Lightning Talk: Why immigrants are like icebergs and how we can unlock their hidden power

Okay. Now I'm literally going to switch gears, and I was advised to actually switch sides of the stage because this topic is something really near and dear to me: my friend Alex McLeod.

I'm really very honored to introduce her next. I just met her, but I felt an immediate kinship with her, because she's an extraordinary person. Not just been extraordinary -- I just felt a kinship with her because she is extraordinary, and she has dedicated herself personally and professionally to finding pathways for internally displaced persons, immigrants, and refugees, and helping them get into jobs that are commensurate with their level of skill, education, and experience, particularly in the tech field.

And her nonprofit is called ReUP. And this is a cause very personal to me because I'm the child of refugees, and I can only imagine the impact it would have had in my parents' lives and my family's life, and the lives of so many, if they had had a champion like Alex to work on their behalf.

So please welcome my friend Alex McLeod.

---

I want you to imagine a world in which everyone here in the room today is part of a game, and your score in that game determines what you can access in your day-to-day, including jobs, but no one's going to tell you the rules. You just need to know them.

That seems kind of dystopian, right?

This is the reality of individuals who move to the US and what they face. Since last year, we've had actually 180,000 people come into the US. They were paroled into the US from Ukraine and from Afghanistan, and they have to learn those rules of what it looks like to get a good job from scratch.

I'm here to tell you that, due to that, many of them are underemployed. That means they're in jobs that are not commensurate with their actual skills and their expertise, and this is amazing for us because we can do something about it.

And so I want you to think about the opportunities here to reconsider how we think about immigrants and refugees.

So I'm the founder, as Marguerite said, of ReUP, the Refugee Upskilling Program, and we help individuals who are evacuated to find jobs in tech in the US. And I want you to think about these immigrants -- and I'm one myself -- as icebergs. What you see on the surface is only a teeny tiny fraction of what they have to give.

Now, we're all familiar with average recruiting processes. If you're lucky, a recruiter will spend about seven seconds looking at your resume, which, incidentally, is not too far off the amount of time that somebody is going to look at a profile on a dating app before they swipe right or left.

The problem with this is that when you have a refugee and they're going through that process, you're only seeing that teeny tiny slice that I mentioned. And what you're not seeing underneath is all the skills and the experience and the capabilities, because they don't know the rules of how to show that, right? And there are lots of biases that prevent them from demonstrating that.

Luckily, though, at ReUP, we work with some fantastic employers who've recognized that sometimes when it comes to equitable hiring practices, you've got to do the hard work up front. And they have helped us. We do [inaudible] workshops. We have a 63% placement rate for the folks that come through our program, which is fantastic.

And those employers who committed to doing the hard work up front, they get to benefit from fantastic results: really, really higher retention rates. Seventy-three percent of employers actually noted that they have higher retention rates for refugees than any other type of employee. And so it's worth putting in that time up front.

All right. So John Wooden was famed for teaching his teams how to tie their shoelaces and how to put their socks on before they even got on the pitch, right? And it wasn't because they weren't amazing basketball players. It's because that was his way of building excellent teams from the ground up.

And we know that works with equitable hiring because we do that with the veterans, right? We put them through boot camps. We help them with training because we know that building excellent teams sometimes requires doing that from the ground up.

And we need to do that, and we need to expand that to refugees who are interested in tech, right? We need to be able to teach them that. We need to give them access to the types of pipelines that we extend to veterans because they're waiting to get that access and to demonstrate their capabilities and to get through the door.

And so employers out there -- and many of them -- this is my ask of you: I want you to come with me on this journey and to be the John Wooden of hiring diverse tech teams, and to open up these pathways to bring in these folks who need to be taught sometimes from the ground up what it looks like to succeed on a US corporate team.

And by the way, we don't need to create these things necessarily from scratch. We've worked with Microsoft, actually, to expand an existing pathway that was just for US military service members to bring in also the Afghan allies who had actually served alongside them. So sometimes you don't have to recreate the wheel. You can just have a small step that can allow for a huge payoff.

Now some employers will be thinking: woof, that sounds like a lot of work, and it sounds kind of risky. I'm not really sure why I should do this. And, you know, immigration is hard. It's very political in America, unfortunately.

And if that is your stance, I understand it. But I would urge you to think about hiring refugees a bit more as part of a barbell investment strategy, right? We don't completely eradicate risk. We manage risk to thrive and to succeed and to win in the corporate workplace.

And so think about refugee hiring like a small investment that you're going to do. It may be perceived as high risk, but it could have this massive payoff in the long run.

And if you need an extra kind of persuasion piece, know this: diverse teams outperform homogeneous ones 87% of the time, and that's a huge step.

And so I've got 10 seconds left, so I'm going to rush off. But I want you to think about two things before I go.

One: what can you do to make your recruiting practices less like a dating app?

And two: what can you do to bring in more icebergs into your recruiting pipelines?

You never know. The payoff might just be Titanic.

Thank you very much.