Charles Mah, chief evangelist at talent cloud company iCIMS, has more than 15 years of leadership experience in talent management at tech companies, such as Workday, SAP, and Databricks.
He joins host Porter Braswell to discuss the problems with traditional recruiting pipelines and how tech companies can improve their diversity recruiting. Mah also shares his own experiences building a career in the tech industry, as a talent leader with a non-traditional background.
HBR Presents is a network of podcasts curated by HBR editors, bringing you the best business ideas from the leading minds in management. The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harvard Business Review or its affiliates.
CHARLES MAH: Well, the underlying problem is we’re trying to design a lot of systems and practices around a model that’s been in place, and I say an operating model of selecting talent and nurturing talent for 30 plus years. The model needs to change to a point of equalizing what the quality of access and communication needs. Because…you have to be able to have a corporate environment that creates networks that allows people that are not the usual ones who get to have access to the top leaders to have quality access as well as much as somebody who’s white, who’s male, who might’ve had that “Hey, knock on the door, come on in, let’s have a conversation.”
PORTER BRASWELL: From HBR Presents, this is Race at Work – the show where we explore how race affects our careers and lives. I’m Porter Braswell. I left a Wall Street career to start a company called Jopwell because I wanted to help corporate America build a more diverse workforce. Each week, we talk to a different leader about their journey with race, equity, and inclusion. These are the conversations we don’t usually have at work. But this show is a safe place to share and learn from each other.
PORTER BRASWELL: In this episode, we dive into the problems with traditional recruiting pipelines and discuss how it keeps under-represented communities out. We also get to some tactical advice on how to address some of the obstacles associated with diversity recruitment. My guest for this episode is Charles Mah of iCIMS, who’s an expert in talent acquisition. Charles has more than 15 years of leadership experience at tech companies such as Workday, SAP, and Databricks. For Charles, navigating the tech industry as an Asian professional with a less traditional background meant putting in work to find points of access with mentors and leaders, and building his network through relationships.
CHARLES MAH: I think some of the silent and less silent obstacles that I faced as an Asian professional in this space is the, I’ll call it, opportunity for access. Generally, I feel that we don’t think about this enough, which is the network effect. Which is how much access someone has, particularly for a minority to the majority of cultures within the company to have conversations about career opportunities, ideas. And so, you really need quality access. It’s the mentorship, the constant conversations. So I think the unconscious bias I’ve seen is usually for most people, having those one-off, one-hour moments, whether they’re right or wrong, usually it’s not thought of as much. And not having the opportunity to have regular follow-ups and regular access has created some challenges for me in the past.
PORTER BRASWELL: And so when those types of things occur, is it the responsibility of the company or of the individual to figure out ways to overcome some of those challenges and be able to find success within that organization?
CHARLES MAH: I think it comes to both, right? I think as somebody that’s in the field of HR, but also as an individual who had to kind of take different career swings to get to where I’m at, I think part of it is you need to be persistent as an individual. I think you need to ask questions, not be shy about reaching out. I’m an introvert by nature. So I’m always constantly probably asking myself too many times, should I reach out to that leader? Should I kind of say, “Hey, how’s it going? Can I be helpful?” But I think there’s also a corporate responsibility as well by creating a very open-door opportunity. I mean, sure, there are people that might come from definitely the far swings of crazy ideas. And maybe you ask yourself as a business leader, why is that person here? Or why are they coming with these weird ideas? But I think for the far majority, people are just out there to help, right? So even though time is money and valuable, I think it’s important for both sides. One side to raise their hand, which is me, the individual. And the other side is for the business leader to say, “Look, let’s create more opportunities to have conversations. Let’s get the context, let’s understand where this person’s coming from. And maybe those different experiences are going to be pluses for where we want to go as a company and as a culture.”
PORTER BRASWELL: You’ve said that you’ve used some creative approaches to get to where you are in your career. Can you give us some examples of that, or do you have a good story about how you’ve leveraged some of those opportunities to really get to where you are today?
CHARLES MAH: Yeah. I’ve tried many different ways. It’s like a sales pitch. I’ve rung people up randomly, given cold calls. My first foray into human capital was actually, I wrote a paper about the politics of Asia, and that got me an opportunity to Hong Kong, where I did some project management work with their Department of Education. That led me into recruitment because I was being interviewed later by an agency, by a recruitment search firm, to say, “Hey, would you be interested in investment banking?” It wasn’t as interesting to me as going to investment banking, as I was curious about what this recruitment search firm did. And I always had this knack of trying to turn the table and saying, “Hey, tell me more about what you do. Tell me more about what does a recruitment firm do.” And that was my first step in recruitment because it ended up being a conversation of joining the recruitment search firm. Where I got into corporate, it was a similar thing. There was a software company called Business Objects that acquired a company called Crystal Decisions. There was an executive that was planning to leave through the merger, and she reached out to me when I was a search consultant, now by this time in Vancouver, Canada. And she wanted to talk about career opportunities. As much as I was going to help her to look at where she can broaden her career and where her next step could be, I decided to throw the question back and said, “Hey, tell me more about the corporate environment. Tell me a little bit more about how does HR work within this large corporate space.” She threw the question back at me. She said, “Would you ever want to work in a tech company?” And I said, “I’d love that.” But I said, “Who would I connect with?” And she said, “Well there’s persons A, B, and C. They’re leaders within the company. I can always make an intro.” So, the biggest ticket through was ask questions. And then ask, can I meet somebody there? And I started to realize I was creating relationships on the fly. And as long as I did it with the notion that I wanted them as long-term relationships. I don’t do it just to get a meeting. And each person that has made introductions for me over time have become lifelong friends. So I would say it’s the connections you make, it’s the don’t be afraid of asking for more meetups, and be persistent.
PORTER BRASWELL: So let’s move on to this concept called the pipeline challenge, right? And you and I have talked about this for quite a bit of time. Earlier this season, I actually had a chance to speak with Donna Johnson, who’s Mastercard’s pioneering chief diversity officer. And we spoke about the common complaint that there’s a lack of diverse talent, or it’s hard to find this diverse talent. So what’s the underlying problem here? And why do people need to stop saying that?
CHARLES MAH: Well, the underlying problem is we’re trying to design a lot of systems and practices around a model that’s been in place, and I say an operating model of selecting talent and nurturing talent for 30 plus years. So I think that model needs to change to really looking at what does pipeline development look like. I think if you go with the traditions of education, where you’ve been, which access points you have, then it’s going to be restricted to a very small group. A group that was built for the culture of the majority of the past. And if you want to move towards different cultures and different backgrounds and people of color, you have to start looking at different ways of finding signals that are the attraction points to where you want to build your own company to. So I use one example of saying look, does it really hurt anyone to hold an event or have a round table about the feature of user design? And rather than going after every single person who’s a user design professional in another tech company or another manufacturing or retail company, is draw people in that have interests in that area. Have conversations. And one of the things I’ve shared with hiring managers in the past is it’s amazing when you don’t think about approaching people just for a job, but for who they are, what they think, and how they think about things. That when the moment comes to hire and that hiring manager says, “Well, I want XYZ backgrounds.” And the recruitment organization, which has overhauled its model comes to you and says, “Well, guess what? Yeah, we could look at these three people. They’re the typical prototypes of hiring. But what about these other three people that are not typical?” And it’s interesting that when a hiring manager responds and says, “Well yeah, but they don’t have X, Y, and Z background.” Well, we’ve been talking to them for six to eight months. So that’s got to say something about their backgrounds and their thinking about the business problems on hand. The model needs to change to a point of equalizing what the quality of access and communication needs. Because back to my first point about access and connecting building networks is you have to be able to have a corporate environment that creates networks that allows people that are not the usual ones who get to have access to the top leaders to have quality access as well as much as somebody who’s white, who’s male, who might’ve had that “Hey, knock on the door, come on in, let’s have a conversation. Wow. This person is innovative, smart.” To now having those innovative, smart conversations in a different forum, and having those signals to prove it. So I think, for me, it is really about changing that construct of how we see the relationship that’s being developed between people who are not part of the typical pipelines and be able to create that supply on our own. It’s a challenge we have to kind of come to the table to meet. It’s not an easy one, but I think it’s worthwhile to try.
PORTER BRASWELL: One of the things that I find so interesting. Again, especially within the tech industry, is when we work with organizations, they typically say, “Listen, the types of folks we’re looking for, they work at our competitors in this very specific seat. We need that talent.” Well, if your competitors aren’t diverse, especially in those seats, then there is nothing that you will ever do when it comes to diversifying your workforce. If that is what it means to be qualified for that given opportunity.
CHARLES MAH: You hit the nail on the head. And it gets me really energized on this topic in particular because it’s a self-perpetuating, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? I mean, you could have all the conversations you want about diversity internally. But if you’re not willing to crack the code, which is back to the constructs, right? So if you go out and say, “Well, we’re a high bar company, and I’m only going to look at X, Y, and Z companies out there that are the highest, the best, and they only hire from the Stanfords, the CMUs, you name it.” And sorry to name those schools, but they are very difficult schools to get into. So in the tech space in particular, I feel that you’ve already written your own destiny by going down that direction. I’m not saying you can’t go down that direction, but I think you have to broaden the viewpoint, right? The thing that frustrates me the most is you raised a point about that perpetuating the problem is it’s like compensation. I mean, we have laws today that have been enacted across the country of not asking for compensation. Because what that does is it perpetuates a problem with another company that might’ve compressed someone else’s comp. We do run into this risk where if the population is two percent across the board for Black engineers in all the software companies, and that’s all I’m going to look for are people that are at those top companies, then that’s just moving the problem around. So the only way you’re going to broaden it is looking at those storylines of I’m looking for a great user design expert. And I’m not going to just focus on somebody that’s coming from this space, but I’m going to broaden it. Maybe it’s somebody coming from retail. And I have a friend who leads talent at another software company and technology recruiting. And she said to me, “Charles, this is a really interesting idea because we just hired somebody that came from clothing design, footwear design, that had this idea about what footwear and experience means. And that person is now joining us to design our new cloud vision for how we see applications for people.” That’s very different, right? But yet, it’s a different approach to changing the way you look at talent.
PORTER BRASWELL: It’s like we’ve always said – that the talent has always existed. It’s just a matter of how an organization can authentically get their brand out to a more diverse audience and create right language to let people know that they’re welcomed and that their background and that their skillset is desired within the organization. And I think that that’s the opportunity for companies if they want to get this right. As you think about recruiting, what level of, I guess, challenge and opportunity arises from a recruiting perspective to ensure that the recruiters are people of color as well?
CHARLES MAH: Yeah. So this is an interesting one. I’m probably going to be a bit of a contrarian to the typical recruitment organizations out there, but I think a lot of the recruitment organizations have taken steps to build diversity recruitment teams. It’s a worthy cause to start filling the path towards what I call where the beacon ought to be, which is the North Star should be, or beacon I’d call it, is trying to incorporate your diverse recruiters into your core everyday recruiting, right? Because I think this thing where we are seeing more people of color joining recruitment organizations, which is a big step forward. And although that’s a step, I think you can’t stop there. Because then what ends up happening is the people of color who are in recruiting are relegated to providing that what we call, “Hey, here’s the extra three resumes in addition to the six you already have.” I think the next step is now to think about how to incorporate those groups into the core recruitment practice, and start enabling experienced recruiters that have grown over the last couple of years to own a line of business of recruiting, and to start incorporating what they’ve learned in their diversity practice into the core recruiting practice of those customers.
PORTER BRASWELL: We have a lot of senior leaders in corporate America that listen to this podcast. And one of the questions that we are consistently asked is – how do you get an organization to evolve their hiring practices to value people of atypical backgrounds?
CHARLES MAH: I think for senior executives, I would say number one, it’s good for business. Number two, it’s going to help you think differently to create a product, to create a service, that’s much more relevant. This is beneficial because this globe is not one race and one gender, it’s many. So I think it’s good for executives to start thinking about the impact to the business, not only top line bottom line, but also how it’s going to build them for their future of what their products and services can look like.
PORTER BRASWELL: In an earlier episode, Edith Cooper, who ran human capital management at Goldman Sachs for a decade – she discussed some of the changes that she made to the firm’s recruiting practices to try to reduce unconscious bias and to recruit more diverse talent. But she was very clear that recruiting diverse talent was just a start. Then you have to retain and promote those employees. So, I’m curious, Charles – how do you think about the relationship between those two functions: recruiting and retention?
CHARLES MAH: I think increasingly, it’s becoming more integrated. Those networks signals, those signals of I call it opportunity, strengths that these candidates will bring into the picture – it cannot stop at the hire, at the offer. It needs to move into an advancement stage into the retention and growth of the people we’re able to bring. So you’ve worked so hard to bring people into the fold. Now’s the time that recruitment also partners with the different elements of the HR organization, whether it’s the HR business partners or the leadership and learning organizations, to put a strategy to understanding somebody who’s earlier in talent what growth can look like, and somebody who’s maybe even later in their career, so they’re senior professional, where they need to go to stay engaged.
CHARLES MAH: It really does hit home when people say hiring the wrong person or hiring someone that doesn’t get engaged leaves, and it’s the cost to that mistake. I think the costs are even greater if we can’t find a way to be, I would call it, the coaches, connoisseurs, and supporters of people that join and helping them to actually hit their career goals. And some of those hurdles might be vertical movement and some of them might be horizontal opportunities. And we have to stay on top of it. And I think we have to marry the recruitment to the retention process through that.
PORTER BRASWELL: So after George Floyd’s murder this summer, so many CEOs and companies put out statements about racial justice and they expressed their support for Black Lives Matter. What kind of effects are you seeing those statements have for a company’s ability to attract and retain a more diverse employee base and new applicants?
CHARLES MAH: So I think for companies to have the conversations, particularly to the executives, it is an opportunity to share not only the values to the outside market to attract, but also to retain. I think different companies have made different choices, as I’ve noticed. Some have decided not to talk about it and said, “Hey, we’re focused on product only. And the product will speak for itself.” And some have said, “Let’s talk about it. Let’s be vulnerable about it.” I think the vulnerability part is super important. I’ll say it answers for itself when we do talk about it, and the importance of the values behind it, and how we need to think about being different, and how we approach diversity, people, and race. But I think the next steps need to be about action, right? And I go back to these conversations about the importance of race also need to open up about how do we help each other create opportunity? And I think there is some ways to go on that part. I think we do need to start opening up and say, “Look, it’s not just about saying we need three diverse candidates now for every single position.” It’s about, are we prepared to open up the doors to have these forums of dialogue not about where they come from, who they are, and what their education is. It’s about having the conversations about, “Hey, you’re doing a favor for us by coming to this event. I want to know more about what you think about our product. I want you to tell me more about how you would approach our product differently.” Those conversations are not happening enough. And I think being able to raise the bar of conversations with people coming to us as an employer is that next step that needs to happen.
PORTER BRASWELL: So, I’m curious to hear your perspective – as somebody who spent the majority of their career within the tech industry and, year over year, received these lack of diversity reports and you’ve seen them come out. I guess it’s a two-part question. One, do you think things will ever actually change and that we will see the representation that we all want to see? And two, do you think tech companies – and when I say tech companies, I guess we’re talking about the senior most leaders in tech companies – do you think they actually care about seeing that change?
CHARLES MAH: The answer is yes, I think we’ll see change. And I do think the senior leaders do care. The part where that is making the change slower than expected is we need to be more vulnerable. And that includes me, right? It’s asking more questions, being willing to be in those uncomfortable conversations so we can help each other, not polarize each other to the finish line. And I think what prevents us from making the impacts of those reports, which will show we were two percent Black population or three percent Latinx, and why you only moved by half a percent per year. It’s not bashing at each other to say recruiting needs to work harder, or the sourcing needs to be harder, or we need to change our entire configuration of a job just to kind of squeeze somebody in. It’s actually having those open conversations that you’ve kind of brought open today, Porter, about the accessibility. It’s the being willing to look at differences, willing to talk about skills, talk about ideas. And if we’re willing to change our practice in the model, those numbers can shift. But I think right now, those conversations are felt like well, if I ignite this, will something else happen? Or what if we just double down and have more candidates? At least it shows that we’re just doing enough. I think the intent is the right intent, but we need to go over the chasm of, I’ll call it in some ways, the judgment culture which we might have and get into the well, let’s try something different. A leader once said to me, he said, “It’s that small step that sometimes makes a difference.” That small step that’s in front of us right now is literally having a conversation about the model versus about just working harder the way we’ve always done it. And I think we’re almost there. It’s just that we’re not there yet.
PORTER BRASWELL: Yeah. What I find is, I think it’s great when organizations come out with their diversity reports. It’s transparent. It keeps everybody accountable. I think some of the issues with the reports is that there’s this lack of understanding, or maybe it’s awareness of where they are on their journey. And in many instances, a lot of these companies are at the very early beginning stages or the very beginning stages of their DEI journey, and they think they’re a lot further along. And they have to first focus on building that internal diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture so that talent can be retained. And then it’s a lot easier to bring in talent, and you can retain that talent. And I think oftentimes, people just want to jump to that transactional moment of bringing in more candidates. Well, if you haven’t fixed the home, then you’re going to have that leaky pipeline. And I think oftentimes in those reports, that conversation is not had.
CHARLES MAH: The retention part is probably not spoken enough about. And we speak a lot about where’s the candidates, where’s the candidates? It’s not just an outbound journey in saying we’ve done all these things to attract. I think the internal component, your own foundation in your house is something where as I’m thinking about it right now, there’s a lot of work to do. I mean, the inclusive component is something we don’t talk enough about. I’ve seen some companies out there, great companies actually that are assuming that what if we just opened a lot of the junior roles in the company? And maybe we’ll just fulfill the number. And then it shows that things will work itself out. That’s what one leader once told me. And I said, “Well, things don’t work themselves out.” So what you’re going to have, is I said, “Look, you’re going to hire these folks into these junior technical jobs.” Better than the most junior jobs, the back office jobs in the company. That does happen a lot, to be frank. But even starting there, these folks will have the potential to grow. And since you’re a great company at growing people, these folks are going to grow to some degree and they’re going to get nabbed by other companies. So you’re going to have this vicious revolving door situation.” I did say, “Hey look, we need to start thinking about the accountability of all these different levers within the people organization. There’s the recruitment accountability, there’s the corporate social responsibility accountability. There’s also the leadership development accountability. And it’s a team, right?” And I think this is the part where what you just said there got me thinking for a moment is, it does take a village to win this battle. And I don’t think everyone is concerned as one village just yet. It’s seen as a hire challenge or a retain challenge. I think it really calls for a collective team to almost base their people strategy on incorporating the diversity and inclusion elements into the core of their pillar of their, I’ll call it, next fiscal year People Plan, and the next five-year People Plan. And I think everyone at the top-level executives need to coral around it.
PORTER BRASWELL: Yeah. What’s your point of view on how recruiting is going to evolve in this virtual world that, I think, is going to be here to some degree forever moving forward. And what are the opportunities when it comes to recruiting a more diverse audience in a virtual world, where not everybody has to physically be in San Francisco, for instance?
CHARLES MAH: It’s an opportunity and it can be a problem. I think the opportunity today, and even where I’m at today at iCIMS is we’re focusing a lot on virtual connections, right? Virtual meaning – take the barriers down and making it hard for people to access technologies, in built video connections. So that way it’s easy for the recruiter. It’s easy for the candidate. That path is going to continue. But I think at the same time, it creates a different problem – where, for employers, if they don’t start thinking about, “Hey, the mission needs to continue about building these open accessibility points.” Employers might get a little bit more stagnant in saying, “Well you know what, we can’t do an event. We can’t do these roundtables. So I’ll work on it two quarters from now.” And I think what I’m really excited about, what we’re doing and what I’m working on, where I am today is we’re trying to make it hard for employers not to not think about it. So it’s kind of one of those things – you want to do event? Great, we’ll create technologies that allow you to do virtual events and make it as rich as it can be as though you were in person. Not an easy thing to do, but a focus. Secondly, I think also the ability to incorporate different skills into your pipelines. That’s going to be important, as well. So one of the things we’ve been working on, and I think this is going to be an evolution in the broader recruitment sector, is being able to connect the employee resource groups and the different diversity interest groups from the inside to the open community. I think right now it’s focused solely as an internal thing. And I’ve been at the pleasure of working at some great companies where those ERGs have been incredibly passionate about connecting with the community, but having the outlet to do that has been difficult. So something that I’ve talked about at my place at iCIMS is how do we connect people together? So that is two things I think is going to be important is the virtual-ness and building communities around it. It’s going to be important to really have technologies, people, and employers continuously hone into the goal, which is I need to broaden my outreach. I need to have topics of interest for people. And I need to bring people together in being able to nurture those groups of people that have had great signals with our folks as an employer, and create them into candidates. And I think that is where I think recruiting’s going to need to continue evolving.
PORTER BRASWELL: So, what’s your advice for young professionals of color that are looking to find success within the tech industry today?
CHARLES MAH: The best advice is with today’s world of social media and research, is number one, if you can find the company that has a culture that looks close to what you believe in, the values, right? That’s the way I look at it. Those tenants will lead you down a direction of approaching those companies. Take the first step of going to network. Understand who the people are. Take your time. I know in some cases, you don’t have time. You need to find that job and you need to kind of get the work rolling and start making that paycheck. But, I think, really kind of taking the first step at looking at the obvious players that talk about communication, as a value, innovation as a value. To raise your hand and even take the big step on LinkedIn and reaching out and saying, “Hi, I’m a graduate or I have experience in this area. And I’m looking at gaining experience and maybe education in this space. Would you be open to a conversation?” I think the second level is even trying to broaden your network to people that are in the company that are not the usual faces of representing the company. I’ve always told folks that the world of ERGs, the employee resource groups, have grown in a very exponential way in most companies. And being able to find the opportunity to connect with those groups, to understand what their value systems are, how they’re fitting, how they think about diversity is important as well. Do the homework around building the networks around that company.
PORTER BRASWELL: So one question I like to ask all of our guests is – should race be discussed at work?
CHARLES MAH: Yes. I say it quick, and I say it with a high level of confidence because we don’t talk enough about it today. And I go back to my thoughts around the fact that because we don’t talk about it enough, we’re not making enough progress. A lot of the things are very obvious in front of us. I think there’s small steps to take to create these quantum leaps. So I have a natural trust and level of optimism in people that the intent is always in the right place. I think it goes to two sides. On one end, if you’re somebody that is not diverse – white, majority of male or even female in some cases – I know there’s a level of discomfort. “Am I going to say something and something’s going to go wrong?” I also would say as a person of color, I’ve always looked at it from the optimism of “Hey, this is part of the learning journey. This is a journey.” So I’d rather have conversations where mistakes can be made, where we can help each other, than avoiding it altogether. So I think the conversation of race at work needs to happen.
PORTER BRASWELL: Well, I appreciate that. And I appreciate the relationship we’ve been able to build. And I continuously learn from you on these topics. So thank you for being on our show and for providing your perspective. It’s very valuable, and it’s very much needed to progress the conversation that we’ve been having. So thank you very much.
CHARLES MAH: Well, thank you Porter.
PORTER BRASWELL: That’s Charles Mah, Chief Evangelist at iCIMS. This episode was produced by Amy Chyan and edited by Anne Saini. I’m Porter Braswell. Thanks for listening to Race at Work – part of the HBR Presents network.