A Journey To Overcome Bias & Create Safe Spaces
Part 3 of Colourful Conversations brought us a discussion between Tolu Aladejebi of Black in Hospitality and Co-owner and VP of Career Contacts Natasha Jeshani about all things recruitment and creating safe work environments.
Natasha began her career in recruitment, specializing in technical recruitment and placing candidates in their dream jobs.
Her passion, however, always lay in shaping the work environments those candidates worked in and ensuring that employees were retained and happy. Once she became a mom, she felt that she was not supported the way she needed to be by her work and started a few side projects, one of which turned into Career Contacts.
When she began building Career Contacts, she felt barriers to entering the entrepreneurship world as a woman and even more so as a mother. These barriers have fed into her desire to ensure Career Contacts is there for mothers in their search to re-enter the workplace, as well as to help ensure the employers Career Contacts works with are doing their part to support their new moms.
Another recruitment issue Career Contacts educates their partners on is unconscious bias during the recruitment phase. Natasha has seen employers overlook qualified candidates based on as little as a non-familiar or traditionally non-white name. They help employers identify these biases and work through them so that the onus isn’t on the applicants to find an unbiased employer, but rather on the employer to work to remove the bias. She mentioned that recruitment firms have the unique power to challenge this bias and present their candidates in ways that get the employer to recognize the value of the candidate.
Natasha said that she is lucky to be in a position where she can be picky with the clients they take on at Career Contacts. She can choose to only work with those who are willing to recognize these biases and do work to be more aware of them. Unfortunately, not all recruitment firms are in the same position, and certainly not all job seekers are in the position to turn down roles because they feel their employers are not conducting themselves in a manner free of bias or prejudice.
When talking about the concept of a safe work environment, especially for BIPOC communities, Natasha touched on two major points:
Cultural Safety: Does the employee feel heard? Do they feel like they belong? Are people open to having conversations that entail differing opinions?
Bringing your whole authentic self to work: Getting rid of the stigma of “leave your personal life at home” and be the kind of leaders who recognize that your personal life affects your professional life and vice versa. Leaders should be there for their employees to help and support them through all their troubles and roadblocks
With both of these points, for the concepts to be truly embraced by the organization they have to be lived values. It is not enough to make pretty branded collateral and onboarding material saying, “bring your whole self to work”. These values must be practiced daily and be demonstrated by all levels of management.
Natasha also happens to be an Amazon bestselling author (HR Insider: How to Land your dream job and keep it). When she gave birth to her daughter, she had a lot of late nights feeding her and decided to pass the time by writing a blog. She soon realized she had enough blogs to create a book, but once she had everything together, she began to doubt that anyone would want to read what she had to offer.
Then, a company she previously worked for closed and 250 people lost their jobs and were reaching out for her help. This unfortunate incident ended up acting as a catalyst for her getting her book out there as she realized that people needed easy access to her wealth of knowledge. It only took a week for her book to hit #1 on Amazon!
We have all felt the hardships that the pandemic has brought to the hospitality industry over the past year, and many in our community have either lost their jobs or are so disheartened by the shape of our industry that they are looking to get into something new.
When looking to change your job at this time it’s important to first figure out if you would like to move industries or change roles within your existing one. This will help determine if you need to focus on demonstrating transferable skills from industry-to-industry or devote resources towards learning new skills to move to a different department within your existing industry.
Natasha recommends doing an audit on yourself to find out where your weaknesses are and determine which ones you can change. She suggests you network heavily within the industry you want to be in but come at it from a place of learning. Consider what relationship can you build from this new contact versus what can you gain from this new contact. Always be respectful of your network’s time and circumstances. Now more than ever we cannot assume that just because someone is not showing any signs of them struggling that they do not have their own issues going on behind the scenes.
You can learn many more handy HR tips by following Natasha on Instagram @yourcareercontact or by picking up her book on Amazon! If you missed it, check out her Virtual Interview tips from our January issue here. Watch out for more Colourful Conversations on the @blackinhospitality Instagram in the coming months.
Other ways to get in touch are:
Natasha Jeshani on Clubhouse