Are you hiring talent or privilege?
“How can I attract the best talent?”
“My startup is small, I don’t have the means to hire the best talent”
“How can I attract the best talent if I cannot pay Silicon Valley salaries?”
Attracting the best talent appears as one of the main concerns of start-up founders and CEOs, becoming increasingly more and more important in their minds as they approach hypergrowth. The story is always the same: I want the best talent, but I cannot find it or attract it. And if I could, I couldn’t pay for it anyway.
When many founders speak about talent, it has little to do with skills, knowledge, or personality, but background. “Talent” has much more to do with exquisite CVs and flashy diplomas than actual skills and knowledge. “Talent” is going to an Ivy League or top-tier universities. “Talent” is having a minimum average GPA of 4. “Talent” is being ex-Google, ex-Facebook, or from a top-tier consulting firm. “Talent” is overwhelmingly white, male, and upper-middle class.
The truth is that the best talent is available in the market at a price they can afford. And quite often, the talent is already hired and working for them, mostly overlooked. The question is thus not a lack of talent — but a lack of privilege.
A few years ago, a new intern came to the company I was working at. His father, a VP at an important client company, had asked our COO if there was any possibility for an internship for his son in our company. Willing to do a favor to an important client, the COO accepted.
Soon, the intern — let’s call him Mark — started. Motivated and eager, he came with new ideas and requested to take on a few projects. Some of these projects had been in the backburner for months or even years — the employees who had pushed for them had been told repeatedly there was no time or resources available for the projects. But the COO needed to find something for Mark to do and wanted to remain on good terms with his father, so he allowed Mark to take the lead. He figured there was no harm done: the projects would finally be done, the employees requesting them could focus on other areas, and Mark would have something interesting to do.
Mark became an employee right after his internship ended and left the company a couple of years later, already a young but very successful professional, with several successfully completed projects in his portfolio.
Mark was a good employee, knowledgeable and motivated. But Mark was also privileged. His head start in his professional career was due to his father’s network and position. He did not need to send out CVs and compete with others when applying for an internship, or work at a café to support himself (in fact, Mark’s internship was his first work experience ever). He took on projects other employees, some junior, had proposed and pushed for for months or even years, and got to lead them.
We like to believe — and we are led to believe — that anybody who works hard will succeed. It is the base of the American Dream. But the truth is that not everybody starts the race at the same starting point. Middle- and upper-middle classes start with the advantage of better social and cultural capital. That is to say: they have more powerful friends, better networks and a greater access to elite education and resources. They can pay for after-school classes or tutoring, increasing their GPA, or go to a private school to enhance their network, which gives them a head start in their careers.
Books like The Price of Admission by Daniel Golden show us that going into an Ivy League university does not have necessarily to do with your academic achievements, but your parents’ wealth. Even what passes for academic achievements is becoming increasingly based on the student’s capacity to attend after-school classes, sports and extra-curricular programs, something out of reach for poorer students.
In the UK, people of middle-class and upper-class backgrounds are nearly 80% more likely to end up in professional jobs than those from a working-class background. Those from a working-class background who reach a professional job earn 17% less than their better-off counterparts. In the U.S., workers from lower social-class origins are 32% less likely to become managers than people from higher origins. This disadvantage only grows if we look at women compared with men (27%) or blacks compared with whites (25%).
Many companies, including most of the behemoths of the tech industry, publish extensive statistics about diversity and inclusion in their companies, but only one (Uber) addresses class disadvantage. However, class and minority status are intertwined: people of color, immigrants, women and LGBTQIA+ persons are more likely to be disadvantage than whites, males, cisgender or heterosexual people.
This is one of the reasons why companies like Google are still lagging behind terribly in terms of diversity and inclusion. In Google, only 32% of their employees are women, and less than 6% are black. Google still hires overwhelmingly more white men than any other race, ethnicity or gender. 65,9% of their leaders are white men, while 73,3% of their leaders are men.
The image is even worse when we look at “top-tier consulting firms”, which usually hire from top-tier universities and require high GPAs. The most diverse of all, KPMG, only has women in 24% of partner and director positions. McKinsey does not publish their numbers but a quick look in their leadership is enough to see it is overwhelmingly white and male.
Talent is not measured in GPAs and flashy school names. Talent is a mixture of skills, resolve and potential, paired with lots and lots of grit. There are many ways to find — and identify — talent without incurring biases, mainly by having good, structured interviews and objective tests.
Many hiring managers believe that if they hire an ex-Googler and that person underperforms, they can always excuse themselves by saying that if Google hired them they must have been good. Other hiring managers believe that hiring from top consulting firms or tech behemoths means that somebody has already done their job for them — if they got hired there, they should be good. However, this is nothing but failing to do your job as a hiring manager: which is finding the best talent, objectively, by yourself and for your company. This responsibility lies in nobody else but you.
When we speak of diversity, we tend to forget class diversity. Class comes with its own culture. Working class people are judged on accent, clothing, and manners. Working class sociolects and foreign accents are seen as “wrong” while middle-class speech and mannerisms are seen as “right”.
Being aware of these prejudices is key to ensure class diversity in a company, which in turn will bring a more diverse workforce in terms of gender, national origin, color, and ethnic background. And it is in this diversity that you’ll find plenty of talent.
