo a largo plazo para ayudar a las mujeres.

Anita Chauhan (04:42)

Me encanta. Bueno, profundizaremos un poco más en ese proceso. Pero, ¿por qué no pasamos a la primera pregunta? ¿Cuál es el mayor error que cometen las empresas a la hora de contratar personal, a pesar de que está claro que no funciona?

Gillian (04:50)

Está bien.

Sí, añadiendo a eso, creo que obviamente mi respuesta breve es que no se contrata a suficientes mujeres, que no hay canales de contratación diversos, pero ese es un problema mucho mayor que el simple hecho de no contratar cuando se analizan todos los candidatos disponibles.

Por eso, parte de nuestra razón de ser es ayudar a las empresas a diversificar sus procesos de selección. Siempre empezamos con una llamada inicial para ayudarme a comprender qué hay más allá de la descripción del puesto, qué es lo que realmente se busca. Pero también cómo es la composición del equipo. ¿Quién lidera esta función? ¿Cuántas mujeres hay en el equipo? ¿Cómo son los ciclos de promoción y todo eso?

luego lo incorporamos a nuestro proceso para asegurarnos de que nuestros candidatos estén informados desde el principio. Sin embargo, el mayor problema que vemos con nuestros clientes en este momento es que vienen a nosotros y las empresas en general vienen a nosotros diciendo que realmente quieren contratar a más mujeres. Tengo un equipo formado solo por hombres, la gente está renunciando, lo que sea. Y es fantástico tener esa necesidad inicial y querer contratar a más mujeres, porque eso es lo que necesitamos para ayudar a trabajar con una empresa.

Hemos tenido empresas que nos han dicho: «Me cuesta atraer a mujeres. No sé por qué no consigo retenerlas ni contratarlas». Pero luego dicen que su jornada laboral es de 60 horas semanales y que esa es la expectativa absoluta, sin flexibilidad alguna. Y las mujeres se quedan ahí sentadas pensando: «Vale, la flexibilidad laboral es importante para mí. ¿Y si quiero ir a recoger a mis hijos?».

Y ahí es donde pueden acabar viendo mejores resultados. Así que, aunque es estupendo que las empresas tengan la intención inicial de contratar a más mujeres, el hecho de que no establezcan esos procesos a través del modelo de retención también está provocando parte de esa tasa de abandono que estamos viendo.

Anita Chauhan (06:37)

Tú, por supuesto. Creo que, obviamente, una cosa importante es que este es un podcast global y hablamos con gente de todas partes, pero, ya sabes, teniendo en cuenta lo que está pasando en Canadá, donde estamos viendo un retorno obligatorio a la oficina, ya estoy viendo que esto está cambiando muchas cosas en la forma en que las mujeres trabajan, mis amigas, mis compañeras de trabajo, simplemente cambia la forma en que interactúas con tu trabajo. Y, ya sabes, también lo vemos en algunas grandes empresas tecnológicas de Estados Unidos. Y creo que, en algunos casos, me parece casi una estratagema para deshacerse de algunos de ellos, porque la gente se va voluntariamente.

Pero como mujer en el sector tecnológico, sé que exigir cosas como esta aumenta las barreras para contratar equipos más diversos.

Gillian (07:22)

Hmm. Sí, totalmente. Siempre digo que lo que importa es la elección. Creo que cuando a las personas se les obliga a hacer una cosa en lugar de otra, es cuando se supera esa sensación de incomodidad. Siempre me pregunto si Toast tuviera una oficina, ¿iría allí? Creo que lo haría de vez en cuando, pero teniendo en cuenta lo social que es para mí el trabajo de reclutamiento, como alguien que es
‍

Anita Chauhan (07:43)

Sí.

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.