Corporate BOSS! Where are your missed opportunities?
There are people out there who can solve your problems in the workplace, if those problems are known to you. Your problem solvers could be hidden, unable to penetrate your systems. They could be employees, inside your business, giving up as their voice consistently unheard, others collaborating with you on a short-term assignment or a gem of an external talent, who wants to join you, but your shortlisting process just missed.
These are all missed opportunities.
Missed opportunities persist as we stick with what we know. Recruitment processes, predominantly a reactive way of finding people to fit the prescriptive units of work, we call jobs is quite possibly the most important and undervalued process ever.
I see, and I agree, that we need to start asking for skills and talents that people bring, not the definitive years served, or industries conquered. So what? Finding ways for people that they can contribute other than 5 days p/week.
A split the room question in Corporate BOSS that we ask leaders is “hire for potential or hire for experience”. Surely you seek somebody who aspires to become something better and that has zero to do with age and all about mindset.
More missed opportunities.
I see and hear too many confidence sapping stories from women in community BOSS PODs that its heartbreaking. Formerly your corporate employees. Hidden from you now, in their local communities and wanting to contribute and now part of this growing creative connected community we call BOSS.
Abundant stories from professional skilled women about failed on line job applications, opportunity to chat as frequent as finding those rare Coles Stikeez, nil responses, a resume with holes, awful when you have done your greatest life’s work and nurture new human beings, receiving inert email declines that make no sense. A recent email decline on a change/comms role was that the client wanted to see people with more experience running streams of work in terms of People Integration. Now if you could really understand what that meant you might be disappointed.
Untapped pool of talent. These are examples of the opportunities missed to make use of a massive pool of untapped female potential, your future problem solvers.
So where does the problem lie? Is it that we simply fail to see, accept or define the problem(s) or too busy to pause and listen to what others are trying to tell us as we persevere with our own perspective and what we think we know? If prescriptive selection criteria, data and analytics provides the solution, there should be no failures in business, no bad hires, but we are not that good, and we need to be able to take action on what we don’t know and see future talent who might have a background different than you’ve sought before.
Profiling the diverse personas of people who work with you first might help you gain insights and at very least a better understanding. Listening to women’s stories of hope and disappointment, inclusion and exclusion, gathered not by level or role or qualification but by life situation, mum, new mum, grandmother, granddaughter, graduate, single dweller, side hustler, intern, collaborator. Bringing them together to offer diverse life perspectives and co-designing solutions with them to solve your problems, building their community and taking action on what you now know.
By showing through listening that you value the experiences of individual stories, you can find and make use of something truly different, can you miss that opportunity?
BOSS can help you expand opportunities in your workplaces in diverse and inclusive ways.
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#humancentreddesign #Innovation #femaletalent #inclusion