Raising the Bar from Day 1: Why Talent Acquisition and DEI Go Hand in Hand

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  00:40

Jackye, welcome to the show.

Jackye Clayton (Textio)  03:58

Hello, thanks for having me.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  04:00

Yeah, excited to do this. You have had quite the leadership career in different types of departments at a lot of different companies. Today, you’re the VP of talent acquisition and dei at Textio. And you’ve worked in roles like customer success before at hiringsolved. You were named one of the top recruitment thought leaders. And you’re also the co-host of the inclusive AF Podcast which I mentioned to you before we started. I think it is a terrific name. So there’s a lot of stuff that we’re going to talk about today. But one of the things we like to do on this show is rewind and talk about the very beginning. Do you remember when you first started to manage and lead a team? What were some of those very early mistakes that you made back then?

Jackye Clayton (Textio)  04:50

Yes so I live in Texas, and when I first went into management, I did something that we called like cowboy up where it’s like you go in and I’m like Oh, the problem is the five people here, let’s fire those five people and start with a whole new team. Like they know nothing of what they were doing. And so I think the earliest mistakes was thinking that I didn’t have to lead, I was just a boss, right? So instead of realizing that as part of a skill, as a leader, you have to be able to develop the muscle to help coach and inspire other people to be their best selves and do their best work. I think that was one of the pieces. And the other part was, instead of looking at it as an opportunity for us to all grow together at a various department, I felt like it was I already know everything, and I’m maxed out and there was nothing else to learn at the very beginning. And it was like, why don’t you just do what I say, instead of understanding each as individuals with different strengths, and then allowing them to coach them for what they want to do, not necessarily what they are doing. And so that has changed in that now I go over with my team, their dream job, what do they really want to do, even if they say, oh, I want to one person was like, I’ve always wanted to be a DJ. So I found a way for him to DJ at our meetings, DJ Or be the host of our Friday company meetings. There was another person who one of my other recruiters that said I was really interested in learning and development. And so we have a required interview class, but then it was Why don’t you run the training class and start developing that class bigger? And what else should we train on? Why don’t we allow you to do those things so that their dreams and goals we try to weave into the day to day, it keeps them excited about being able to reach their goals, but that also means that I’m helping develop them with the understanding, like I want you to grow and be able to go someplace else and be an ambassador and say, I know, I wasn’t a recruiter, but I really have the learning and development. Now I’m ready to make that leap into that charge. But this was a great opportunity for me. And so it’s really looking at the full development of a person, rather than just the remit that we have to deliver as a department. I think that was a big change.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  07:29

Yeah, lots to unpack there. Let’s start with the term. Did you use the term cap going up? Yeah. So I’m not familiar. What does that mean? Exactly? Does it mean exactly what you said, which is just change the team?

Jackye Clayton (Textio)  07:42

Well, you know, like, you remember those old westerns, and the guy would always come up, and he’d be like, okay, Marshall, there’s a new sheriff in town. And it was like, everything from here that you’ve learned, forget that. This is what we’re going to do starting now. And so, in Texas, you hear it a lot. Well, you’re not going to just cowboy up here, like, you’re not gonna just come in here and change everything. And so that’s a standard term. I use TEKsystems.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  08:08

All the time. That’s awesome. I love it. I love it. Okay, so I guess when you first started doing this, you thought that you were going to cowboy up? And then I guess there was like, five troublemakers or something? Or maybe they? And you said, Well, we’re just going to change the team. And then I guess like, through the course of that you went from a, I will just tell them what to do to, I will coach them so that they can be the best that they can be?

Jackye Clayton (Textio)  08:31

Yeah, I was quickly told you can’t fire your whole team. Now that that’s off the table, what we try next. And so it was like, Okay, I’ll just boss them. It’s like, okay, well, that’s not working. What else can you do? And that really started my boss coaching me to lead a team, and really developing relationships to understand the day to day challenges. And of course, we can see flash forward to 2022. It’s something that we’ve had to really dig in and learn respect people as individuals, and make sure that we see them not as just a cog in a wheel. But as humans with goals and aspirations and recognizing that the more that you can be empathetic, the greater opportunities you can lead and coach and inspire.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  09:23

Got it. And so one of the things that you mentioned, as you were describing that journey, was that in the beginning, you were thinking that maybe are this operating from a place of this is the person this is who they can be and there may be a little bit immutable, and then that kind of change to know they can actually grow and become this greater version of themselves. Do you remember what led you to kind of shift that understanding? I think it’s a very important one. We often talked about the growth mindset and seeing people as not immutable you Remember how you came upon that? Was it a quick realization were some things that happened that led you to change your thinking?

Jackye Clayton (Textio)  10:08

There were a couple of things. One was, I had a co worker early in my career. And I hated him, it was really my first recruiting job. And I worked at an agency. So you partnered with a salesperson, and I hated this guy. And I was so mad, and I would complain to my boss all the time. And my boss was like, brought us into a room and said, I’m not going to fire you, and I’m not going to fire you. Apparently, he had been saying the same things that I was saying about him, to my boss about me, which, really, I’m the drama, I’m thinking, you are the drama. And she basically said, y’all are gonna have to figure it out and just left us in this room in silence with the two of us. And then we started to get to know each other. And we started learning about where we came from the history, how did we get to this point? Where did we want to go? And how can we do that together. And so it kind of started with scaling some of that. And then additionally, I’m a Gen XOR. So what is interesting is that my career kind of evolved alongside the internet, by the time I was 30, the internet just launched. And so we were able to kind of grow together. And I had a boss that would really invalidate all of the things that I was saying. And so I took to writing about it and asking the public, you know, the five other people on the internet, what their opinion was to find out, how are they doing, and then I really grew a desire to write. And now, thank you for describing me as a top thought leader. But the goal was not to be a thought leader, the goal was to share information and gather information from other people and have some other people that I wanted to think of the world of work differently, the world of recruiting differently in the world of talent acquisition differently. And I feel like there were a lot of things that I was doing on my own, that if that was nurtured could have created a full community. And now we can see there were people who did take that opportunity to build communities like era media, or sourcecon, and recruiting daily, no, and organizations that were built off of that community. And so we lost the opportunity to grow and develop as thought leaders as an organization instead of just individualize. And what I found is not only does that help people grow, it’s interesting how people growing into their personal desires, ultimately can help grow your full organization, because they’re more engaged, they’re happier, you’re giving them an opportunity that a lot of organizations won’t give them the ability to go and develop themselves and, and something that they desire personally, and try to see how those things correlate. That’s also the beauty of diverse thought is the opportunities, you will gain skills in that opportunity that you can use at your work. And just because we haven’t done it before, doesn’t mean that those opportunities of learning, aren’t there. So the more experiences you have, the more you have to add as a person to the organization.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  13:23

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And I can see how you arrived at that conclusion. One of the things I did want to ask you, and maybe this is a personal curiosity is because you emphasize writing so much how his writing, would you say helped in your own development? And how much do you write? I mean, just very tactically speaking, how much do you write on a daily or weekly basis?

Jackye Clayton (Textio)  13:47

Well, the amount that I write now is pretty gross. So I work at Textio, where we look at language and words being the operating system of diversity, equity and inclusion, right? It’s having that communication and growing that muscle, and then also making sure that your words are inclusive. And so I write a lot. But at one point, I was writing between 500 and 1000 words every day for like three years about the technology. And so it’s really helpful to give a little bit of clarity as to what I’m trying to say, and making sure that I’m organizing my thoughts. What’s funny is that verbally, I have a tendency to keep some of it in my head. And I’ll only say half of the other sentence. When I’m writing, I can go back and say, Is there anything else I should be asking? Did I answer any of the questions? And what was even more fun is that I was able to earlier in my career, use my mom as a resource to read and say, do you understand this because they were not part of this industry, and later, utilize my children who are now adults to read it to say, is this understandable for you when you read this Can you paint a picture in your mind of what I’m creating, and also was helpful to understand at what level we should use words. And traveling internationally really helped me to understand English as a second language, not just English as a first language and how we can better communicate with people who may know multiple languages is the simplest form. But it also turns out to other native speakers, that same way of speaking is easier to understand. And so I was able through writing to realize it’s not who uses the most words, or the longest words, or have the most syllables, it’s about being clear, in your words, to paint an accurate picture so that we’re all on the same stage in order to move forward. And so I write quite a bit. I always have a notepad and a pen. I’m a little old school, I have to write it down in order to comprehend and I think it’s not used enough the written word, when thinking about communication skills, not just what you say, verbally, but what you’re able to write as well.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  16:01

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So you know, it’s interesting. And for anyone who doesn’t know, tech co helps you write in an unbiased way, right? It’s your friend that will make sure that you’re using inclusive language, which is useful for a lot of cases. You know, what’s really interesting is, we had Kim Scott on this show, and she had her new book called just work. And the way that she described it was that I thought that I knew a lot about being inclusive and writing in an inclusive way. But I was so surprised that even when I had my text reviewed, that they found so many things that even I had to change, just ableist language that I use throughout the book that even I wasn’t aware of. So this stuff is hard. And it requires us to maybe change the way that we speak. And maybe we’ve been doing that for a long period of time. So tools like this are certainly helpful. Thank you. So the thing that I wanted to dig in on is you have a very interesting role at Tech CO. So it seems almost like it’s a dual role. So you lead the Talent Team. And you also focus on D AI at the same time. So maybe you can talk about how that came to be? Is that something? Is that a job that you designed for yourself? Or how did you come into that role? And should other people think about it the same way?

Jackye Clayton (Textio)  17:23

Great question. So if you look, my background, most recently, the last three organizations have been HR tech startups Textio. Previously to that it was seek out and before that, it was hiringsolved, all HR tech startups. And in the beginning, as the Director of Customer Success, I found that a lot of what I was helping organizations do was actually find, attract and retain talent from diverse communities and underrepresented communities. And so I spent a lot of time doing that and helping with the outreach. Later, I went really was working with some large organizations and getting really digging down specifically on how you could find this talent. And what always surprised me is that after we would find the talent, they would say, Okay, now what, and I realized within there two products that I worked in before, even though we could tell them, show them where the talent was, and show them, you know, give them opportunities to reach out build projects and design regular cadences of communication. They still felt like they didn’t know what they were doing. And so I realized that actually finding the talent wasn’t the issue. There was another issue that was doing that there was also starting to study when organizations, especially through 2020, we’re making these really huge commitments to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging and saying, we’re going to increase the hiring of women by 30%. For an example, I had a client come to me because their CEO said they were going to increase hiring of women by 30%. And I said, let’s look at your internal numbers and used a tool to look at people leaving the organization. And they were excited because they thought that they had increased by 25%. But actually, they had only increased by 5%. Because 1000 women left and within three months 800 were hired, but in the last year 1000 women left. And so the problem showed that it wasn’t about just recruiting, there was another part to the issue at hand. And so I kind of built it and said, I will not do talent acquisition without doing diversity, equity and inclusion. And I will not do Diversity, Equity and Inclusion without having influence or decision making with talent acquisition because both of those can undo all of the work. Either you’re recruiting people from underrepresented groups, but the person who’s doing diversity, equity and inclusion is only focused on women and people of color and they’re not creating an environment for people who are neurodiverse people from the LGBTQ plus arena or P People who are deaf or hard of hearing or with disabilities, and so then those people are leaving. And it’s like, what are you doing, we work so hard to attract this talent. And so we had to have an understanding of what’s happening once talent from underrepresented communities are getting to the organization to either cause them to be promoted, have the experiences, training development that they were looking for, and what are we doing to make sure that this is a safe place to land. And I can tell you as an organization that helps create inclusive environments, and being the responsible for our inclusive environment, it changes with every single hire, the culture changes, the mood changes, the importance and emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion changes. And so if you don’t see those things in advance, then you can’t be accountable. If you’re not looking at the actual numbers of who’s coming in, who’s leaving, and the makeup, the demographics of the organization as a whole. It’s important, I think, also, diversity, equity and inclusion leaders, a lot of time look at the company as one cake without recognizing the layers of that cake. It’s supposed to be all chocolate, well, there’s a strawberry in there, there’s a butterscotch in there. I know it still tastes like chocolate, maybe some people don’t notice. But when you dig in, and you look, you realize you don’t have a chocolate cake, right? And so it’s the same where, oh, we have 50% women and 50% men. And then you ask the organization, how was the money split up? Are women earning 50% of the wages and men 50% of the wages are the leader is the leadership opportunities given to 50% women and 50% men, and then you realize no marketing, HR and customer success is all women, tech and the leadership and accounting, they’re all men, they all get paid higher. And so are we really inclusive. And so it was important to be able to have a hand in both of those cookie jars to make sure that we’re really truly diverse and inclusive.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  22:03

Hey, there, just a quick pause on today’s episode to let you know that we’d really appreciate you helping us spread the word about the Supermanagers podcast, if you’re enjoying what you’re hearing so far, dial into your podcast app of choice, whether that’s on Apple or Android or Spotify. And just leave us a quick review. Now back to the interview. I think you bring up a really good point. And I feel for a lot of organizations, when they might think about Dei, they might think yes, let’s hire more women, let’s hire people from different communities. But the challenge is, like you said, you actually have to do the work of making sure that when you have that talent that that talent will actually stay. And I feel like the reason maybe it doesn’t happen is because that’s probably harder to do that requires Yeah, a lot more work. salutely.

Jackye Clayton (Textio)  22:52

I mean, probably once a week, I will look at my written word, pieces of paper all over my desk. And I’ll think this is why this is so hard of because of the work that we have to do. We had a change in leadership and a change in management with a different emphasis. Not everybody agrees with what every change that’s making people move to various departments. Some people are really excited and came in and some people transit. And then you look at your numbers within that department. And you’re like, Oh, snap. Okay, now, this is unbalanced. So then you have to change your whole recruiting strategy, the way that you’re presenting, like, where are you presenting your opportunities to make sure that you’re getting in front of the right people, all of that changes based on whose voice is missing from the table. And so it’s something that we constantly monitor, of making sure that we have the right voices that can help build an inclusive tool.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  23:49

You know, this is really interesting. And at some level, it’s interesting, because you also had a background in customer success at some point. And we naturally understand this for business, right? If you have a product or an offering that customers churn from constantly, it’s kind of really hard to grow your customer base. So you have to make sure that you solve the retention issue first. And then obviously, do you know get more customers or in this case, get more talent? It’s funny, because you’re right, we often talk about the stats of you know, we’re X percent men, X percent women, and we don’t necessarily talk about retention rates. And I wonder if that should be something that we should talk about actually, like we have a 95% retention rate for women who join our company as an example. That’s a stat that I think that it would be really interesting if everybody started to actually monitor. I did want to ask you about some tactical things, though. So say that someone says okay, I want to get in and I want to build a more inclusive environment and I’m willing to do the hard work of making it so that diverse talent stays what would you recommend that they do? What are some steps that they can take?

Jackye Clayton (Textio)  24:59

Sure. So the first thing is I would look at building out metrics and holding accountability, like how are you going to? Are you going to reward people for making sure that they have an inclusive team? Are you going to like how are you going to measure the success, even before that, define what diversity is right? Diversity are mean, when you’re looking at that to make sure that there is a clear understanding that we’re looking at voices missing from the table. I think it was really funny, I did talk to a recruiter once and I was like, We really need men in this room. And they were like, Oh, I thought you’re about diversity, equity inclusion, and like, yeah, it’s a 90% Women department. And so men’s voices are missing. So we’re looking for men who join this team, to make sure that we have an inclusive tool. So I would also make sure to look at it from a natural standpoint, from whose voices are missing, that can be helpful rather than okay, that means black people, Hispanic, Latino, Latinx, LGBTQ like really look at whose voices are missing, that can help you build your product, and then other constantly, make sure that you’re getting opportunities to grow, make sure that that’s a leadership competency. When you’re promoting internally, that they understand that we’re looking to build inclusive teams and hold them accountable for helping them the retention, and the recruiting of people from underrepresented groups, and then share your learnings publicly of what’s happening. Because what happens a lot of time as a member, you know, I’m a black woman, for people who can’t see me, I wear my hair natural, you know, I wear big glasses all the time. But when I look at the full scope, it’s not just oh, we want to have people like you on our team. It’s what are you doing for me? And so unfortunately, a lot of organizations, they look at diversity through a cisgendered, white male legs. And so the lessons that they’re teaching people is how can you tolerate people who aren’t like you, as a cisgender, white male, right. And there’s other people that have different histories and experiences of how they got here. The other part that is important, especially if you’re at a startup, or at a smaller company, is the stage of the business, and how that can impact your ability to hire various people, and the different types of people who will join during those different phases. You know, you have your series A Series B, Series C, you have your seed round, you have your fundraising round. And the reason why that is so important is because you and I know if you’re looking for funding, the people you’re looking at the year before you’re doing funding are salespeople, like hardcore salespeople. And then what happens is the praise goes to beat sometimes can go to people who are working the hardest, that changes the culture of your organization. And so are you being inclusive to people who aren’t going to work 16 hour days who aren’t going to make 300 dials a day, you don’t sell the big deals, but they’re helping you maintain that piece, then you might have you just raised the money. So then the next phase, you get your series B and you’re in a nurturing base and helping within customer success. The people on the sales team now all of a sudden seem really too aggressive, right? And then you’re saying, Oh, I don’t think we need all these aggressive people, they don’t feel right. So they leave and go someplace where they can be nurtured. You know, people who are nurturing and customer success are looking all right, and then you got to make money again. And so the people who start your or come to your organization, we know at the beginning are not always the people that are going to take you to the next level. But make sure that you are consistent with their message with diversity, equity and inclusion. And make sure you’re not letting people go, that can be a good fit. Because of the stage where you are in a business, be careful to make sure that you’re taking everybody along that journey, and that it’s not siloed by department and I see that mistake happening a lot of times, because instead of looking at the whole cake in this instance, and by siloing it by departments, there becomes this unsettled feeling going on within the organization. And people feel that differently based on the way they were raised culturally, ethnically, you know, throughout their experiences. And so it’s important to acknowledge that

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  29:26

show the point that you bring up, which I want to emphasize is it is true that at various stages of company building, you will require different types of people. And it is different people at different stages. So you are right, like when you’re the first five people trying to fight gravity to stay alive, to get to a point where someone will even give you funding. You might have to do more than eight hours a day, right? And so that’s a certain type of person and then as time goes by and your company starts growing, you’re going to need more experienced folks stat have families and have a different lifestyle. And so yeah, it is something very important to be conscious of that different stages are going to require different people and and you have to be careful about this. One of the things that I also know is true is you don’t want to wait to solve this problem too late. Because again, if you’re now say, a 50 person company, and everyone is a white male, it’s going to be hard to like you’re really fighting gravity at that point to change that. So it is something that you want to focus on early on. I know from our experience that when we’re hiring, say women onto the team, they also want to know, what is the profile of the company? Like, am I going to be the only one? Or are there a lot more? And they’ll even reach out and ask, you know, women who already work there? What’s it like to work at this company? So you bring up a very good point in terms of that, to get into something very tactical on the you know, what can you do to encourage di in the workplace? You have something at Tech co call Taco Tuesdays. Is that correct?

Jackye Clayton (Textio)  31:01

I do have Taco Tuesday. So

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  31:03

tell us about that. What is that?

Jackye Clayton (Textio)  31:05

So the reason tacos, we have Taco Tuesdays. So internally at Textio. Getting a taco is like the highest honor. And so there’s a whole Slack channel that was like, Hey, Jeff got a taco and you can give other people kudos through the Slack channel and you give them a taco. And so part of what is interesting, and a challenge is, people want to know what textarea does to do these. And in my head, I don’t want to I don’t want to, you know, I don’t know, I was like, this is ongoing work. Like I don’t it’s working this one. But it can totally fall apart next month. And it’s like, it’s okay, you share these ideas. And I was like, well, I’ll give them a little DACA. Okay, this is what we’re working on. This is what we’re doing. These are some steps that you can take. I also think I look at AI along with people at text to look at diversity, equity and inclusion in a iterative fashion, and that we’re always trying something new. It doesn’t work, we pivot. And so every Tuesday on LinkedIn, I give a little taco just talking about what we are actually doing. This is not theory, this is not even a suggestion. It’s just letting you know, hey, this is what we’re doing. If you’re looking for new ideas to help you with your D IB initiatives, or just curious because so many people ask us all the time, like, Well, what do y’all do inside? What are your numbers? Like, what is this happen, and it’s sometimes it’s like, Oh, I wish you would have asked me three days ago, we looked better three days ago, it changed. It’s gonna change a month from now, I guarantee, but we wanted to share some of the things that we were doing internally, and then also highlight some of the things that we know that we do that no other organization is doing and showing how that has an impact overall, on the importance for what we’re doing. And also because we’re a distributed team, we’re spread among nine states, and allows people internal the text do get an opportunity to get a snippet of what we’re doing because they see the effects of our work, but don’t always know what goes in on the back end to create these barriers, environments.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  33:14

Got it. And so I noticed you have quite the LinkedIn following as well. So if people want to know what’s going on, they can follow you on LinkedIn for Taco Tuesdays. That’s awesome. So given that you’ve been working in the talent field for a long time, one of the things that I think we have a quote from you where you say, I want the interview process to be so great that people will tell their friends to apply to work here, just so that not even if they don’t want the job, but just so that they can experience what this interview process is like, that sounds very intriguing. What is the I mean, if you were to explain it, or do I have to apply to find out?

Jackye Clayton (Textio)  33:50

Maybe you should apply? Actually, no, you don’t have to apply to find out. The one thing that we changed that I think is different is that we tried to have feedback for every single candidate on every single world. Now, it’s hard to do on the executive roles, because we have so many hundreds of people applying to be able to respond on all of those roles. But for the especially the icy roles or director level and below, we tried to give everyone feedback and let them know where we are in the process. And if there’s something very clear, we’ve tried to be very gives very specific feedback now to candidates that are qualified and we want to go through that process. We do something that is very different than other organizations, we tell you, these are the things that we want to know about. These are the questions that you’re going to be asked, this is a presentation that we’d like for you to create. These are the things that we want to have because, you know like when I applied for my most recent jobs, some of them I interviewed for a role. And at the end of it I was like in tears. It was the most is painful experience I’ve ever had. And I do public speaking. And I was like, I don’t they were like, oh, Everything’s been great, it looks really great. And I was like, I have to stop you. I will never work at your company. Like that was such a painful experience. And it shouldn’t have been. And when I first came into Textio, I was like, Why do I have to meet with all these people? Like I understand the importance of the role. But this has taken a really long time I have other things, I was not looking for a job I was. And I’m like that, why is this the first thing that I’m going to change. And so the other part was wanting to be more inclusive. For people who are neurodiverse, or people who might need accommodation to be like, Let’s offer people help. I don’t want to see candidates at their worst. And because of the negative experience that I’ve had, and different things I’ve read on Reddit, or we’ve all had conversations, you know, I have a group of friends on Labor Day, we talked about bad interviews, like going to work. And so it was like, what would make this experience more equitable, and feel better if people could interview me at my best, instead of a test on how well I handle anxiety, or questions I’m not prepared for when you’re at work, it’s not like you’re not going to call a friend or ask a co worker or even Google and answer and to create your best work. So that’s part of that experience. We also narrowed it down so that you won’t have more than five interviews, but we narrowed it down to trying to have a maximum of four people on the interview process. How many times have you heard of people I interviewed with eight people, and then they decided to go another direction. Or they just kept saying one more interview, every time I had an interview, they said just one more person, I want you to meet with one more person. The other part was understanding that people bring bias. The more people you have the interview on different days, the more bitis you’re bringing into the process, I would have one interview at eight o’clock at eight o’clock, I’ve already had coffee, I’m freshly showered, I’m like feeling all good about myself. And then if I interview all the way through one o’clock, by like, 1130, I’m starting to get hungry, I’m thirsty, I need a health break. And by one o’clock, all I want to do is get off the phone. Now I’m exhausted, I’m not at my best, I don’t feel fresh, my coffee, caffeine is worn off. So we’ve tried to make it easier for the candidate to make sure that they can be their best at all stages, we give breaks in between the interview process. The recruiter is really your advocate, they are speaking on your behalf. The first part of the process is working with the recruiter, and the recruiter tells you each step of the process on where you are, and almost takes an agency approach to make sure that you’re still interested that nothing has changed and allows you to feel like you have a point of contact. And what was interesting on Glassdoor, because last door isn’t like the Holy Grail of all of recruiting. But one thing that I found that was interesting is that, you know, people usually go to Glassdoor when they’re mad, right? They’re like, Oh, I’m gonna talk bad about this company. You know, it’s like Yelp like, this sucks, you know. And what I had was like we, we saw an increase of people that were saying, that was saying, I didn’t take the job, or it was a hard interview or an easy interview, and it uses it. And it was a bad experience. So that they least they might say, it was a hard interview, or they didn’t get the job. But it was a positive experience. And so we really just want to make it we really tried to set the bar and set the example have full transparency to stand out so that if it doesn’t work out this time, maybe there’s something else that we can do in the future. And then when you think about how you level set all of the opportunities that you have, you’ll remember the positive experience, you have a text. Yeah.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  38:44

Yeah, I think that’s a good summary in that way. So breaks less interviews, try and take just as much time as you need, but not more than that. And recognizing that you introduce more bias when there are more people, and also different times during the day are going to just you know, if you’re doing an interview at 8pm, after you put the kids to bed, you might be in a different state. So yeah, that’s a good way to sum it up. Jackye, this has been a super insightful conversation. We’ve talked about everything. I think you’ve convinced me that having someone who is responsible for talent acquisition, also be well versed in D AI initiatives is a good bet. And hopefully, more and more hopefully, you’ve started a trend there. The final question that we really like to ask all of our guests is for all the managers and leaders constantly looking to get better at their craft. Are there any tips, tricks or parting words of wisdom that you would leave them with?

Jackye Clayton (Textio)  39:37

Yes, I think that it’s important to always be learning, but I look at diverse opportunities of learning and not just looking at, you know, I was laughing I’m taking a data science course. And it was like, you know, you can learn more by working with our team than you can from course. So look internally at that learning and see what you can learn from your team that you already have. So that you can grow in that learning together. And it also gives people internally an opportunity to lead in that moment, so that you can also find out the strengths of the people around you, and have a better feeling of growing the organization as you grow as a person. And also always make time to understand people that are different than you as a competency for leadership. It’s very important that all of the leaders set the bar of what it looks like to nurture inclusive environment. And I think it’s one of the core competencies on what determines who a true leader is.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  40:42

That’s great advice and a great place to end it. Jackye, thanks so much for doing this.

Jackye Clayton (Textio)  40:47

Thank you. It’s been fun.