Max: Welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster, and today on the show I'm delighted to welcome Bianca Stringuini. Bianca is a specialist in inclusion and culture, and has worked for some of the leading employers in the world, some of the Fortune 500 companies including Visa, JP Morgan, AIG and has a unique global perspective on matters of inclusion, coming from Brazil and having spent most of your career in Asia Pacific, does that introduction suit you Bianca?

Bianca: It's very nice. Thank you Max. Thanks for having me.

Max: Thanks for coming. So we're going to talk about diversity, which I think you have a unique perspective on not just because that's your space but also because I'm always interested in the Asian perspective. I'm in Hong Kong and you're in Singapore. You come from Brazil. So we have a very, maybe different perspective than where our American colleagues, and I'd like to talk a little bit about that difference and to help our audience shed some light on what diversity means in different parts of the world. But before we get into these heavy topics, perhaps you could tell us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up in the inclusion space. Were you trying to right some wrongs?

Bianca: Now I don't think I had such lofty goals when I started. I kind of started to get into inclusion and diversity completely by chance. I was moving to Singapore, from Brazil. My background is in trade, and I was working for the Singapore government actually then the ministry affairs, and we were bringing Singaporean companies into Brazil and taking Brazilian companies to Singapore and I came here a couple of times, and kind of fell in love with it and decided to do my MBA here, and I had a friend of mine that worked for American Express at the time and said, oh there is this role here for the first inclusion and I think you should apply for it, because I think you really fit the bill and I was like 'Why me?' like I didn't even know what it was because in Brazil, in 2007, this was not a topic that people would talk about, and I had to google it for the interview. And it was such an amazing finding for me that there were people in the world that worked to really kind of improve employees well being and belonging, fighting against discrimination and all that, and as a woman that started my careers in the early 2000s in Brazil, I suffered all of that, as the only woman in a trading desk with 16 guys and all that so I was like oh there was a job like that. So I was kind of amazed about it and what I loved about the role itself was at Amex, I said to them 'Look I don't come from HR, I don't know this field', and they say oh that's exactly what we want and I was like 'what?', and they are like, we want someone with the business experience that can figure it out what diversity inclusion means in Asia and Asian countries of Asia, because they were an American company that had a global, probably a more American strategy around DNI for a very long time and it's very successful at it but wanted to really figure out what does this mean in this part of the world and that's kind of how I started my journey. So my question throughout all the other roles that I had in inclusion and diversity have always been, what does this mean here, what does this mean with this company, what does this mean this function because diversity is different everywhere and it needs to be locally relevant, if not, it doesn't work.

Max: Right. But it was an initiative that was started in the US, and then kind of spread out, and within that company into a global initiative. Of course, it doesn't really make sense from my side on the recruitment side. What we see is these job application forums where you have to self identify as a certain ethnic group, and then answer you're applying for jobs in China and you have to say whether you're a US veteran, or one of those things, these standardized forms. They just tell the audience that we have not localized. So, just at the application level there's plenty that needs to be done. 

Bianca: I think on that point, I always ask, when you're collecting data, what are you collecting for and what are you doing with it? So I'm very very pro standards and processes that are consistent, but specifically with data we need to be very careful. Why are we asking these questions and what messages are being sent, because I am all forward to asking self ID questions when you have an application form where I am looking for candidates with disabilities for instance, you want to provide accommodations, you want to know what will be required for this process. You want to know if people need any kind of self declaration in the country where you were in, where you do have other kinds of self IDs that you need. But if you ask me from veterans everywhere in the world. It really doesn't make sense but then my question is, what are you doing with the data you're collecting, and that kind of data collection for me, kind of principle. So you have to think like why are you questioning the question.  

Max: Before we started the call you said you like the word inclusivity better than diversity because maybe it's less political.

Bianca: No, I think the inclusion is kind of a secret sauce is what makes it work. Because if you have a very diverse workforce, but very low inclusion, it's just chaos. It's still a lot of people that don't give to each other, don't respect each other, don't work together and are not creative together.

Max: You can hit the quota, but everybody hates themselves, hates everybody else.

Bianca: There was no dialogue, there is no arguments that are constructive, there is no platforms for people to feel that they do belong to something because, at the same time, I think for me inclusion begets diversity. I think if you create an environment that is inclusive, you will attract a diverse workforce because they want to work in that space where I don't understand when people say to me, inclusions are hard to measure and so diversity is where you can get the measurements for success in a sense that you can have hard targets, I think you have can have our targets in inclusion as well, but they have to be more related to engagement, to kind of productivity, to leadership capabilities. I think that you will get diversity, if you have an inclusive place, but it's kind of like you always clean your house before inviting guests over. You don't invite your guests and say, Oh, the house is a mess and maybe you guys can help us fix it. I think that's a little bit naïve, because it creates, especially in a Goodman point it recreates a revolving door where the recruitment team is always trying to get more and more diversity into the door and people come in and they are now welcome, they don't feel like they belong, and they leave very quickly, because they have places to go, they have offers.

Max: Yeah. I mean there's no doubt some employers will specifically look for Chinese speakers, and specifically those will mostly be ethnically Chinese. There's a strong business rationale for it and it's supported and if we drop in somebody that doesn't speak Chinese in the middle of that environment, it's going to be a little bit awkward so they have to be ready for it. These kinds of pragmatic realities...