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Announcer 0:00
Welcome to the CXR channel, our premier podcast for talent acquisition and talent management. Listen in as the CXR community discusses a wide range of topics focused on attracting, engaging and retaining the best talent. We’re glad you’re here.
Chris Hoyt 0:16
Hello, everybody. This is Chris Hoyt with CareerXroads. And I have some fun folks with me today. And this is kind of an interesting piece. So we have Molly from Otis, we have Curtis from Elanco. And of course, we have Barb our own Barb Ruess is on. But it’s kind of an interesting approach. So typically, what happens at the end of one of our CXR meetings is the team the CXR team, jumps right off the call and jumps on another call to do a recap of how we think it went. And did we have any big takeaways and what we feel like we might want to do differently, or what really, really spoke to us. And what I usually walk away with is like two pages of notes that are scribbles that we then sort of work through and decipher. But we thought this might be a fun time for us to open it up and bring in some of our meeting participants, and leaders who actually were in the meeting to get their insights as well. So Molly, I’m just I want to I want you to just really quick, if you just introduce yourself for a second, and you know who you are, what you do at Otis, how long you’ve been there. And then Curtis will do the same thing with you. And we’ll just let’s just have a conversation about how we think it went.
Molly Nuhring, Otis 1:24
Yeah, sure. Um, so nice to meet all of you. My name is Molly Noreen, I lead talent acquisition at Otis elevators. So in addition to all the other fun things, we spun this year from United Technologies, and became an independent company, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange, about two weeks after COVID. So it’s been one of those years, which has been absolutely nuts. But I’ve been at Otis for about five and a half years. And it’s been really, really interesting the last nine months. So thank you for having me.
Chris Hoyt 1:57
We’re glad to have you. Yeah, it has not been a boring year for many of the organizations know that Curtis, I’ve known you through a few iterations of organizations. Good, it’s good. We have you both on here this company interesting.
Curtis Dorsey, Elanco 2:12
Indeed, so Curtis Dorsey, Elanco, animal health, I’ve been with the organization, depending on how you count the time, 23,23 years, we actually were formally part of Eli Lilly and company, we actually spun out, you know, about 18 months ago, and then decided to, to acquire an organization two thirds our size, and launch workday and do all those things in the last couple of years. So, so I can, I can appreciate where Otis is Molly, and I’m a global talent acquisition for Elanco.
And have been doing so for the last three and a half years.
Chris Hoyt 2:51
Fantastic. Now, today’s meeting we did was diversity, equity, and inclusion. And as you guys know, historically, we have always woven some element of DNI into our topical meetings. And the topics are usually sourcing, branding, executive recruiting, leadership, you name it. But we felt with everything going on. And we made this decision, I guess, gosh, some eight, nine months ago, to begin building out meetings that were dedicated just to the UI, and the challenges that organizations are having. And so that’s the meeting that we just wrapped up. And Curtis, I’m going to pick on you because you went last any any big takeaways. Like what how did how did you walk out of that meeting? Feeling?
Curtis Dorsey, Elanco 3:34
Yeah, I apologize for some of the background noise. It was perfectly quiet in my house until just a moment ago. No, I think one of the one of the things that that I’ve always appreciated about about the sessions is the the ideation opportunity to to, you know, tackle, tackle real issues that everybody’s either or, you know, some cases people have already tackled, some people are on the cusp of tackling. I thought that it was a good mix of sharing, as well as, like, always enjoy the, you know, the real, the real kind of SWAT team, you know, opportunities to kind of dive in and, you know, we’re all trying to wrestle the D, the DE&I, you know, bees down. So I walked away with some some great, some great pearls in particular around some of the creative, creative ways the different groups tackled the davita issue on a, you know, what would relative be a relatively tight budget when you’re trying to, to, you know, we’ve been tools and training and all these things, so that that’s always, you know, highly valuable.
Chris Hoyt 4:39
Yeah, we did a for those who might be listening, we did a exercise for DaVita, DaVita proposed a challenge to I think we had some 50 some odd people on companies davita post challenge, etc. Right. here’s here’s a pocket of diversity. We have an opportunity for improvement. They’re an incredibly diverse organization. But I appreciated the transparent with a transparency within an area that they really like to improve on. And we we built an exercise around giving everybody I mean, it was really an arbitrary number. Right? Here’s $100,000, what are you going to do? And broke into those rooms? I really loved that. I enjoyed it. Molly, How about yourself?
Molly Nuhring, Otis 5:21
Yeah, I have two pages notes similar to you. So I think I gotta go back and summarize my thoughts. But um, I certainly overall, I mean, it’s great to hear people talk about similar issues that we’re all having. Certainly, this is a hot topic for a lot of us. I think we, we started a little bit slow in our first breakout session, because it was relatively short. And we were trying to kind of find our way into how do we all talk about best practices and kind of a short amount of time. So I would have loved to spend a little bit more time on those top four or five topics we identified in the survey, as Hey, I want to hear more about that best practice. But right at the beginning of the meeting, we talked about the top one, but there was four or five, I thought were really great. Maybe could have spent a little bit more time there. But then the second breakout, I thought was fantastic. I thought having your business case, everyone’s clear on what we needed to do. And we had some really good discussion in the room. So that was really helpful.
Chris Hoyt 6:19
You raise an interesting question I I, I wonder of the best practices shared in the beginning, we can go back and look, but I wonder how many of those made the cut when we when we built an application for them for DaVita? Right. So we’re that were the top five that organization, they’re most proud of those make it into the recommendations for DaVita when there was imaginary money to spend.
Curtis Dorsey, Elanco 6:44
Yeah. Interesting, interesting thread to pull. Pull it back. Yeah.
Molly Nuhring, Otis 6:48
Yeah, for sure. And then I think the one thing that I maybe I just constantly it’s going around for me, is only about 10% of our 68,000 employees are in the US. And this topic, in general tends to be a very us driven topic, right? Like ethnicity is not talked about in the same way, especially on the global landscape. However, gender and some other categories are. And so I would have loved to spend a little bit more time talking about this from a global scale. And what are some people doing outside of the US to identify particularly certain countries are in certain regions? What does diversity mean to them? And what are they doing about addressing that, because I think we get a little bit narrow, sometimes focus on the US clearly that that is the hot topic. And even internally, that’s what I spend most of my time talking about. But it’s certainly I think, an area to maybe dig a bit more on, that’s still really important.
Curtis Dorsey, Elanco 7:44
But I would, I would double click on that Molly to because it becomes also very easy for organizations to just focus just on gender outside the US to try to pull it all together, but there but there are other elements that that oftentimes I think, lose, lose focus outside the US because very quickly, it either feels very, very US centric, because it’s you know, race, ethnicity, etc. Or, you know, there’s kind of this broad, we’re gonna focus on gender, and and then you miss opportunities, sometimes outside the US to focus on things that from a diversity perspective are very relevant, and other countries outside of just, you know, gender.
Chris Hoyt 8:20
Well, if you’ve ever managed a global team, it’s it’s a really interesting awakening of what is what is permissible from a diverse know from an inquiry standpoint and a self ID standpoint, and you know, what you can and can’t ask what you cannot ask in Germany versus what must go through in Italy verse was, like, it’s really fascinating.
Molly Nuhring, Otis 8:41
Oh, my God, I would have loved if somebody would just write a book on that. Here’s the question by country that you need to build into your workday, recruitment launch, or whatever ATS uses. They make some money, because let me tell you trying to go locally, locally, through every country and working with legal working with ta working with compliance. And there’s a lot of myths and conceptions about what’s really required and what’s not and what’s beneficial to track and what’s not allowed. And it just it’s a whole network of confusion. I think sometimes
Chris Hoyt 9:13
Well, it’s fun, and it’s funny, you bring it up mine because we did an EMEA call a few weeks ago, that was it. 3am for me, that I got on and when we said well, what do you guys want to talk about? I was pleasantly surprised. That diversity, like and these folks were in five different countries. And they were all Yes, diversity, but not like that diversity like this. And somebody’s like, Oh, yes, but I need it like this. Like it was spread all over the place.
Molly Nuhring, Otis 9:37
Yeah, yeah.
Chris Hoyt 9:40
Well, there were a couple of things for me that really stood out. And Curtis, forgive me if it was you that said it. And I mentioned this again, but really focusing on engagement and retention of diversity, which I thought was really powerful versus the attraction and we all want to do the attraction side and get the pipelines and the slates fixed, but we’re not hearing a lot of people talk about it. engagement and retention of URLs?
Curtis Dorsey, Elanco 10:04
Yeah, no, it’s it’s, it’s something that I’m particularly passionate about. And we by no means have it, have it solved. But it’s actually something that I had spent some time and started spending time on when I was at our former parent company, because, you know, we’d have, you know, functional areas come to us and say, Hey, here’s what we need recruiting to do to help us fix our diversity, you know, diversity challenge. And what I started doing, which really started to kind of reinforce the importance of it, it started mapping out, hey, let’s talk about what what, you know, from a recruiting perspective, how much of an impact we can help you with, but there’s an also an element of, you know, engagement and retention, right, you got it, you got to close the hole, because really, in most cases, we’re working off of a base of what the turnover is, or, you know, new spaces that we’re moving into where you’re building out organizations. And if you don’t address both, the reality is you can’t recruit your way out of, you know, or it will take you far longer to address your diversity issue, if you’re just trying to attack it with recruiting without, you know, also engaging the talent that you have retaining the talent that you have you actually because of the size of your base, run the risk of losing more than your recruiting, and then that makes from an engagement perspective, more difficult, because now you have people leaving, and then people are saying, hey, how was it over there? You’re like, Well, yeah, it was okay. And that’s not, that’s not a great recruitment marketing tool. But that’s one of the things that I’ve begun talking more about is, hey, let’s look at, you know, what the recruiting role and partnership looks like, in the context of from an engagement and retention perspective is once as you tackle that piece that actually accelerates what we can help with from a recruitment perspective.
Chris Hoyt 11:46
Yeah, I agree. And you get into that overlap of where talent acquisition and talent management should really be partnering. That’s right. I feel like we could have done a whole nother and maybe we maybe we should do you guys tell me a whole nother hour on the retention, the engagement. I mean, literally, the accountability of DNI after the handoff all the way to the C suite, because I feel firmly the folks sitting up in the big chairs need to need some financial accountability. Right to the DEI hiring and management piece. I mean, mollywood, what do you think is that at the end of the segment? Could you have done another hour on that?
Molly Nuhring, Otis 12:20
Yeah, no, absolutely. I was thinking, whether it’s a connection with talent management, specifically with your diversity, equity inclusion office, or both, right? It’s kind of like, particularly in my organization. Those are three different specialties that all roll up into the talent organization. But as hard as we work as it was working together, I still don’t feel like we’re integrated enough in terms of our strategy. And one of the golden nuggets I took out today was that really quarterly EBR review, and that not being delivered by ta that’s not delivered by DE&I. It’s everyone coming to the table at one time together and presenting, here’s where we’re at and where we still need to go. And you know, our opportunities because it’s just too siloed too often. And I don’t think that leaders are really getting the full picture, which then helps them understand what they could really do to make a difference as well. So I think it’s a really great point, something I certainly want to spend more time on.
Chris Hoyt 13:18
I missed that. That was that was Cigna. They did the QBR right? regretable losses, by by band, they did it by band level to
Molly Nuhring, Otis 13:28
Really tying it all together, right? Because you could also include, here’s how many people have been through a certain training module around that conscious bias. Here’s what our pipeline looks like, right? You’ve got so many different pieces that you really got to pull together and do a full strategy.
Chris Hoyt 13:42
Now you’re talking now? Yeah, all the data in putting making the pieces work,
Molly Nuhring, Otis 13:47
Bring it together. And I think, you know, probably I wouldn’t be surprised quite a few different organizations. I want to say anyone who’s written a blank check, but right, we were given the opportunity to say, because of all of this social injustice and other issues that are happening, what do we want to do differently? And what is it going to cost? Right? Like our board has asked us for the action plan. And similar to some of the groups today, our response was, let’s look at the data first. And then we’ll figure out where we invest our dollars, right, let’s not just start throwing money at things. But again, all of that takes a consolidated approach to to the budget planning into letting data lead you where you need to go.
Chris Hoyt 14:26
That’s great, Barb. It was two and a half hour meeting. So this is just a quick overview of what we think we want to focus on a little bit more next and a big takeaways for each of us. Barb why don’t you take us out with what what was your you’ve been on a? Well, almost 60 of these this year with us? Right? You’ve been on all of them? What was the big takeaway for you or something? Maybe we could have done a little differently or gone a little deeper on?
Barb Ruess 14:47
Yeah, um, well, I think just just based on how I always have the ability, I have the ability to close this the small breakout rooms, right. And it’s always interesting. I have a good sense of how conversations are going based on as soon as I put the notice out that the rooms are closing, if I get a bunch of people that hop back out into the main session, or people stay, and it was very telling that people stayed because there was still a lot to talk about, which does not surprise me at all. That there’s still a lot to talk about. I thought it was so interesting at the very beginning. And Molly, I completely agree with you. We only got into one of those best practices, and I’m not so sure we finished that discussion. Because we need people jumping in like I have a diversity toolkit. I do the QBRs I mean, we have people popping in I’m you know, hiring. We have specific internal sources not just focus on diversity, we’ve got incentives for external, you know, search firms like it was so interesting to hear the different resources. And I’m excited to have a whole nother meeting focus on just this. I love that we got more out of this topic than we have in any of our other meetings. Even though we’ve done specific exercises on DE&I issues. There’s clearly a lot to mine and learn in this area.
Chris Hoyt 16:00
Yeah, yeah. A lot of growth opportunity. Curtis, Molly, I want to thank you guys for jumping on after just doing a quick recap with us. I’ve got even more notes now as a takeaway, so I’m really looking forward to seeing you guys in the next meeting.
Curtis Dorsey, Elanco 16:13
Absolutely, yes,
Molly Nuhring, Otis 16:14
Thank you.
Barb Ruess 16:15
Thanks, guys.
Announcer 16:16
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