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KEY HIGHLIGHTS

👀 What Anish sees as key patterns of bias when companies he works with are looking to hire a senior level exec.

🤩 What most startup founders look for in key hires.

🚵 Why more diversity in VC can lead to more diversity among founders – and thus to more diversity among hires.

👨 What characterizes founders who are typically open to overcoming their biases.

🙋‍♂️ What founders can do once they do realize they may have some bias in their hiring processes.

🤔 What form of bias is much more common than ethnicity or gender.

👩 For a company that notices they have very few women on their team, is it a good idea to only interview women for their next open role?

3️⃣ How to think about culture fit – and the three elements that can make for a clearer definition of culture fit.

👍How hiring outside the mold can be beneficial to a company. 

✅ There is truth to the fact that underrepresented people are frequently disenfranchised.

⛔ What underrepresented people can do as they choose not to work for a company that is not diverse.

🔎 How networking can empower underrepresented folks in their job search.

KEY QUOTES

The language of bias takes many forms

You circle back to really think about what about them is not a culture fit, and within that process, it’s very easy to see why they weren’t. And it’s not exactly fair, why they were left out of these processes.

Founders want familiarity

What I’ve learned from it, from the level of executive hiring that I’ve been working on for quite a few years, is my biggest theory on what founders look for in hires is themselves. 

I think everyone who’s at the founder level just wants to hire themselves over and over and over again — whatever that might entail. 

There needs to be a conscious step towards inclusion

I think certain people who are in power need to understand that bias a little bit better and be able to harness and utilize that power they have to step outside of their bias and say, “Well, hey, no, we’re going to bring in some people who don’t just look like me, speak like me, and so forth.”

Openness to being better is critical

There’s other founders we work with who I think they are good at listening, and they’re good at asking questions. They’re good at asking — “How can we do better? What can we do?” Then I know at that point, I can say things like, “Well, hey, I looked at your LinkedIn,” and “Hey, I’ve met a bunch of your team, I’ve noticed that they all sort of fit a certain profile. Optics really show that there may be a little bit of bias within your process, and it’s just something for you to think about. And if you want my help in figuring out how to improve that and making it not just a number on a spreadsheet you’re going after, like a D&I number on a spreadsheet, I’m happy to help.” 

The biggest bias can be the least obvious

I think the big one that gets left out consistently, which is, I honestly think is frequently worse than ethnicity and gender, is age. I would say across the board for all of our clients that the age discrimination is much deeper than the other two. 

Culture fit is not redundant; just redefined

When I think of hiring, I think of it as people hitting three buckets to be really well qualified for a job or that they will come in and do a good job. I think it’s some level of a mixture of expertise, energy and attitude. 

The energy and attitude portion is kind of a culture fit thing as well. If you just get the sense this person can do the job, they have the energy to do it, but they’re just going to hate it every day — that’s gonna spread. So I don’t think culture fit needs to go away, it just needs to be bucketed a lot more intelligently.

Acknowledge the bias

First off, having that mindset of the world is against me and is disenfranchising me, there’s truth to that. If you don’t come from this exact sort of mold, and very frequently we’re born into the mold, there’s nothing you can do throughout your life to fit that mold. Don’t think that you’re being a Debbie Downer — you’re being real.

An important tool to combat bias

The number one thing I think that’s going to help grow your career is networking. Reach out to people who are part of your community — your ethnic community or community of what your career expertise is, whatever it is. As you start having conversations with these people and letting them know that you feel like some of the biases have gotten in the way of your career, I think the more networked people that you meet will say, “Well, hey, I know this company, who I think actually would like you, and you’re not gonna deal with this same situation again.”

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Shamanth: I’m really excited to welcome Anish again to the Mobile User Acquisition Show. 

Anish: Yeah, it’s amazing to be back. Thanks so much, Shamanth.

Shamanth: You know, I think it’s much like I said the last time we spoke, I’ve always learned so much and just seen things from a different perspective every time I’ve spoken with you – and this is definitely something I’m excited for today as well. In particular, when we chatted yesterday, you really suggested the direction in which it would make sense to take this conversation. And that is definitely a direction that is very near and dear to my heart, as I could tell is to yours. 

And that is how dramatically the world has changed just in the last week or so. Tell us a bit more about the situation in which we are recording this for those folks who might listen to this perhaps a few weeks or months down the line?

Anish: Yeah, of course. As a whole, you’re seeing mostly black and Latin communities empower, speak, really say everything that’s been on their mind and really show a lot of the systemic racism – and we’ve seen it with the police more recently. But as a lot of people are feeling more empowered, they’re speaking out against systemic racism in many other areas beyond just relationships with the legal system or the police system. 

And I think a lot of these systemic issues are in tech and in our general processes for hiring and relate to a lot of overall systems that are in place that leave out black and Latin people at the top of the pyramid. So therefore, how do you get to that top of the pyramid? You need someone to help you along the way and there just hasn’t been that sort of rope or that hand that’s been put out there to help a lot of these people grow in their careers so that they can then help the next generation who wants to grow in their careers. 

So a lot of things are happening right now. They’re all very emotionally charged. I think that’s very good for the world because people are feeling a little bit less afraid to speak up, speak out, talk about their situations, for fear of repercussion – and I think that’s powerful and necessary around the world. 

I see a lot of areas within what we do on a regular basis in terms of hiring senior level folks within some of the most popular companies. We’re seeing a lot of folks being left out of those conversations within companies that we deal with for whatever reasons of them not fitting in based on their background, their socioeconomic upbringing — just not fitting the “mold”. It’s important to discuss those issues. And I think until you discuss them, the people behind the scenes who are making those decisions may not even realize the damage they’re doing or the biases they have. I’m excited to talk about all of this.

Shamanth: In your own recruiting work, what are some of the ways in which this bias becomes evident to you when you work with a company that is looking to hire a senior level exec or a leader or a growth professional? Are there specific patterns or ways that you see are somewhat common in which all of this manifests?

Anish: Yeah, absolutely. Just to back up a little bit, I think it helps give some context about my background, what I do, and how it leads into this conversation. I was actually helping to lead growth and performance marketing for different companies as a consultant and full-time for quite a few years. Then I actually just got a lot more excited about the recruiting side of growth where some of my clients I’d worked with, I just noticed that they had multiple holes within their team where maybe they didn’t hire well enough or they just needed help hiring. So I jumped in to help them on the hiring side, as well as the growth side. 

Then over time, I just felt like the hiring and recruiting side was a little bit more interesting than actually doing the growth, and I built a firm focused on just just the recruiting side of the business. So now I run an executive recruiting firm. We’re about 9 people, and we basically hire for fast growing startups within growth, marketing, analytics, design, and product. Given that we work with mostly startups, these are companies that are hiring maybe 1 to 5 people at any given time — not like the Googles and Facebooks, who are hiring maybe 1000 people or more a week. 

Within that, you see each founder kind of scrutinizing every person a little bit more deeply than a very large company might. Not to say that they don’t scrutinize people very deeply, because Google, of course, puts people through a lot of steps, but you just have fewer people that you’re dealing with on a regular basis and fewer candidates as a whole. We definitely see it manifest when we have a candidate who fits a lot of the skill set and expertise that a client is looking for, but they just don’t talk the talk or they don’t come from the same backgrounds as the founders or they have an accent that’s not Western European. You see that come up down the road as that particular candidate is being evaluated and is “not a culture fit,” which is some level of codified language. 

Then

you circle back to really think about what about them is not a culture fit, and within that process, it’s very easy to see why they weren’t. And it’s not exactly fair, why they were left out of these processes.

What I’ve learned from it, from the level of executive hiring that I’ve been working on for quite a few years, is my biggest theory on what founders look for in hires is themselves. 

I think everyone who’s at the founder level just wants to hire themselves over and over and over again — whatever that might entail.

So part of the issue is that the people who are founding these companies and getting venture dollars, they all fit a very unique mold. You know, they’re going to be very by the numbers. They’re going to be skewed heavily much more white and skewed heavily much more male, and they’re going to feel a certain comfort with other people who also skew white and skew male. Just because culturally, they’re going to be able to understand each other, speak the same language, and there is just that ease and comfort. 

I think that’s a natural bias between people to want to surround themselves with others who they feel some level of similarity and sort of cultural assimilation with. I’m not necessarily pointing the finger and calling them evil, but what I’m saying is that bias is innate.

I think certain people who are in power need to understand that bias a little bit better and be able to harness and utilize that power they have to step outside of their bias and say, “Well, hey, no, we’re going to bring in some people who don’t just look like me, speak like me, and so forth.”

Then it’s also important for the founders and CEOs to themselves come from much more — not very specific white male backgrounds. 

Those people are going to hire a much more diverse group of people working for them. To make real change within this, the founders themselves need to look a little bit different. How do you do that? You keep going up the food chain. How do you become a founder? Usually a VC gives you money. Well, if that VC is also white and male, they’re going to be more comfortable with other people below them, who also fit that mold. Much like my theory, if everyone wants to hire themselves, when you’re a VC, you’re essentially hiring someone, you’re hiring a founder, you’re putting your trust in them. That trust is often going to come from someone who looks like you, speaks like you as well. 

There needs to be more diversity in VC as well because then that will trickle down to everything else. It can be fairly systemic. But, there’s a lot of great people out there who are doing work to help a lot of these areas. I think particularly black and Latin populations are being left out of really high paying jobs. And I think they particularly get much more bias than any other kind of group — than any other ethnicity, much more than both me and you might get, so something needs to be done about that. 

How do you approach that? How do you say within an organization that we need to make sure these people who are traditionally left out for very poor reasons are not left out? I think it has bias, and I think someone might have an accent, someone might not use the “lingo,” may not listen to the same music, or go to the same kind of social functions that a founder might see themselves going to. It’s a question: how do you make this all better? That I don’t have 100% of the answer to. But I think it starts by the people in charge looking a little bit different.

Shamanth: Some amount of systemic change is important and necessary. I am curious, though, again, you’ve worked with and dealt with a lot of companies. Are there companies and founders that have done a good job of actually overcoming what seems to be a fairly strong bias? And just from the data points that you have seen, what do you think characterizes the people that do overcome this bias? And how might somebody else looking to overcome this bias just learn anything from these folks?

Anish: I think there’re human characteristics that I see within certain founders that we work with that some of them have this capability and others that don’t. I think the ability to take feedback — when I look at some of the founders we work with, I just don’t think they have the ability to take feedback. So I don’t feel like we have that loop or that relationship. And I don’t think anyone below them on their team even has that feedback loop or relationship to tell them like, “Hey, you’re wrong in this situation,” or, “Hey, you could improve by doing this,” or “Hey, I’d really like to see something put in motion that addresses some of my concerns about us not hiring more diverse folks.” 

I think it’s just some people are incredibly difficult to get through to, and when you know that you’re dealing with someone who is very difficult to get through to, maybe someone who has a little bit more frantic personality can at times be difficult, you’re naturally not going to want to bring up any of these things. You don’t want to deal with it. You just want to get through your day and move on. 

And then

there’s other founders we work with who I think they are good at listening, and they’re good at asking questions. They’re good at asking — “How can we do better? What can we do?” Then I know at that point, I can say things like, “Well, hey, I looked at your LinkedIn,” and “Hey, I’ve met a bunch of your team, I’ve noticed that they all sort of fit a certain profile. Optics really show that there may be a little bit of bias within your process, and it’s just something for you to think about. And if you want my help in figuring out how to improve that and making it not just a number on a spreadsheet you’re going after, like a D&I number on a spreadsheet, I’m happy to help.” 

But again, I think unless I have trust that that person is open and is the type of person who even wants to deal with that kind of conversation, it’s very hard to get that going, and I think that’s partially on myself. I should probably go get over that fact. And even if someone is kind of hard headed, or kind of a difficult personality — give it a shot anyway. 

Shamanth: Yeah, and let’s assume this founder says “Oh, yeah. I just realized. I looked at my team page, and everybody looks the same. Oh my God, I never thought about this.” And he says “Thank you for bringing that up. Help me.” What happens next?

Anish: I think some people can make the next process a little more complex than it needs to be. It’s just looking at — what’s your hiring roadmap? Okay, great. Well, of these people you’re looking to hire, let’s talk about how we can add a little bit more diversity to your team. And which of these people, or all of these people, what are the areas where you’re lacking? Is it gender? Is it ethnicity?

I think the big one that gets left out consistently, which is, I honestly think is frequently worse than ethnicity and gender, is age. I would say across the board for all of our clients that the age discrimination is much deeper than the other two. 

So what can we do about it? How open are you to a variety of candidates? You never want someone to just hire someone very specifically because they check a box. I think by bringing up a lot of these biases and the fact that someone who doesn’t come from your exact background may not fit the exact mold that you originally had in your head, when we have these conversations, that particular founder might say, “Well, hey, maybe this person who comes from a different background, who maybe six months ago I wouldn’t have thought they were a fit because they don’t have the Ivy League, the Google, the McKinsey,” whatever it is that’s the founder’s dream hire. They’ll look at the person and give them a chance. 

I think that’s where it starts, and it goes from there. And beyond that, I think asking other people who have expertise within D&I and how they do it. I personally will say, I have not had enough of those conversations to understand from a deep perspective, how to do it functionally on a day to day basis. I’ve talked to people who’ve given broad overviews and why the system needs to change, but I haven’t done as much research into how that looks on a day to day basis.

Shamanth: And I think those folks need to know and understand that some of  this isn’t going to come naturally to them, and they need to make an effort. They need to just question some of their assumptions.  I actually can think of one company that actually noticed and said, “Oh, we don’t have too many women on our team. For the next role that we’re going to hire, we’re just going to interview women.” Do you think that is a good idea?

Anish: It’s a great question. I could see it definitely helping, but it’s honestly very complex. Are you then creating a process just to check a box? Or are you legitimately creating a better environment overall? It’s a very difficult question to look at. I would take it almost looking at the person who’s making that decision, and try to gauge what their intent and goal is, but I think the crux of where that starts and the crux of the idea is in the right direction. 

If that particular decision does lead to a more diverse workforce in any of those areas — age, gender, ethnicity or even socioeconomic upbringing, I think it is a good place to to get started. Even specifically interviewing more people who fit that kind of mold because that’s kind of a starting block. I think once founders start meeting more and more people who don’t fit that very narrow idea of who they should be hiring, there’s a lot that can be done there.

Shamanth: Something you alluded to earlier was the concept of culture fit, which can often be used as a reason for making a lot of these decisions. So would you advocate that founders just abandon the idea of culture fit, approach it differently, define it differently? Let’s assume some of the startups that you’re working with and advising come to you and say, “Okay, we do want to change. How should we think about culture fit?” What is your typical advice to them?

Anish:  I would just say that it is a part of the process. You do want to hire people that you want working for you. I think we’ve all met people who we thought wow, this person is just amazing.

When I think of hiring, I think of it as people hitting three buckets to be really well qualified for a job or that they will come in and do a good job. I think it’s some level of a mixture of expertise, energy and attitude. 

The energy and attitude portion is kind of a culture fit thing as well. If you just get the sense this person can do the job, they have the energy to do it, but they’re just going to hate it every day — that’s gonna spread. So I don’t think culture fit needs to go away, it just needs to be bucketed a lot more intelligently.

I think those three buckets I gave can offer a pretty good perspective, and obviously expertise is much more technical. I think that’s the science of it. So I don’t think that’s necessarily culture fit oriented, but the next to energy and attitude — those are very much culture fit oriented. 

I think part of it is as founders, just being educated and talking to people who have been rejected from jobs multiple times because of culture fit oriented issues that are related to – they don’t talk the right way, they don’t have the same kind of socio economic upbringing as the founders, they’re just not one of us. I think, as they have more and more conversations with people who have had those experiences, I would hope that they’re going to naturally realize more of their biases and work on improving them. 

And I think that’s the path forward — just hearing more and more people’s stories. Then someone who might have an accent that’s not Western European or traditionally fitting into the bucket of the bias to what you think the smarter accents are. You can be a little bit more open minded. And then I think it’s actually a hiring advantage at that point. 

All the companies are fighting…. So one of the things that’s very disheartening for my job is, and it really pains me, every company is trying to hire a very specific type of person. You know it when you see it — they went to this school, worked at this company, they speak a certain way, they’re this age, they’re this ethnicity. That’s the dream hire for every single company. Once companies start getting out of that mindset of, “Okay,  I just need the white guy that went to Yale and worked at McKinsey then worked at Google.” Then they start seeing, “Oh, well, hey, this person, who doesn’t have that background, who’s not being aggressively recruited by every other company, who’s incredibly thankful for this job, and is going to work his or her tail off to grow into this job and improve it, maybe that’s someone we look at instead of just being desperate to keep hiring the Ivy League kid who worked at Google and McKinsey.”

Shamanth: Right, and there is another side to all of this, which is what happens to the candidates. As you pointed out, there are candidates who get rejected multiple times for a similar reason. I can see how as candidates, it’s easy to look at all of this as a narrative of disempowerment. The world is against us — it can be an easy narrative to absorb. What do you recommend for candidates who are in the market for high paying jobs? They are on paper qualified, even if you have defined culture fit clearly enough, they would be very qualified. What are some of the things you think they can do to maximize the chances?

Anish:

First off, having that mindset of the world is against me and is disenfranchising me, there’s truth to that. If you don’t come from this exact sort of mold, and very frequently we’re born into the mold, there’s nothing you can do throughout your life to fit that mold. Don’t think that you’re being a Debbie Downer — you’re being real.

If you have certain accents, if you don’t come from a higher socioeconomic background, if you weren’t given the opportunities in life that other people were given much more easily and freely than you were — you are going to get knocked, you’re going to get dinged. Just realize that those feelings you feel are not wrong, and you are not being extreme with your feelings. It’s real. 

When I’m pitching these founders, and I’m talking to them, I know this person isn’t someone who’s going to accept someone who didn’t come from the same socioeconomic factors, who isn’t one of these particular molded people. The advice I’ve given to people who don’t fit the perfect mold is to look for companies that are run by people who don’t fit the perfect mold either. If you’re looking at your classic, 28-year-old founder — Harvard Business School, MBA, D2C company founder, which is pretty much the template for a founder in New York. They just want other people who are in their late 20s, early 30s, Ivy League MBA, worked at BCG, McKinsey — they just want that. That’s in their mind, there’s no chance someone who doesn’t fit that mold is as good as them. 

Again, it goes back to people wanting to hire themselves and people who fit that mold aren’t going to break out of that mold. Many of those people are our clients, and we help them find those people. Sometimes it pains me when they don’t realize that they could be looking a little bit more broadly and intelligently, but they don’t. 

Look for people from non-traditional backgrounds to work for, and you’re going to get along with them better. Look for that person who was scrappy and started and bootstrapped their own company. Oftentimes those people might come from more non-traditional backgrounds. Let’s say you’re getting aged out of certain roles, look for founders who are a little bit older or look for companies who already have a history of hiring people who are roughly the same age as you, and they’re going to be accepting of you. Don’t focus so much on getting into that hot company because when you get into that hot company, you might just notice that the culture isn’t where you want it to be. I would say go on LinkedIn and do research into these companies and look for other ones who already have gotten to the point where they’re hiring more creatively, more diverse, and founders themselves are more diverse.

Shamanth:Definitely I think this — even though the bias is real, some of the skews are real. Definitely there are companies that have founders that are more open, and I think it’s definitely helpful for somebody that’s in a minority to really look for those founders that could be more open to hiring folks like that.

Anish: Absolutely, and maybe be honest with some of these founders. For example, when I was consulting, I was there really early consulting for them, but they ended up becoming a $3 billion valuation company. The culture is actually phenomenal. Everyone treated me incredibly well. But, there were roughly 25 people in the company at the time, I was the only non-white person except for the admin assistant who was Asian. I don’t want to be the fucking only non-white person here. I had an opportunity to join them full time. That’s actually feedback that that particular company would have taken very positively. 

It was the kind of people who are really good at dealing with feedback loops. I don’t necessarily look at them in anger or irritation, I just think nobody gave them that feedback loop. I wish I had at that point, because I think they would have looked around and thought, “Okay, well, maybe we can get better.” Then also realize you’re losing an employee at that point, you’re seeing the repercussions of it. I think one thing people can do is, as they’re choosing to not work for a company, specifically give the feedback that “I chose not to work for your company because you are not diverse, and I don’t want to work with just people who look like this because I personally will not fit in.” Even if you are someone who does fit in, and that’s a reason you chose not to choose to work for a company, give that feedback to the founder. Let them know specifically that they lost someone great because they are incapable of looking outside their tunnel vision. 

That feedback loop I think can be really helpful. Also VCs can specifically say, “Hey, we’re not really funding a company that looks like this. We funded 15 other companies that look like this. We’re bored — we’re fucking bored of you. We’ve gotten 10 pitches from some fucking version of you this week. We don’t need 11. Go do something, go diversify your team, go do something creative. Bring something a little bit more creative to table — do more.

Shamanth: I think those can be powerful ways to push back.  Also if you’re giving feedback as a candidate, you have nothing to lose. Once you are within the company, there’s always a fear that there’s a power dynamic at play. But as a candidate, you are in a position of a lot of power because you’re essentially what is leaving them. I think that’s a good place to leave that feedback because I imagine at least it’s possible that somebody on that team’s gonna perk up and say, “Okay, something’s off here.”

Anish: If enough voices on the team say that, maybe the founder will listen. I would say another thing that you could do, and I think this is true of anything you’re trying to do in your career.

The number one thing I think that’s going to help grow your career is networking. Reach out to people who are part of your community — your ethnic community or community of what your career expertise is, whatever it is. As you start having conversations with these people and letting them know that you feel like some of the biases have gotten in the way of your career, I think the more networked people that you meet will say, “Well, hey, I know this company, who I think actually would like you, and you’re not gonna deal with this same situation again.”

The more conversations you have, the more networking you do, you’re gonna come across more of these people who will connect you with companies who are a little bit more creative and who are going to look at your background and give it a lot more weight.

Shamanth: I think this ties into something you said in the last conversation. That was more in the context of founders, but you said it makes sense for a founder to put themselves out even when they’re not looking to hire. It’s the same thing for candidates. If they’re putting themselves out there networking, connecting with peer groups, perhaps from their own minority group, or even the broad professional groups, they know what’s happening. So when there is an opportunity that does arise, they are ready and open and available for it. At least again, when people ask me for advice, this is definitely something I do say to them fairly often that you need to network years before you are even looking for a change because that is when the opportunities are going to be ready.

Anish: Obviously, you’ve done a great job of that. Look at all these guests you have on your show and look at the business you’ve built. We’ve talked about where business comes from. I think you mentioned more of it comes from one to one personal relationships than anywhere, and that’s what I’ve noticed as well.

Shamanth: This has been, as always, very instructive to me and very thought provoking. This is perhaps a good place for us to start to wrap up. I know you’ve given us a little bit of background about yourself, and I’ll introduce you. Can you tell our listeners how they can find out more about you and where they can go on the interwebs?

Anish: Absolutely. So it’s bringruckus.com. You’ll see the clients we’ve worked with, the members of our team, and so forth. And my email address is just anish@bringruckus.com. Reach out to me for anything and everything related to this chat, or even just anything to do with talent hiring.

Shamanth: We’ll link all of that in the show notes and the transcript. For now, I think it’s a good place to wrap. Thank you again for being on the Mobile User Acquisition Show.

Anish: Thank you as well. Thanks for inviting me for a guest the second time around, and I think you’ve nailed it. Any conversation with you is always going to be amazing. So thanks so much. 

A REQUEST BEFORE YOU GO

I have a very important favor to ask, which as those of you who know me know I don’t do often. If you get any pleasure or inspiration from this episode, could you PLEASE leave a review on your favorite podcasting platform – be it iTunes, Overcast, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast fix. This podcast is very much a labor of love – and each episode takes many many hours to put together. When you write a review, it will not only be a great deal of encouragement to us, but it will also support getting the word out about the Mobile User Acquisition Show.

Constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement are welcome, whether on podcasting platforms – or by email to shamanth at rocketshiphq.com. We read all reviews & I want to make this podcast better.

Thank you – and I look forward to seeing you with the next episode!