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Okay, now I'm literally gonna 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. Um, I'm really very honored to introduce her next. She works. Uh, I just met her, but I felt an immediate kinship with her because she's an extraordinary person. No, not to say that I'm extraordinary. I just felt a kinship with her because she is extraordinary and she has dedicated herself personally and professionally to finding pathways internally for internally displaced persons, uh, 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. Um, and her, her non-profit is called RE-Up. 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've had in the my parents' lives and my family's life, uh, 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 and cloud.

00:01:28

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 gonna tell you the rules, you just need to know them. That seems kind of dystopian, right? This is the reality of individuals, um, who move to the us um, and what they face. Uh, 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. And 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.

00:02:19

Um, 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 re-up 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. Um, 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, uh, 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. Um, the amount of time that somebody is gonna look at a profile on a dating app before they swipe right or left. The problem with this is that when you are, when you have a refugee, um, and they're going through that process, you're only seeing that teeny tiny slice that I mentioned.

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And what you are 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, um, at re-up, 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 upfront. Um, and they have helped us. We do core city workshops. We have a 63% placement rate for, um, the folks that come through our program, which is fantastic. Um, and those employers who committed to doing the hard work upfront, they get to benefit from fantastic results. Um, really, really high retention rates. 73% 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 that time up front.

00:04:01

Alright? So Arthur Wooden, John Wooden, not Arthur Wooden, um, was famed for teaching his teams how to tie their shoelaces and how to put their socks on, um, before they even got on the pitch, right? And it wasn't 'cause 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 that works with equitable hiring. 'cause we do that with veterans, right? We put them through boot camps, we help them with training. 'cause 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 'em that we need to give them access to the types of pipelines that we extend to veterans, um, because they're waiting to get that access and to demonstrate that capabilities and to get through the door.

00:04:48

And so employers out there and know there many of them, this is my ask of you. I I I want you to come with me on this journey and to be the John Wooden of hiring, um, 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 you know, 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, oof, that sounds like a lot of work and it sounds kind of risky.

00:05:34

Um, I'm not really sure why you 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 barbelled 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 gonna do. It may be perceived as high risk, but it could have this massive payoff in the long run. Um, and if you need an extra kind of persuasion piece, know this. Diverse teams that outperform homogenous ones 87% of the time. And that's a huge stat. Um, and so I've got 10 seconds left, so I'm gonna 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.