#174 - Helen McGuire, CEO Diversely - On making workplace D&I measurable and actionable

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give underrepresented groups a fair opportunity in the workplace while helping businesses attract 70% more diverse talent and twice the relevant talent, in half the time. My guest is Helen McGuire, Co-founder and CEO of Diversely

Helen is a champion of underrepresented groups. She’s an international speaker on the topics of diversity, equality, and inclusion and has meanwhile become an award-winning entrepreneur in the diversity space.

She founded the first women’s careers platform in the Middle East – Hopscotch.work – in 2016, which grew to a worldwide community of over 80k working with businesses like Facebook, Mastercard, and Nestle.

Still, she experienced frustration with the lack of impact of its in-person business model and the fact that 75% of businesses say they are committed to improving diversity, yet just 8% have the tools in place to measure hiring improvement.

This led her to found Diversely in 2020 together with her co-founder Hayley Bakker.

The vision for the company is clear and compelling: A global workplace that’s freed from bias for all those from underrepresented groups – not just women. Their mission: to provide an integrated solution to the issues around diverse hiring.

This inspired me, and hence I invited Helen to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the workplace when it comes to hiring the best people for the job, and how this bias is actually impacting the performance potential of many businesses around the world. We discuss Diversely’s approach to solving this massive global problem at the very core, and what obstacles they had to overcome to ensure a rapid go-to-market.

Here are some of her quotes:

You don't see representation of real-life within those offices in those boardrooms, or those shop floors, or those restaurants or wherever it might be, you're not seeing a genuine representation of even the customers or the clients that you're trying to serve. And that really puts you on the back foot in terms of attracting the right employees to your business, but also in terms of being able to serve those people in the best way you could possibly serve.

And if you don't have the perspective of 50% of the population where women are concerned, or 20% of the population where disabled people are concerned? Or whatever the percentage population is of your specific race and ethnicities in the location that you are, then how are you really understanding what your client or your customer wants? And are you actually limiting your sales revenue because of that?

During this interview, you will learn four things:

• That teams that are slightly uncomfortable with each other, come up with much better solutions.
• How starting with solving the essence of the problem, not aiming to reinvent the wheel, and changing behavior in that very moment can spark momentum
• How pricing can be used as a lever to get to market quickly
• Why taking a rebellious mindset and looking at the problem from a completely different perspective is the recipe to create something remarkable (and not burn out along the way)

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Helen McGuire
• Website Diversely