Une embauche juste et équitable nécessite une stratégie de fidélisation (S2E14)

Anita Chauhan (00:16)

Bonjour à tous et bienvenue dans notre dernier épisode de Looks Good On Paper, présenté par Willo. ⁓ Je vous parle depuis Toronto, où il fait vraiment très froid. Nous nous sommes réveillés sous une épaisse couche de neige aujourd'hui et je suis un peu frigorifiée près de la fenêtre, mais je suis très enthousiaste et je suis sûre que cette conversation avec notre dernière invitée me réchauffera. Je souhaite la bienvenue à Gillian Emerson dans ce podcast. Gillian est responsable des talents et des partenariats chez Toast, où elle contribue à redéfinir la manière dont les entreprises technologiques recrutent en faisant de l'équité un avantage concurrentiel. ⁓ Gillian a été l'une des premières employées de Toast et a contribué à mettre en place la fonction de recrutement dès le début. Je suis très enthousiaste. J'adore ce que fait Toast à travers le Canada et l'Amérique du Nord. Je pense, Gillian, que l'une des choses que j'ai mentionnées avant de commencer, et sur laquelle nous pouvons revenir plus en détail, c'est à quel point il est difficile d'être une femme dans le secteur technologique. J'adore la mission que vous vous êtes fixée. J'aimerais beaucoup vous entendre à ce sujet. Qu'ai-je oublié dans l'introduction ?

Gillian (01:10)

Mm-hmm.

Anita Chauhan (01:16)

Qu'est-ce que tu as reçu aujourd'hui ?

Gillian (01:18)

Oui, tout à fait. Merci de m'accueillir. Il fait très beau et très chaud à Calgary. Je ne sais pas pourquoi nous avons échangé nos places. D'habitude, il fait froid et glacial, mais aujourd'hui, Calgary est très ensoleillée et agréable. Oui, merci de m'accueillir. En gros, je suis arrivée chez Toast juste au moment où nous commencions, un peu par hasard, comme le disent beaucoup de personnes dans le domaine du recrutement.

Anita Chauhan (01:22)

Quoi ?

Gillian (01:39)

⁓ J'ai fait mes études de premier cycle en Ontario, en psychologie, puis je suis retourné chez moi à Calgary, où j'ai obtenu une maîtrise en gestion. Ensuite, j'ai suivi le mouvement en me disant que le conseil semblait être la voie naturelle pour quelqu'un qui avait fait une maîtrise en gestion, mais cela n'a pas du tout été couronné de succès. ⁓ J'ai pris du recul et je me suis dit : « Bon, réfléchissons à mes études, recentrons-nous là-dessus. » Et puis un projet s'est présenté. Toast venait de se lancer et participait à un projet appelé « Propel Project » par l'intermédiaire de l'université de Calgary. Ils ont donc obtenu un projet de 50 heures avec un étudiant. J'ai consulté leur site web. Il s'agissait simplement d'une ébauche de site web. Ils n'avaient pas encore lancé leur programme d'adhésion. C'était très vague sur l'ensemble du projet en général. Et je me suis dit : « Inscrivez-moi ». Et donc...

Je me suis inscrit, j'ai envoyé mon CV, ma lettre de motivation et tout le reste, et j'ai eu la chance d'être sélectionné. Et j'ai simplement aidé à tout, de l'

Quels que soient les projets pour lesquels ils avaient besoin d'aide, mettre en place des enquêtes et des questionnaires, recueillir des commentaires, cela a très vite débouché sur le recrutement, évidemment grâce à ma formation en psychologie. J'ai toujours eu à l'esprit l'acquisition de talents ou le recrutement. J'ai donc vraiment commencé à m'impliquer dans ce domaine. Et puis... cela a pris de l'ampleur et s'est transformé en quelque chose d'autre. Nous avons donc connu un grand succès au cours des trois dernières années en aidant les entreprises à embaucher davantage de femmes dans leurs équipes techniques. J'ai grandi aux côtés d'April Hickey, notre PDG, pour aider à développer cette fonction de recrutement d'un côté de l'entreprise. Et de l'autre côté, nous avons un programme d'adhésion qui soutient les femmes dans le domaine des technologies.

Anita Chauhan (03:30)

J'adore ça. Ça me ramène à il y a 10 ou 12 ans, quand j'ai commencé. Tout d'abord, je viens d'un milieu non technique et ils sont arrivés du gouvernement et je ne savais pas dans quoi je m'embarquais.

Gillian (03:44)

Oui.

Anita Chauhan (03:45)

Et maintenant, vous le savez probablement aussi, n'est-ce pas ? C'est juste que vous n'êtes pas préparée. Je pense que la situation était très différente il y a dix ans, mais j'espère que nous voyons aujourd'hui davantage de femmes dans les STEM occuper ces postes. Mais vous avez effectivement dit avant que nous abordions ce sujet que vous constatiez une légère baisse ou que Toast avait remarqué cela dans le domaine de la technologie, chez les femmes dans la technologie.

Gillian (03:54)

Mm-hmm. Oui, je pense que dans l'ensemble, c'est formidable d'intégrer des femmes, mais au final, il faut aussi les fidéliser. Et donc, ce que nous constatons, c'est que les femmes arrivent dans le secteur des technologies, mais qu'elles le quittent au bout de quelques années, peut-être à partir d'un certain âge, ce qui est vraiment regrettable. Nous sommes donc très attachés à la mise en place de systèmes qui, bien sûr, partent du sommet vers le bas, comme la représentation au niveau de la direction, mais qui intègrent également la diversité dans les processus. Cela va de la candidature à l'entretien, puis à l'offre d'emploi, et enfin au soutien à long terme afin d'aider davantage les femmes.

Anita Chauhan (04:42)

J'adore ça. Nous allons approfondir ce processus dans un instant. Mais pourquoi ne pas passer à la première question ? Quelle est la plus grande erreur que les entreprises continuent de commettre en matière de recrutement, même si cela ne fonctionne clairement pas ?

Gillian (04:50)

C'est cool.

Oui, pour rebondir là-dessus, je pense que ma réponse courte est évidemment de ne pas embaucher suffisamment de femmes, de ne pas avoir de sources de recrutement diversifiées, mais c'est un problème beaucoup plus vaste que le simple fait de ne pas embaucher lorsque vous examinez l'ensemble de vos candidats.

Une partie de notre raison d'être est donc d'aider les entreprises à diversifier leurs pipelines. Nous commençons toujours par un entretien téléphonique afin de comprendre ce qui va au-delà de la description du poste, ce que vous recherchez vraiment. Mais aussi, quelle est la composition de votre équipe ? Qui occupe ce poste ? Combien de femmes font partie de l'équipe ? À quoi ressemblent les cycles de promotion, etc.

puis intégrer cela dans notre processus afin de nous assurer que nos candidats soient informés dès le début. Cependant, le plus gros problème que nous constatons actuellement chez nos clients, c'est qu'ils viennent nous voir, ainsi que les entreprises en général, en nous disant qu'ils veulent vraiment embaucher plus de femmes. J'ai une équipe composée uniquement d'hommes, les gens démissionnent, peu importe la raison. Et c'est formidable d'avoir ce besoin initial et cette volonté d'embaucher davantage de femmes, car c'est ce dont nous avons besoin pour aider une entreprise à fonctionner.

Certaines entreprises sont venues nous voir en disant : « J'ai du mal à attirer les femmes. Je ne sais pas pourquoi je n'arrive pas à les retenir ou à les embaucher. » Mais ensuite, elles précisent que leurs horaires de travail sont de 60 heures par semaine, que c'est une exigence absolue et qu'il n'y a aucune flexibilité. Et les femmes se disent : « D'accord, mais la flexibilité au travail est importante pour moi. Et si je veux aller chercher mes enfants ? »

Et c'est là qu'ils peuvent obtenir de meilleurs résultats. Ainsi, même si les entreprises ont à cœur d'embaucher davantage de femmes, le fait qu'elles ne mettent pas en place les processus nécessaires pour les fidéliser contribue à expliquer le taux d'attrition que nous observons.

Anita Chauhan (06:37)

Tout à fait. Je pense que l'un des aspects importants, c'est que ce podcast est diffusé dans le monde entier et que nous discutons avec des personnes venues de partout, mais vous savez, compte tenu de ce qui se passe au Canada, où l'on assiste à un retour obligatoire au bureau, je constate déjà que cela modifie considérablement la façon dont les femmes travaillent, mes amies, mes collègues, cela change tout simplement la façon dont vous interagissez avec votre travail. Et, vous savez, on voit ça aussi dans certaines grandes entreprises technologiques américaines. Et je pense que parfois, c'est presque une stratégie pour se débarrasser de certaines personnes, car elles partiront volontairement.

Mais en tant que femme travaillant dans le secteur des technologies, je sais que cela ne fait qu'accroître les obstacles à l'embauche de ces équipes plus diversifiées en imposant de telles exigences.

Gillian (07:22)

Hmm. Oui, tout à fait. Je dis toujours que ce qui compte, c'est le choix. Je pense que lorsque les gens sont obligés de faire une chose plutôt qu'une autre, c'est là qu'ils ressentent une sorte de malaise. Je me demande toujours si Toast avait un bureau, est-ce que j'y irais ? Je pense que j'y irais de temps en temps, mais étant donné le caractère social du travail de recrutement pour moi, en tant que personne qui est
‍

Anita Chauhan (07:43)

Oui.

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.