Chéla Gage is the Senior Vice President of Reformation, a climate-positive and sustainability-focused fashion company. Chéla explains how her personal history shapes her role in recruitment and how she connects it to her passion for diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI), and belonging. I ask questions about her different career paths, how to scale up and scale down, and why she views managing talent acquisition as an agnostic career experience. Chéla explains her idea of how to create a company with attributes and values that a diverse workforce can be a part of and why this relates to differentiated EVPs.

Key Points From This Episode:

• What is Reformation?
• How Reformation is sustainability-focused.
• Chéla’s role in the company.
• Why DEI and sustainability are long-term games.
• How Chéla ended up in talent acquisition.
• Chéla’s experience of owning her own firm.
• Why TA is industry agnostic.
• The different career paths Chéla has followed.
• Chéla's experience of scaling down from a large enterprise to Reformation.
• How to recognize when it is time for larger-scale processes (three major indicators).
• How Chéla got the sign-off for RPO changes.
• The impacts of COVID-19.
• How to use EVP in a meaningful way.

Tweetables:

“Employment changes lives.” — @tweetatche [0:06:58]

“Talent acquisition is truly the bridge that takes an organization from where they are to where they really want to be.” — @tweetatche [0:10:00]

“In talent acquisition, you have to have a backbone.” — @tweetatche [0:22:31]

“I think it takes a talent expert to listen to the organization and find out what’s necessary and then adjust and adapt.” — @tweetatche [0:25:02]

“An employee value proposition consists of proper change management. It tells an employee why they should work here, and why they should continue to work here.” — @tweetatche [0:36:04]

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Chéla Gage on Twitter

Chéla Gage on LinkedIn

Reformation

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