Debbie Madden wants you to make better teams – but because she knows what she’s doing, she gave her book the attention-grabbing title Hire Women. The founder and CEO of NYC-based Stride Consulting, Debbie offers practical advice for hiring managers, anyone looking for a new job, or who wants to change the culture in their current organisation. And it’s not just that hiring for diversity is a lofty goal – since implementing these practices, Stride has seen some hard business benefits. It has won numerous awards for culture, maintains an enviable employee retention rate, and is more profitable than ever.

Quotes of the Episode

I was a huge sceptic… [but] I put a job post for a HR role through a gender-neutral wording tool, changed about 10 words, and went from 75% men applicants to 75% women applicants, with the same title, literally overnight.

Listen if you’d like to learn more about

* Why you should never reveal your current or previous salary

* Building a great organisation – or improving the one that you’re in

* Debbie’s Handshake deal

* Why diversity matters

* Skills matrices, career ladders, and how to apply equal pay in the real world

Links mentioned in this episode

* Want to work with Debbie?  Find her at Stride Consulting

* Read Hire Women – it’s a short read, and immediately useful.  US / UK / DE

* Make your job description more gender-neutral with Textio

Hosts

The Product Experience is hosted by Lily Smith and Randy Silver.

Lily enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. Lily has spent 13 years in the tech industry working mainly with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She has worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank in Bristol, the Product Managers’ meetup with regular events and talks on Product now with 800+ members and growing. This year Lily will be launching ProductCamp in Bristol and she joins the MTP team as co-host of The Product Experience podcast.

A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy has been working as an interactive producer and product manager across the US and UK for nearly 20 years. After launching Amazon’s music stores in the US and UK, Randy has worked with museums and arts groups, online education, media & entertainment, retail and financial services. He’s held Head of Product roles at HSBC and Sainsbury’s, where he also directed their 100+-person product community. He’s also spoken at Mind the Product Engage (Hamburg), at a number of ProductTanks (London, Zurich, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Oxford,  & Brighton… so far!) and at conferences across the US and Europe.

Music

Our theme music is from Hamburg-based Pau, featuring ProductTank Hamburg’s own Arne Kittler on bass. Listen to more on their Facebook page

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