Transcript

LENA: Hi, everyone. Welcome and thank you so much for joining us today. We're really excited to dive into our session today to talk about how to hire right on the left, practices to improve equity in hiring for nonprofit and social good workplaces. This is Lena Tom, I'm the president of Meso Solutions. And I'm gonna be joined here by Deepa and Lara in just a moment. So before we get going, I wanted to just give everyone an overview of the agenda today. 

First of all, our hope is that you were able to join our previous webinar, where we set some standards and expectations. So if you haven't had a chance, we encourage you to go back and watch that before diving into this one. For this agenda for this webinar, we'll be doing obviously some introductions and going over our learning goals. And we'll be doing a couple different sections focusing on centering, equity and inclusion, always important in any hiring process. And then we're gonna get into some nitty gritty, breaking down the stages of the hiring process, and specifically developing the role and our favorite topic tasks and the pros and cons around that. 

So really excited to get into some meaty topics today. But first, a bit more about us. So like I said, I'm Lena, I'm the founder of Meso Solutions. Meso Solutions is a small firm which focuses on supporting progressive organizations, social good organizations in the critical hiring search process. And we are joined today by Deepa from the Sierra Club. She's the director of digital strategies there. And really excited to have her expertise about not just the hiring space, but the broader progressive space and what that means for decisions we make when we're trying to build our teams. And last but certainly not least, Lara Haddadin from Meso Solutions. She's a search associate here. And Lara will lead us through the bulk of this work today and just wanna shout her out for great work on this curriculum today. So with that, I'm actually just gonna go ahead and hand it over to Lara to introduce yourself further and take it away.

LARA: Cool, thank you, Lena. So just to start off with some key learning goals, the point of this training is really to help enable y'all to build an overall better hiring process. And to also identify barriers to applicants for your org or company. And to make sure that you're centering equity and inclusion in your hiring. It's pretty simple. It's pretty straightforward. So we are going to start off by digging a little bit deeper into the idea of centering equity and inclusion in your hiring process. Everyone wants to do this, but where do we start. And that's where the four dimensions of racism come in, and why we want to take a second to reflect on this after discussing it in our first webinar. 

As a quick reminder to folks or as new information to folks who may not have seen our first webinar, racism is more complicated than most people think. As this image shows, it's institutional, interpersonal, structural and internalized. Organizations and companies should be attempting to tackle all four dimensions of this, and it can start with the hiring process. So, we know that some organizations are in the beginning steps of trying to tackle four dimensions of racism. And we know that many progressive white-led organizations and companies are now more aware than ever of their staff’s racial makeup, and are now in the process of kind of struggling to change things and are unsure of where to begin. 

So let's take a moment to consider how times have changed since George Floyd's murder at the hands of the police. Since that's really what kind of sparked organizations to begin to look at the internal makeup of their staff. In the background of this slide, you can see the Blackout Tuesday black square that was really popular on social media. But in turn, it ended up overshadowing actual information black people and other people of color were trying to share through the #Black Lives Matter. I wanted to use this background for a reason. Organizations and companies really hurried to take part in blackout Tuesday and hurried to make social media posts about the Black Lives Matter movement with mostly white staff trying to create this engaging content that centered people of color for the first time ever, and they often missed the mark. So you can see in this tweet that we've shared, a woman calls out fashion Instagram pages for having mostly blonde white women on their feeds. And then immediately, suddenly finding black and brown models after these companies and organizations posted their black square. So audiences have and regularly do call out these organizations for their attempts to profit off the current social justice movement. And I think that, this really stresses the importance of having people of color and other marginalized communities, on your team and on your staff that not only feel comfortable working for you, but also feel comfortable speaking out when necessary too. That's what an equitable hiring practice does. It not only helps create a diverse staff, but it transforms the workplace and the overall organization or company. And as you can see, in this slide, performative gestures and tokenisms do come across as painfully obvious. And we need to work to challenge efforts that appear socially conscious, while still perpetuating racial inequities. And I think Deepa, can really speak to this point, too.

DEEPA: Sure. So hi, everybody I'm Deepa, director of digital strategies at the Sierra Club. And our digital strategies team includes our social media team. So this is actually something that we are constantly dealing with and thinking about in our work. And the example in our world is when we're talking about environmental justice, when we're talking about climate change. Often the communities that are disproportionately affected by the climate catastrophe are communities of color are marginalized communities, are communities in rural areas. And often environmental organizations will struggle with what photos to use in posts, or will do things like talk about centering black indigenous and people of color voices, but have a blog post written by a white man, right? So our audience is savvy and can sniff these things out and will call us out on it. And I think at Sierra Club, what we're really trying to figure out now is we are in a movement, and how do we meet the movement moment? 

So for us, what that looks like, is not just having folks of color on staff who can speak to this, but really training our white staff to see this stuff. So the burden is not always on people of color to point these things out. Because that isn't an equitable relationship for anybody. So this is something we're working on in real time.

LARA: Sorry, I was muted. Thank you so much, Deepa. So tying, centering equity inclusion into the hiring process to, these things that Deepa was talking about. The goal of centering equity and inclusion is not only to hire people of color, it also helps to ensure that anyone hired at the very least has a deep understanding of social and racial justice. So we must work to transform organizations and companies that subconsciously and sometimes even consciously encourage systematic oppression and white supremacy. Even if someone checks all your required boxes in terms of skills, if you hire someone that does not have that deep understanding of social and racial justice, you may end up actually creating a potentially unsafe environment for marginalized folks who may wanna work for you. It's also critical to make sure that we're holding current staff accountable, too. To make sure that they're transforming and moving along with the process the same way that we expect from new staff. So really when you create a hiring process that's more equitable, you are creating more opportunities for people of color and other marginalized folks to get hired for the positions that they deserve. You're also helping to create a work environment that's safe, accepting, understanding and just. You are bringing in multiple backgrounds, new perspectives to the table, thus creating an overall stronger and more mindful organization. And you're also hiring white folks who have an understanding of social and racial justice and can speak on those issues and avoid those missteps and performativity that we were talking about in the previous slides. 

So, overall, really, you will be building up an organization that people of color and other marginalized folks actually want to work for and work with. So, we do need to keep in mind, in an effort to hire people of color, you can't put the burden on staff of color to do the bulk of networking and outreach. We need to really call it what it is. Asking staff of color to do the bulk of networking and outreach for a position is not only tokenizing, but it's also flat out unpaid labor. Changing as an organization and creating a more equitable hiring process means eventually being able to attract people of color, and other marginalized folks organically. And that's not possible if you're depending on your staff of color to bring other people of color in. We need to create structures that mitigate our own biases and relationships. And we need to think about how these things can trickle down into our work life and encourage the status quo. So when we think about networking, for example, we need to think about who we're reaching out to and why. Are we just asking the same white people with Washington, DC, political backgrounds? As a white person, are you bringing in more people with a similar background as you because those are the only people in your networks? So now I'm going to pass it over to Lena. So she can walk us through the breaking down of the hiring stages.

LENA: Yeah, and I would just add to what you put so well there. We know that just hiring people of color, or hiring women or hiring whatever is underrepresented in your organization, that is not a racial equity strategy. That's not a social equity strategy. And similarly, we talk a lot in this space about biases and things like that. And unconscious bias is everyone's favorite buzzword to talk about these days. But we've actually seen that things like unconscious bias trainings don't really work effectively, because this isn't about individual people recognizing privilege and power. That's obviously part of it. 

But the more important thing is that you, as employers, and hirers on this training, are thinking about how you build a system that, that won't matter so that your blind spots. We all have blind spots. This is a lifelong journey. This is a lifelong learning process. It's not about us being experts on everything. But it's about building again, those structures breaking down the institutional systems that hold up the status quo that hold up white supremacy ableism, all the isms. So I encourage people to separate whatever their personal feelings and values are, and think about what are the actions and steps I can take. Which I do think lends itself perfectly to breaking down the stages of the hiring process. So we talked about this briefly in the past webinar. But when we think about a typical model, and how folks in general approach their hiring and staffing up plans, what we usually see is people are into thinking about what that perfect candidate looks like. And they run through the stages of like, okay, throw a job description out there into the world, get it up as quick as possible and move through this and try to get somebody in that can do the work from day one. And a lot of what we emphasize and talked about, is that there's actually really critical steps that happen before that. 

And when we talk about how it takes more time to hire a more diverse pool of folks, diversity is not our only metric. But if that's what you're thinking about and to build a more equitable environment, it's really that longer time period at the front to think about how does this fill a need for my organization? How does that rule fill a need? What does that look like? What's like a profile of a successful person, and forcing ourselves to challenge ourselves on these things? Because if we're just hiring exactly as we've been, nothing's gonna change. And so a lot of the important work is actually way before you ever put a job description out into the wild. We talked a lot about organization development in the last webinar. And so in this webinar, we're able to start to dive deeper on role development and the latter stages. So just keep this in mind that there's no step by step guide to execute this well. It's about consciousness at every stage and bringing into every stage of this, what would it mean to build an equitable work environment? What would that mean for me? What would that mean for our team? What would that mean for this new person that we're potentially hiring. And with that, Lara's gonna jump back in to talk through developing roles.

LARA: Thank you, Lena. Yeah so, before we get into the in and outs of applicants, it's important to take a step back and talk about the development of the role itself. Anyone who's been a part of a hiring process knows that there's so much more that goes into it even before the job description is publicly posted. So when we talk about envisioning the role, I want you all to think about questions you ask yourself and your team, when you're in the beginning process for hiring for a role. Some questions that we typically ask clients when we're starting out with them, and are attempting to learn more about the role include what are the most important characteristics you want for this person? What does culture fit mean to you? What skills are you missing on the team? And how are you looking to grow your organization? And how are you hoping that this new hire helps to do that? So we ask these questions, because we need to think about the role more critically than just the job description and job requirements. Because every new hire either helps change an organization, or helps keep the status quo. And I think Deepa can also speak to this point, too, if you wanna chime in Deepa.

DEEPA: Sure. So, so much of what I'm doing right now is rethinking how to basically build a modern digital team inside a 128-year-old organization. So when I showed up, there were very specific ideas about what it means to be a digital person, what it means to be a technologist. And what I've really tried to do with my managers and folks that I talked to in the organization is instead of thinking about, maybe the status quo, what is it that we're actually trying to build? And what is the vision that we all have? And what are the values that we hold as a community. And think about that in the hiring process, which I don't know that many organizations really encourage because it takes more time. And it really requires you to be very clear about what you're trying to build and what your vision is, versus I just need someone who has these three qualifications and can do this job. That's certainly a way to hire. But what I found is that especially in digital technology, there are so many people from so many different backgrounds who end up in these roles. I'm certainly one of them. And so we have to expand our imagination, when we think about what it looks like to think about hiring.

LENA: Yeah, this is such a great opportunity, like you said, to challenge ideas that we may have held without even realizing it. I think culture fit is a perfect example, which is why we "haven't" here is that culture fit so often becomes an excuse to just do things the way they've been. Cause oh that's just how we operate. That's what works for us. And we often talk about, well can you imagine a different way of being successful or a different way of operating and is culture fit just a term that's being used to cut certain people out. So I think there's so many valuable lessons that Deepa and Lara are bringing to the table here.

LARA: Thank you both. So when we're thinking about this idea of helping change an organization or helping keep the status quo. A good place to start is this idea of hiring an expert. So when we begin envisioning a role with clients, many of them are looking for that expert. That perfect person that hits all the required skills in the job, that may have even more skills and resources than asked for. Typically, we call this perfect person, a unicorn because most of the time, they don't really exist. So we need to be more flexible. If we do want a truly diverse staff, we need to be more mindful and realistic of our expectations for our applicants and our employees. Typically, applicants really want to learn and grow and not only should a new position be able to provide that for them, but we should believe in them. 

When we look critically at the position and are more open to training people on the job when possible. We're opening more doors for people who may not have been given the opportunity to expand their skill set, but have the passion to want to grow. So looking more into this idea of hiring an expert. Oftentimes, people that are experts and hit every required skill in the job description are typically white and or privileged. They're people who haven't had to worry about finances and could take unpaid internships. They're typically people who work more unstable jobs like campaigning, which we can admit is not a possibility for a lot of working-class people and marginalized communities. These people can also typically afford to spend big bucks on data boot camps and have the free time to learn those things too. So this is unfortunately, how companies and organizations accidentally feed into white supremacy, and keep upholding these systems of oppression. That's when it encourages these harmful outcomes and harmful working environments that have at this point become normalized, honestly. So how do we fight against this? 

When we're developing a position or hiring for a role, or a position that's already created, we need to take some time to think about what we can train folks on while they're on the job versus what they really need to know. I can use my own personal example of this. 

Before being a search associate at Meso Solutions, I was a caseworker for men recently released from prison. When I was hired as a caseworker, I did not have any casework experience. But I did have a really strong background in crisis intervention and trauma informed care. So my previous boss was able to look at that experience, and hired me to be a part of the team anyway. And knowing that he and my past co-worker could teach me those casework specific skills on the job that I didn't previously know. And it worked honestly, I was a pretty good case worker. And it's because my boss gave me that chance. 

Cool. So moving on to a part of the hiring process that's personally my least favorite, cover letters. So no one wants to read a cover letter, and no one really wants to write one, we can admit that it's 2020. So cover letters are typically outdated. They're generally just the same thing copied and pasted for different job applications. It does take a lot of time to read them, which isn't helpful when you do have many applicants. And they typically don't give you much substance other than a repeat of what you already read on their resume. And honestly, they can be difficult to write too because there's so many different opinions on the correct way to write a resume. So pre-screening questions are something that we can ask for instead of a cover letter to help give us more information about candidates and applicants. So the pros of pre-screening questions is they give a fair comparison of what you most want to know from applicants. So in cover letters, folks typically are writing as much as they possibly can in order to impress whoever is hiring for the role. When we ask pre-screening questions instead, not only do the applicants know what's most important to us, but we do also get direct answers concerning what's most important to us. They can also allow for the centering of equity and inclusion. 

I know for Meso specifically, whenever we work with clients, we always add in a question about equity and inclusion in our pre-screening questions. Even a question just as simple as, “How have you centered equity and inclusion in your past roles?” can tell you a lot about an applicant. And it also easily weeds folks out who just aren't a good fit for the position who don't have that deep understanding of racial and social justice who don't really have the skills that you're really looking for. A con is that it does require extra time from candidates to potentially do more custom work for a role. So a way to avoid this is by setting boundaries like word limits. So give suggestions on formats such as a cap of 100 words, 150 words per question. Pre-screening questions are more so intended to give you a taste of applicants thinking it's not supposed to be like a thesis. 

So, pre-screening questions are helpful, of course, but we all know that resumes are where we get a bulk of our information about applicants. When looking at resumes, we need to make sure that we're reviewing resumes for substance, not style. Getting too into the style of resumes can be damaging. When we do get too into the style of resumes versus the actual content of the resumes, we can be adhering to a set of often unspoken rules about class, race, age and privilege. And we need to be honest and admit that sometimes we do judge the way applicants resumes look. Sometimes you can tell how old someone is from the way their resume is styled, or how much experience that they have or how well they've even been taught to do something like write a cover letter, write a resume. And you know I know this may be a little bit controversial, but professionalism is, at its core, rooted in white supremacy. Which means by association resumes can also be rooted in oppression. Some folks may not have had the resources or opportunities to have been taught the correct way to style a resume and the correct words to use in a resume. Personally, for me as someone with two immigrant parents, it took me a really long time to figure out the best way to write a resume because I had no one to ask. My parents had never really had to write one before. So not until I started building those connections was I able to be confident about my resume. And even now my resume is not as pretty in both visuals and wording as some of the ones I see when we're helping clients hire at Meso. 

So moving on to a big part of a resume is education. So education requirements can hinder applicants primarily marginalized folks who may not have had the resources to afford higher education. Instead of education, we can ask for experience. So whether that experience comes from education or paid work or volunteer work. We know that there's more than one way to do something well, and we need to be open to people learning and doing things differently. So I'm going to actually pass it over to Lena now to get into the bulk of some problem areas when it comes to hiring.

LENA: Yeah, so Lara spent some good time digging in on a couple common things that we see in resumes and cover letter stages. But there's so many more things because this process is really nuanced. And we wanted to spend a few minutes to dig in on some general categories of how things can trip you up, especially in those early stages of developing the role and reviewing resumes and things of that nature. 

One is we've touched on the idea of like how we maintain the status quo. So again, culture fit, appearances, time and availability, and just all sorts of arbitrary assessments that we can tend to bring to the table. And what we have to remember through all these problem areas is that we as the employer, as the person who is potentially hiring, hold the power in the situation. Because we know what we need, we know what we're looking for, we know the organization's mission and goals. We have way more information than any applicant is going to have. So we can't think about, well, I need this person to fit X, Y, and Z because one they may not fit that. And you may maintain the status quo. But also, we just need to challenge our expectations of what a "professionalized workplace looks like" to Lara's point about how it holds up white supremacy. Another example not related as much to race, but I think a lot about disability access, and the importance of that. And when we think about culture fit or a particular way of being successful, something that comes up a lot, is how we ask about communication styles. Which I'm gonna get more into in a little bit. 

But when we think about being successful, we can say we need this person to be able to present via PowerPoints and Word documents and things like that. But what if using a PowerPoint is just a challenging tool for someone with a particular disability to use? Does that mean that they can't be successful in that role? Why is the PowerPoint the thing that's important or critical? We can imagine different ways of success just by opening our minds and it's again incumbent on us to have that open mindset to think about that when we're reviewing folks. But we have to challenge our status quo ideas and all the ways that we don't even realize that it's holding us back. Another part is, of course, context and access. So one more time you have the power, you have way more information, they're not gonna give you perfect answers. It's very rare that you're gonna get like a perfect answer to those pre-screening questions because they're trying to figure out and hone in a little bit of like, what is it that they're really asking for or looking for from me?

So you wanna try to be really clear in your job descriptions about those critical needs. But when you're reviewing, when you're talking to people, be continuously aware of that knowledge and balance. Be aware of how different communication styles can impact things, or that limit of access to technology or other systems. That is a real big one that comes up a lot for us because for example, some technology systems are really expensive. There's a thing called stata, it's a statistical program, it's really expensive. But what if someone's had access to the free variations of statistical programs, that should be equally applicable. And so I don't wanna screen one out just cause they didn't have access to a really expensive tool. And similarly, being really aware of acts of omission. So if something was not explicitly in your job description, and they're like, well this person didn't include that they're proficient at Google Docs or whatnot. That might just have seemed like such an obvious thing that they didn't include it on their resume. They're trying to again guess and have a sense of what they think is important to you. But be really conscious of acts of omission. If something that you're hoping for just wasn't in someone's resume, don't cut them at that point, they might have that experience. And you might just have to dive into that deeper in a later conversation. 

And last, but certainly not least, is we really have to treat hiring equity and inclusion as skill sets. So I talked a bit about this earlier, it's not just about understanding our unconscious biases, or having the value of caring about equity and inclusion, it's about how we actually enforce it as a skill set. And that is critical when it comes to your hiring managers and the people that are leading these searches. Because hiring is a skill set, management is a skill set. We have seen all too many times where someone who might be really strong at their craft gets promoted to a management position. And then really does poorly in management because they haven't been trained or haven't been supported or whatever that may look like. 

So if you're in a leadership position, thinking about how you're providing support and potential formal training to new hiring managers, and making sure that all of those managers are then held to a high standard around equity inclusion. That could mean creating transparency around the process. That could also mean creating lots of standardized processes and policies. This can be an easy thing, well, relatively speaking, easy thing to incorporate into things like human resources documents. So that somebody who is hiring for the first time isn't trying to build it from scratch. They can learn from the past of things that the team has found successful in creating a clear and fair process in the hiring. And I'm gonna pass it back to Lara to talk about one of my favorite/least favorite parts of the hiring process that we all often use, which is tasks. 

And I'm gonna take a moment to be a copy here, because I was an early advocate of the use of tasks. I have a heavy data and analytics background. And something that we often found particularly data and analytics folks, not to stereotype ourselves, but we didn't always perform well, or at our best in interview settings. And tasks can be really powerful, because they're another way for people to demonstrate what they know. So it was great for data and analytics folks to demonstrate, yes I know what I know. And here's how I can show it to you in a way that maybe I don't verbalize as effectively. So it can be really good. But what we've seen in the last five years especially is this exaggeration of tasks, into tasks and into a process of prove to me that you know this thing that's on your resume. And Lara is gonna get a little bit deeper into it. But it's really become a problem. And we are tasking people to death, we are asking them to demonstrate the same thing over and over for so many jobs. So we have to be really conscious about when and how we use these and how they can actually lead to an inequitable process. Whereas, for myself when I think about my early use, it was actually to create a more equitable process so that it became about comparison of skills, as opposed to who could write the best resume or who interviewed best. But with that, I'll hand it over to Lara to talk through that.

LARA: Cool. Thank you, Lena. So yeah, what Lena was saying is totally right. Giving applicants tasks that they must complete is something that's becoming increasingly more popular. So it is something that's worth discussing. When we're thinking about tasks, an example could be something like giving applicants a prompt to write, or an email to write for an online organizing position in order to, see where they're at in terms of their writing ability and their ability to make an ask to a large audience. So that's just one example of what a task can look like just to get some background just to start talking about this. So what are we really trying to learn or gain from the tasks that we send to applicants? So many people assume that tasks can make the process more of a blind comparison but they can also simply just retain the status quo. You bring your biases, assumptions and backgrounds to the creation of a task in the first place, which leads to, maybe unconsciously bringing them in when you're grading and looking at these tasks, too. 

So, let's talk about some pros of tasks just to get started. So if done right tasks truly can test for necessary job skills like writing ability. Applicants can also showcase their skills in a different way, which is primarily helpful for people with strong resumes, but may not be that great at interviews. It can also potentially open up the door to creative and informative discussions that benefit the organization. So for instance, if they're given a prompt that opens up conversation the next interview where they're given the opportunity to, go a little bit more in depth about the task that they've created. So, we also wanna talk about the cons of tasks too. So tasks can complicate the hiring process for applicants if they are too long and difficult. We have seen in the past people drop off during the task stage, if the task is too complicated or too intimidating. So if a task is assigned, it really needs to be approachable to people. Tasks also have the potential to be exploitative. People should be getting paid for tasks that take a very long amount of time. 

I know for Meso's, specifically, we typically try to make sure that tasks can be completed in an hour, two hours at the very, very most, but typically an hour or so. And it's just unacceptable to ask someone to finish a task that takes four plus hours, which we do often see especially in the tech world, and in that kind of space. So tasks also have the potential of rewarding people who are encumbered or have additional resources. So it can really reward people who maybe don't have a family, don't have children to take care of, don't have like three jobs that they're working. It can potentially give a push to people who have the ability and time to work on things as long as they need to with not as many responsibilities as other folks may have. So, in general I also wanna add that we should not be assigning a task that uses intellectual property. So we shouldn't use people's ideas from their tasks in our companies and organizations. You shouldn't gain actual work product from a task unless you plan to pay people for it. We have seen that happen before. So it's just a really important thing to know.

And really that's where the hiring process doesn't end. But that's as much as we can talk about in this webinar today. There's so much more that goes into it. We will have a third webinar soon that really digs even deeper into organizations, the hiring process, equity and inclusion. But for now, I'm gonna pass it on to Lena to make some final notes and final comments.

LENA: Yeah, and I wanna actually bring Deepa back in here to talk about the task thing, just before we go too far off of it. Because this is such a critical thing. And I wanna re up it. This was always true even before the time of COVID and our upside down world that we're in these days. But I think it's really important to just keep going back to that question for all these ages. Like what are we trying to learn or gain from these applicants through all the various stages that is on us as hires to figure out what is this process really telling us in order to make a good decision. And I encourage people to approach each stage as the opportunity to have a further conversation with someone. And with tasks specifically to challenge yourself on is there another way that someone can demonstrate their ability that doesn't require, many hours of work? And if we do move ahead with a task be realistic about how long things take. I think a lot of folks will say like, "oh, this will only take an hour." And it's like "no, that's longer than you think it is. That's gonna take a lot of time." So just to balance those things. But I'll give closing thoughts in a moment. But Deepa any other just thoughts or feedback about the hiring process and what else folks can be thinking about as they move forward?

DEPPA:  Alright, thanks, Lena. So specifically on tasks, I also was an early proponent of tasks and learned over my time as a digital organizer, a manager and holding other roles that tasks often tell us information about people that we have assumed to be true. So a good example of this is if we're hiring an email writer. Of course, it's very important that folks understand how to construct an engaging, an exciting mobilization email. But I have seen many times people who submit tasks, whether it's a sample email or a sample action alert, when you actually talk to them and dig in on some of the things that people tend to overlook in interviews. Which is what is their ability to explain their work? How are they connecting their work again, to that larger vision or the movement that they're in? And how are they able to take feedback on said work? The same person who submitted a task that you may think was excellent, in the course of that conversation, you will learn other things about them. Things you're actually like Lena's saying if you're leading in a two way discussion about the work with them. So I would say the over reliance on tasks gets us to a place sometimes where we build a cookie cutter teams. People who have all taken the same data or digital boot camp who've learned to write in a certain way. It doesn't actually allow us to do the thing I was saying before, which is expand our imagination on who can have these jobs. So all of this resonates very deeply with me.

LENA: And Deepa I was also thinking about, from our conversations that something that comes up a lot that you've personally experienced is on more senior roles, people will often get asked to like lay out a strategy or something really complex during the phases. And this comes up a lot in the task, but it can come up in earlier stages and the interviews as well. I think it's important to remind people that maybe somebody will be able to lay out a perfect strategy from you with after, maybe one or two conversations, but that's probably not likely. And so what are we again, asking someone what is it we're trying to gain insights into? And so what we often have moved towards at Meso is encouraging people, give people a question to think about, to plan around. And then again use that as an interview question and conversation. I think that we have to get rid of this idea of interviewing and hiring as a one way process. It's a two way process. And that creates a more equitable environment when people feel like they have an opportunity to ask you and learn about you as an organization and what you care about. So thinking about how to open up discussion as opposed to just be like, well this isn't on their resume, they're out or okay they didn't do this exactly how I wanted on their task, they're out. Instead, it's an opportunity to just learn some more. 

And with that, I will close it out. So I just wanna say thank you again to our team to Lara of course, but Temi and Paige from Meso Solutions as well. Meso Solutions advisory board, our awesome marketing team and to many other folks that we can't begin to name but thank you so much Lara and Deepa for your incredible thoughts today.

Thank you.