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"I'm always on the lookout for 'good people,' I've liked to say as my mantra for hiring. And for a long time that meant smart, passionate people with very similar experience to mine.
This isn't a realistic standard, especially when I work in a nascent, ever-changing field. Fact is, I need people who don't have the same experience that I do; I need people who think differently and who will make me smarter. I need people who came from the client side, the agency side, the geekier side, who can tell me what we're missing. I need youth; and yet I need experience. I need seasoned people who can also drop outmoded thinking. I need someone who sees working with my organization as the ultimate opportunity and yet makes me feel like I have struck gold by having her on board.
I need a lot, you see. And, I suspect, I'm not different from the millions of managers out there who are navigating increasingly global, networked markets.
I believe BlogHer was able to grow as a business because the community had no pre-conceived notions of what it was (other than an org for women), which only freed us up to get smarter and fully leverage the talents of the many women who opted to work with us. But I can't give myself that credit, or the company. We had no choice but to embrace women and diversity--it was our mission.
Yet that's not a given for many other organizations. I had an eye-opening experience this weekend, when I attended the Women's Leadership and Innovation Conference, produced by Womensphere, in New York City this weekend. I was invited to speak on a panel about women who'd started entrepreneurial ventures involving community, though I was able to sit in on a few sessions, notably the lunch keynote, entitled "Unleashing Potential: Inspiring and Empowering Diverse People - and Oneself". The session was moderated by Nadine Mirchandani of Ernst & Young and featured Freada Kapor Klein, CEO of The Level Playing Field Institute, Joanne Creighton, President of Mout Holyoke College, and Carla Harris, Managing Director and Head of Equity Private Placements and Global Capital Markets at Morgan Stanley.
All three of the panelists impressed me, though they offered up wisdom from very different perspectives. As head of the Level Playing Field Institute, Klein showed how companies actually lose billions of dollars of talent by insisting on one kind of talent, or a resume branded with all the right schools and experience.
"You don't always know why someone went to the school she did," Klein said. We assume that if someone's school wasn't top tier that the candidate couldn't get into top tier, but that's just not the case. Many top candidates had to care for family and stay close to home. Or, for some, a top-tier school just wasn't a priority.
I went to school with a very different notion of what I would be doing once I graduated, and "new media", let alone "social media", wasn't exactly a major. Qualified candidates can be people who have very different backgrounds, or who couldn't afford a good school.
Klein also mentioned companies that shall remain unnamed (ine rhymes with "Oogle") that often miss the big picture by requiring educational transcripts as a gatekeeping method. She mentioned a very experienced 39-year-old woman who was recruited by the company, who had to first produce a college transcript before the company could continue discussions. I understand such incidents where people lied about their background, but in this instance, the work and experience seemed to take precedence, no?
As Joanne Creighton mentioned some of Mt. Holyoke's history and traditions during her keynote, women interspersed in the audience clapped or laughed; they were clearly alumni. It occurred to me that some of us had another form of privilege that even other educated people may not have had in life, the influence of strong women; an education that was grounded in the notion that women would do great things.
I didn't go to a sexist school. My sorority supported sisterhood and good works. But I don't think that state or co-ed schools necessarily promote women making a place for themselves in the world. Rather, in these environments you have to seek out this re-enforcement. As I met so many Mt. Holyoke alumns the pride and assumption of being powerful was apparent in each one. Sure, some graduate and don't opt to have groundbreaking careers, but none question whether they can have these things. For many other women
