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According to McKinsey, diverse companies are 35% more profitable than non-diverse companies. Yet many businesses are failing when it comes to diversity, equality and inclusion.
At the same time, HR teams are struggling to overcome skills gaps and hire the talent they need. How is one company solving both of these problems? And what are the DE&I strategies that work?
Host and Cofruition founder Sam Floy speaks to Holly Simmons, Co-Founder of the ambitious new social mobility network, Niya.
If you've listened to the episode and would like to find out more about the work Holly is doing at Niya, visit their website niya.ai or connect with Holly on LinkedIn.
For more inspiration, Holly suggested following fellow female entrepreneur, Bumble founder Whitney Wolf Herd.
EPISODE OUTLINE
I. Introduction
Introduction to BetterBusiness Radar podcast and guest Holly Simmons
II. Niya's Mission and Approach
Niya's mission and problem they are solving
Focusing on reaching under represented communities and connecting them with global businesses
Mobilizing under represented communities at the earliest stages and providing training resources for clients
Simple ideas and principles for companies to adopt
III. Structural Problems and Collaborative Mindset
The complexity of theDEI landscape and the need for a collaborative mindset
The importance of filling up the pipeline with a diverse pool of talent
Training resources for clients to adopt inclusive, engaging, and hiring processes
The potential for growth in the industry and Niya's product roadmap
IV. Leveraging AI and Grassroots Connections
Leveraging AI and new tech developments to better performance
The importance of grassroots connections and partnerships with schools
Uplifting grassroots organizations and networks
V. Understanding Needs and Hidden Value
1The importance of understanding the needs of underrepresented communities
The value of listening to other people's stories
VI. Conclusion
Holly's recommended resources for learning more about DEI
Where to learn more about Niya and Holly
Outro and closing remarks
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Sam Floy
Everyone is talking about diversity and inclusion, not just that it's important, which it is, but also that it's good for business. According to McKinsey, diverse companies are 35% more profitable than non diverse companies. Many businesses seem to be failing to implement successful diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies. What are they missing and what should business leaders do to implement a smart and successful de and strategy? This is Better Business Radar, a practical and, dare we say, inspiring podcast about smart ways to grow better businesses. And I'm Sam Floy, a B2B entrepreneur and founder of Cofruition, the company behind this podcast, bringing you weekly insights from interesting thinkers, doers leaders, and experts. Today's guest, Holly Simmons is co founder of Niya, a social mobility network creating a diverse, equitable and inclusive future of work by connecting organizations to a global community of underrepresented people. I asked Holly to start by briefly explaining what Niya is and the problem that they are solving.
Holly Simmons
Niya is a social mobility network, and were founded under this premise that talent is everywhere but opportunity isn't. We're basically trying to make it as simple as possible for global businesses to connect with and hire, mentor and train underrepresented people. We're on a mission to mobilize 100 million underrepresented people in the next five years. Very ambitious, but yeah, all boiling down to supporting social mobility, profit making company.
Sam Floy
Or is it like, you're not a charity, you're like, this is a commercial venture.
Holly Simmons
Yeah, commercial venture.
Sam Floy
Fully ce and I diversity, equity. Inclusion is something which more and more companies and company leaders are thinking about, but often it can just stop there and just, oh, we should be more inclusive, we should be more XYZ. There a specific part, like, if you look at that landscape, is there a specific thing that you've zoned in on the way you've identified? There's an issue.
Holly Simmons
We largely tackle the kind of pipeline problem, so more coming at it from the diversity side. Ultimately, once we're able to fill pipelines and connect businesses to those underrepresented communities, they then need to look at the culture that they actually have within their workplace, promoting kind of more inclusion and equitable practices.
Sam Floy
What's, like a typical company that you'll work with?
Holly Simmons
Typical? There isn't really a typical I think we've kind of found our sweet spot with global corporates who I suppose are kind of simultaneously under a lot of shareholder pressure to actually start prioritizing diversity and inclusion. Also from an external perspective, obviously, there's an expectation that industry leaders will really be driving change in this area. I think beyond that, companies that are hiring on scale, we don't want to roll this out as a small scale initiative. We're very much looking here at how we can transform the way that society structures exist. As a result, global companies are kind of best placed to change that.
Sam Floy
What are some of the structural problems that exist?
Holly Simmons
That's a good question. I think doing the right thing isn't the easy thing and that's the case so often across the board, but certainly when it comes to diversity and inclusion and that kind of rings true across industries and businesses of all sizes as well. The dei landscape is incredibly complex. There's so many stakeholders to manage and most businesses haven't really worked out what the best practices are yet. Rather than having dedicated dei teams, a lot of companies are still expecting employees to pick this up alongside their day to day job and employee resource groups to carry the burden of these initiatives and actually driving that change. Saying that obviously there has been great progress in the past kind of five years and we're starting to see things moving in the right direction, albeit with more siloed focuses than I think we need to look at in the long term.
Sam Floy
Okay, so your typical use case is you'll typically be speaking to like head of recruitment ahead of HR.
Holly Simmons
Yeah, it varies quite a bit. If companies do have dei teams, then we'll chat to those organizations heads of department, but then sometimes we'll focus more on early careers and talent acquisition teams.
Sam Floy
Okay, what's your value proposition to them? It that we will source a diverse pool of talent to put into your pipeline or is it that yours help with tracking what's already in there?
Holly Simmons
We focus more on external facing staff. Actually access focusing on the reach to underrepresented communities. Our main differentiator is that we're an aggregator. A lot of businesses at the moment, especially corporates, might establish one off partnerships with local community groups and diversity networks, universities, schools, in an attempt to actually reach those most in need. Actually it can become a lot to manage. A lot of those partners have databases in spreadsheets and as a result of that kind of fragmentation, what we found is in a lot of cases it's just another logo on website. Instead we aggregate all of those partners, we establish those relationships and then we basically create skills profiles for all of the beneficiaries that are supported by those networks, matching them directly to the job training and mentorship opportunities that businesses have on offer. We're just about to start raising our seeds so that we can develop the AI to actually facilitate those connections in a more direct way.
Sam Floy
Very cool. With the we discussed it but I'm curious, a lot of companies I feel get or instinctively get that diversity, equity, inclusion is a problem, but do you have any doubters? If you do, what do you say to them? There any I don't know, I don't say hard evidence, maybe hard evidence, but is there anything that you can really say, well look, this is a problem for you it's not just a PR thing, like your business is suffering because you don't have a more diverse workplace or whatever it is.
Holly Simmons
Yeah, it's interesting to be honest. I think we've come so far in even the last five years in terms of progressing the conversation forward and we're seeing that more businesses are moving away from seeing this as like a tick box exercise, a PR goal, and I suppose a moral obligation. Instead now the business case is quite clear. The diversity of thought that it brings into an organization's teams and their ability to actually therefore serve the population is really starting to come through. Don't get me wrong, I think it still sits with individuals within the organizations to actually drive that change. Sometimes that can be more challenging than not. I'm sure you've heard it on countless occasions, but a lot of people will turn around to us and say, we just want to hire the best person for the job. And that's great. We want to focus on building high performing teams, not just diverse teams.
Holly Simmons
We very much see them as being the same thing. Even when I look at the hires that we've made recently, we're hiring a CTO right now. Obviously you want to find the best person for the job, but it's the way that you actually look and how you're I suppose it's the way you're defining what the best person for the job is. A lot of people that do actually challenge the need for diversity and equality within businesses are also the same. People who, unfortunately, interviews might naturally gravitate towards people who are more like themselves, people that they get along with in an interview and who share their values and cultural backgrounds and all things like that. When actually, it's more important to drill down and look at the core skills and an individual's actual ability to deliver on the task at hand. I think that's the really important piece that a lot of organizations are really missing when it comes to engaging and hiring underrepresented people.
Sam Floy
Yeah, I mean, I can see that particularly because we've actually found it when doing the hiring for Cofruition, the company I run, I wrote a job description and I realized that basically most of the applications we got were also from white guys. I went through it and I was like, I actually think there's quite a lot of stuff that unconsciously in how I wrote the job description was probably I was favoring certain things in terms of the way people were phrasing things, et cetera. In that case, I actually did a secondary thing of no, actually I'm going to go through. I made this internal rule, which was I'm going to interview three guys and three women. That was my little trip wire to almost force myself to get out of this bias. How far down that decision hiring decision process. Do you go, do you say we're going to fill up the pipeline and let things flow?
Sam Floy
Or do you also have these little things to catch along the way?
Holly Simmons
Yeah, a little bit of both. Obviously, filling up the pipeline with a real mix of people from different backgrounds is really the starting point. What we're encouraging businesses to explore is intersectionality in a bit more detail. For example, there's been a real focus on gender equality for the last few years and we've seen global initiatives and campaigns like the 30% Club increase representation at the board level. Without intersectionality and looking at other underrepresented communities, there still isn't the kind of benefit filtering through. Being able to bring people into the pipeline is obviously critical. For companies that can be as simple as looking, just thinking outside the box, looking at alternative sourcing channels, the people that we support aren't the people that sit on LinkedIn, they're not the people that sit on these kind of typical diversity job boards because ultimately they still don't have the access.
Holly Simmons
In that same way, they don't have the education and the awareness of the need to actually be sitting on these platforms. That's part of the work that we do in actually mobilizing them at the very earliest stages. Once we fill that pipeline, we have training resources for all of our clients which actually cover how to adopt inclusive, engaging and hiring processes. That your job ads are using inclusive language, so that your assessment centers are actually considering neurodivergent candidates who might have less confidence when you suddenly throw a kind of curveball question their way in an interview and all these kind of considerations. There's a lot of education that's really important further down the line. Beyond that, we also want to make sure that the businesses that we're working with actually have the cultures where the community members can be their authentic selves and can thrive long term.
Holly Simmons
There's nothing more unsettling, especially for people who have been really struggling to access opportunity. We work with a lot of refugees and displaced individuals and many of them it takes a long time, they'll have career breaks in the transition and resettlement process and for them to find a job and then two months in find that they don't have a seat at the table and they can't actually thrive. For us, there's no point in us doing the earliest piece of work if the company can't support that person in the right way. As a result of that, the education piece is critical, as well as also connecting those organizations with other businesses that do incredible work around measuring the kind of quantitative side of diversity and inclusion and actually working with your whole business around microaggressions, unconscious biases, cultural acknowledgments, all things like this. To look at it so much more holistically.
Holly Simmons
It's a really big problem that needs solving. We know that we're only solving a part of it, but the collaborative mindset that we're adopting, I believe, is what has the potential to really drive this forward.
Sam Floy
Other than hiring Naya to come and do this all for you, what are some of the simple ideas or principles that a company can start to think about or start to adopt? You mentioned, for example, the language that you use in Job Adverse. What's an example, perhaps, of a non inclusive language versus inclusive language.
Holly Simmons
Yeah, this is really interesting, actually. There are a few tools that you can find online that are free to use and that will basically analyze your job ads. I think especially with language, there are real gender differences, even down to the adjectives that you use. I think, naturally speaking, when we think of kind of high performers, the language that's used is typically more masculine. It's as simple as a woman reading a Job ad and just feeling like it's perhaps not the right position for them because of the way that you've described their communication style, their level of confidence or things like that. So, yeah, it really does boil down to the kind of granular details in that way.
Sam Floy
Okay. In terms of throughout the interview process you mentioned, one thing is to really just be aware of these things, which sometimes can be a reflection of bias. I think I always felt that with certain professional services companies, they would have this characteristic as presentability or something, which always seems to be code for charm clients and stuff, which I always felt was I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but I always felt that was favoring a certain people from a certain background.
Holly Simmons
Yeah.
Sam Floy
Are there any things in terms of the actual interview process that you should be thinking about?
Holly Simmons
Yeah, definitely. My gosh, there are so many, perhaps to give kind of some examples of other instances where perhaps cultural differences impact people's kind of performance. So, in the UK, for example, we are used to greeting people with a handshake and holding really strong eye contact in an interview. In our opinion, that's, I suppose, ingrained enough, that is, someone who is confident in themselves and as a result, potentially more able to actually deliver, whereas individuals with autism will really struggle to actually hold eye contact. It's no reflection of their ability to deliver on a job, but it is in that specific conversation. Likewise, we work with I mean, half of Niya's team are refugees themselves. A lot of them are Sudanese. When they greet one another, they don't greet one another with a simple handshake. It depends on the gender dynamic, and there's an awful lot of complexities that you will come to understand in time, but it's really just around your expectations of what people will bring to an interview and making sure that's as fair as possible, regardless of where someone comes from and what their background is.
Holly Simmons
So I guess that's more general stuff. In terms of the questions that you provide, we'll always encourage people to actually share their questions with their candidates in advance of the interview. It just means that everyone can prepare in exactly the same way. They have the same amount of time, and regardless of how confident they are on the spot, it just gives people the space that they might need to actually perform in the right way.
Sam Floy
Do you have any pushback on that? I can imagine my gut reaction on that is I wonder if the answers I get are just telling me what I want to hear. Imagine if I'm interviewing someone, they're just telling me what I want them to hear as opposed to getting their quote unquote real reaction. My sense is I'm doing some bias here, but it feels like there's something I might not be getting people. I will be getting people's best answers, but that might not be the best way for me to go about doing that.
Holly Simmons
Yeah, I think that you can look at it from both sides and a lot of companies will find a balance for them that works best. It might be that a chunk of their questions are prepared and that they have some that are more off the cuff. The advantage of having them prepared above anything is the fact that when you're in an interview and you let the conversation be dictated by the responses from an individual, then by asking people different questions, you're automatically not giving people an equal opportunity to actually prove themselves and gain access to the job. I was reading something the other day that was even talking about the way that a lot of women are asked preventative questions, whereas men are asked promotional questions and even women do it. It's like an internal bias that exists. If those questions aren't outlined and present to candidates, then there's a risk of women having to defend their abilities, whereas men are able to promote what they're capable of.
Holly Simmons
It's just incredible how that language can actually dictate the conversation.
Sam Floy
We've spoken about this in terms of gender. Do you find it helpful for companies to be thinking about these issues in terms of clear categories like male, female, non binary, and other genders? Or additionally, race, class, background? Nor a divergent or not, is having companies think about diversity in terms of these clear labels the ideal outcome, or is it more of a stepping stone on the way to managers having a more nuanced understanding of the issue?
Holly Simmons
Yeah, I would say it's a stepping stone. I think at this stage it's important to actually just have the awareness, and I definitely don't think we're there yet. At Niya, we are committed to supporting anyone that feels they're underrepresented. We have all of our community members and beneficiaries are able to self identify when registering with us if there's a specific group that they identify with. Ultimately we're not going to push that because like I said earlier, it's not just about building a diverse workforce, it's about building the best workforce and building a high performing workforce. Moving away from this narrative of people fitting specific criteria will be great. Right now, businesses do need it so that they can look into their data, so that they can see what the pay gaps are that exist. And that's beyond just gender. Companies are really good at declaring their gender pay gaps, but they're not looking beyond that.
Holly Simmons
Also, progression within businesses is a really interesting one. A lot of companies will have clear employee progression frameworks in place, but they won't necessarily track if there are any trends in how quickly people are actually progressing through that framework. You might have joiners from one background who are naturally accelerating and being promoted at more regular intervals than others. As a result, it's the business's responsibility to actually invest in the training and upskilling of those who are struggling in order to promote more equity. So, yeah, there's various stages to consider and right now it's definitely important, but I think De and I at the moment is a hot topic, if you will. You search it on Google. There are news articles that are spinning out every day. We don't want it to be a fad. This needs to be something that's so deeply ingrained in the culture of businesses that it's not just reactive, they're not seeing global crises that are happening around the world and wanting to respond to them really fast while they're at top of the kind of news story.
Holly Simmons
It has to be with like a long term lens.
Sam Floy
You mentioned actually in one of your recent LinkedIn posts that you were astounded at the potential for growth in this industry. Can you perhaps I was astounded as quite an interesting word. Can you dig into why that is?
Holly Simmons
Yeah, I guess I just think there is so far that we have to go and there are so many people that need support and at the moment, the structures in businesses just aren't in place to enable equality and everyone wants it, right? You chat to anyone and everyone, you've got friends that work in different industries at different levels of their career, and everyone says that they like the idea of working in a more diverse workplace right now. When we're at a point where we can actually tackle social mobility and we define social mobility as the extent to which an individual's background predetermines their level of income, their level of education and their access to work, and when you start looking at social mobility in that way, all of a sudden it's wider societal change. I think that's what really excites me. About Niya. When I look at the product roadmap and what we're developing, yes, right now we're planning on connecting underrepresented people to opportunities and businesses.
Holly Simmons
What we've got built into kind of our pipeline and scope is that we want to look at universal skills assessments. Right now, we've got candidates in over 40 countries around the world and those who were born in the UK and educated in the UK. It's a lot easier for them to get a job in the UK because they might have gone to a Russell Group university or their GCSEs A levels. The structure is recognized, whereas we've got refugees who have come from elsewhere and actually they might have gone to an incredible university, but it isn't acknowledged by the businesses here in the UK. Universal skills assessments and skills assessments that are looking at skills more holistically beyond just the traditional grading, looking at those soft skills and what people can bring to the table and also that are accessible. Obviously, education isn't accessible to everyone right now.
Holly Simmons
If we can solve that and combine that with the links between corporate and grassroots level, then I just think the potential is limitless.
Sam Floy
It's so ambitious. This is massive thing and I think it's very cool to hear you talk about it in this way. I mean, creating a business around this feels like I'm assuming the best use of your time, but is there also stuff that needs to be happening on a legislative level? Or is it actually something that the business world is its own ecosystem and so it can define its own rules within there? Or is something like this always going to be blocked or hampered if the legislation isn't there?
Holly Simmons
Legislation obviously also has a way to go. I think what's really changed off the back of the pandemic, of course, is remote working and suddenly those geographical boundaries don't necessarily exist in the same way. And, I mean, if you catch me and Nia's co founders out of work, just chatting over food, we're all talking about the potential of skills passports. How can we be more strategic around the movement of people so that we're actually moving people in alignment with the critical skills gaps and the opportunities that exist at a global scale? That is, for me, absolutely mind blowing, the potential there. I think what we're finding is businesses that are open to remote work, suddenly their pool of talent is more than ten x what they were dealing with five years ago, and that's really exciting.
Sam Floy
Better Business Radar is a podcast made by us, the team at Cofruition. We offer an all in one solution for high value service companies looking for a simple and effective way to grow. A lot of businesses don't need Facebook ads or Drip funnel campaigns. They need to have a systematic way to demonstrate full leadership, expand their network and have the consistent high quality content to stay on people's radar. This is what we offer with our fully managed company podcasts. If you're interested in hiring us for your business, then head Cofruition.com/BBR where you can learn more and get 10% off the setup of your show. The link is also in the episode description. Now back to the episode.
Sam Floy
If we assume that this version of the world is going to play out as you think it is, what is something that perhaps business leaders today haven't fully grasped or something which they could do to begin to orientate themselves to thrive in this world?
Holly Simmons
My biggest piece of advice is always to look to the long term. Don't be too reactive, don't just jump on trends and actually look at future proofing your workforce from a dei angle. What I mean there a perfect example is the response to the Russia Ukraine war which obviously broke out this time last year and we had hundreds of organizations coming and knocking at our doors saying we want to hire Ukrainians that have been affected by the war, we want to train them. And that was brilliant. The issue was, by the time the humanitarian aid had been delivered and people had actually reached a mental state where they were focusing on rebuilding their lives and actually looking to the future, by that point, it wasn't in the news headlines anymore. We now have hundreds of skilled Ukrainians who are looking for opportunities, but it's not now on the priority list for organizations.
Holly Simmons
I think that kind of short, narrow minded approach is actually really limiting businesses in their ability to scale diverse and capable teams within their organizations. One of our clients, they've trained over 150 underrepresented people through our train to hire scheme. For example, 40 of them are Ukrainians. What they're doing is they're investing in their training from the very base level. This is people that don't have access to great education systems and don't necessarily even know where to start. They've been investing in their training. We've been facilitating training around product management, web development, coding, basically the critical skills gaps that we're seeing industry wide. Their graduates are either hired by that company or they're reentering our talent pool to then be hired by other organizations elsewhere. What we're seeing is by doing that, not only are they tackling retention because naturally they're going to be hiring people who are loyal and committed to supporting that business, but they are actually ingraining the diversity piece in their hiring and sourcing practices from day dot.
Holly Simmons
Yeah, biggest piece of advice is definitely think long term and prioritize that future proofing side of things.
Sam Floy
One of the things that often gets talked about with regards to the future of work is automation and not quite the robots are stealing the jobs, but this idea that a lot of work will be automated away and there might be fewer jobs available. How does that play into your vision of the future?
Holly Simmons
Yeah, I think there's two different pieces there in terms of automating away jobs, I think it's definitely something that we need to be conscious of. Chat GPT has been incredibly helpful, even for me in my day to day job in the last kind of month or so. One thing that I read about that is how can people leverage AI and these new tech developments and automations to actually better their own performance? Because ultimately a chat bot isn't going to be able to replace a human if a human is using a chatbot to better at what they're doing. Right. That human element is always going to be really crucial in my opinion, in terms of how automation can actually benefit Dei, we are obviously a prime example. We're raising seed funding at the moment to actually develop the AI to facilitate that matching, as I mentioned, and that will enable us to deliver the impact at scale.
Holly Simmons
Businesses will be in a place where rather than having to jump onto these spreadsheets and deal with these partnerships, instead they're literally going to have underrepresented candidates who fit their specific criteria suddenly landing in their ATS systems, ready to be assessed in the same way that anyone else normally would. Technology is enabling us to have this impact. Our approach at Niya is always high growth, high impact. We want to apply the high growth startup practices and that business mindset to solve social problems because in our opinion, that's a win. It's what the world needs.
Sam Floy
My sense on what I've heard about Niya is there is this big problem that a lot of companies are facing. How do we get more diverse workforce? You've come in and you've identified this is where we think some of the pain points are, but I imagine you're perhaps not the only solution out there or the only way that companies have to solve it. I'm curious, what are some of the other ways that companies have tried to go about doing this?
Holly Simmons
So, as I mentioned, a lot of businesses will just be trying to do it on their own. They'll be trying to develop these partnerships with schools and so forth. Besides that, there are diversity job boards that are emerging and diversity hiring platforms that are popping up. I guess technically speaking, they're probably our most direct competitors. Although what we've learned is actually that grassroots connection, which I keep circling back around to, that's what is going to drive the long term change. A lot of these diversity job boards, they might for example, a lot of them will source candidates who have been rejected from previous roles and who are then looking for jobs elsewhere. Companies, when they're rejected, will basically email them and say, oh, join this job board and you'll be able to find opportunities with inclusive companies through. That in our opinion, don't get me wrong, that's still so needed and helps with the dei side.
Holly Simmons
If businesses do just want to tick boxes, then great. It's not tackling social mobility in the same way.
Sam Floy
Why do people not pick up on this? The idea of doing that extr of actually going and seeking out people rather than finding the people who are self selected, if that's the right framing?
Holly Simmons
Yeah, I think they do, to be honest. Most businesses, especially larger companies, are forming those partnerships and there are global charities that will have those relationships with corporates. Really it's like rather than us trying to reinvent the wheel, we want to celebrate the work that these grassroots organizations are doing on the ground to support underrepresented communities and we want to uplift them rather than undercut them and create our own communities and networks.
Sam Floy
We've spoken a lot about the future, but if were to fast forward two or three years, what have most business leaders begun to understand? Maybe more practically, what are the actions that they're taking in their business that are different to what they're doing today?
Holly Simmons
Yeah, I keep circling back around to this idea of intersectionality and I think that's going to be the real big change in the next few years. Rather than just having 50% women on boards that come from the same privileged background as the white men around the table. Instead you want to have more physically disabled individuals raising their voice, more neurodivergent individuals expressing their needs and looking at how a woman's experience from a privileged background can be so incredibly different to a female refugee with a black heritage, for example. That I think is going to be really key. And how can businesses do it? In the same way that we discussed already. I suppose you need to not only look at the sourcing, but look at the culture. People aren't going to want to join your business if you aren't shouting about how you are creating an inclusive environment for people to work in.
Holly Simmons
To be the first person in a room that looks different, who comes from a different background, it can be really difficult. I speak from ultimately a real place of privilege. I'm obviously a white woman, but I have had a good education, went to a really good state grammar school and have a family network around me that have offered that support along the way. Even for me, I've worked in businesses before where I've been the first woman in the room and I'm talking companies that have global reach sitting in their headquarters and me joining them as an intern. It's crazy because they are naturally removing 50% of the population. Really in terms of understanding the needs. Yeah, I could go on for ages. It's obviously a huge passion point. Boils down to education. I think educating not just HR teams, but the entire workforce on how to make this a better environment for everyone.
Sam Floy
Yeah, as you said, I think so much of I've enjoyed from this conversation has been all this hidden saying. It there's so much value out there in terms of the work people are doing and the potential that exists in people. If you broaden your perspective and your definitions on what counts as a high performer or what counts as someone who could fit well within our team, yeah.
Holly Simmons
This is what we say. And talent is everywhere, opportunity isn't. Sometimes when you say that to HR teams, they're like, Absolutely not. We have had job descriptions out there for so long, we can't find the right people. When you actually break it down, you realize there's a reason for the fact that they haven't found the right people.
Sam Floy
So, a couple of quick questions just to finish on Holly. Within this industry, who is it that inspires you?
Holly Simmons
There are so many incredible female entrepreneurs who inspire me immensely. Whitney wolf heard from? Bumble would definitely be up there. She's a huge champion for gender equality and was also, like, the youngest female self made billionaire. So that for me, I'm like, incredible. As cliche as this is, as well, my co founders, Cameron Hugh, they're probably my biggest inspiration day in, day out. Just the tireless dedication to the cause and what we're building is so much easier to overcome the hurdles of building your own business when you have that support system around you and you're also aligned in terms of what you want to achieve and the impact you want to have.
Sam Floy
For people who are interested to enter this space or just learn more about the deni world, is there a particular book, resource, podcast, something that you can recommend that you think is a really good starting point?
Holly Simmons
I think podcasts are definitely a great place to start. Obviously, we're chatting one as it is, but so many specifically around diversity and inclusion. I think for me, what is always really interesting is listening to other people's stories. That's one of the best ways to develop empathy, and for me, that's the motivating factor. There are podcasts that will spotlight individuals who perhaps have refugees who have seen great hardships and have come up over that to reach where they are today. And I would always start there.
Sam Floy
And, Holly, people who would like to learn more about you, learn more about Niya.
Holly Simmons
Where can we direct them to Niya's website, nya AI. There's about, obviously what we're up to, the progress that we're making and all of our candidate stories on there. Besides that, to connect with me. I'm a huge believer in the value of networks, so if anyone is passionate about building a diverse and inclusive future of work or just wants to drop me a note, then LinkedIn is probably the best place for it. I spend half my day sat on that platform.
Sam Floy
Very good. Cool.
Sam Floy
Well, Holly, thanks so much. That's been really great.
Holly Simmons
Awesome. Thanks so much. Sam.
Sam FloyThank you for joining me for this episode of Better Business Radar. It's been a pleasure speaking with Holly and learning more about how to build a diverse and inclusive future of work. Thank you, too, to everyone listening. If you'd like to find out more about Niya and their approach to diversity and inclusion, visit Niya AI or reach Holly on LinkedIn. Links are in the episode description. If you enjoyed this episode and would like more insights from leading thinkers and doers who can help you be smart in growing your business, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Sam Floy. This has been Better Business Radar. See you next week.
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