In this groundbreaking episode, we delve into the dynamic realm of technology where a dedicated group is leading the charge for change.
Join us as we explore the passionate mission to level the playing field and foster diversity within the tech industry, with special guest Jenna Mullins, Founder of Per Ardua.
Discover how Per Ardua is breaking barriers, ensuring that every woman's voice and talent is not just acknowledged but valued, respected, and heard. Tune in for an inspiring journey into the future of tech, where inclusivity is not just a goal but a reality.
SheCanCode is a collaborative community of women in tech working together to tackle the tech gender gap.
Join our community to find a supportive network, opportunities, guidance and jobs, so you can excel in your tech career.
In this groundbreaking episode, we delve into the dynamic realm of technology where a dedicated group is leading the charge for change.
Join us as we explore the passionate mission to level the playing field and foster diversity within the tech industry, with special guest Jenna Mullins, Founder of Per Ardua.
Discover how Per Ardua is breaking barriers, ensuring that every woman's voice and talent is not just acknowledged but valued, respected, and heard. Tune in for an inspiring journey into the future of tech, where inclusivity is not just a goal but a reality.
SheCanCode is a collaborative community of women in tech working together to tackle the tech gender gap.
Join our community to find a supportive network, opportunities, guidance and jobs, so you can excel in your tech career.
Hello everyone, thank you for tuning in Again. I am Kayleigh Batesman, the content director at she Can Code, and today we are discussing levelling the playing field and driving diversity in the tech industry. We're exploring the passionate mission to level the playing field and foster diversity within the tech sector With my special guest for today, jenna Mullings, the founder of Peradra Group. Welcome, jenna. Thank you so much for joining me today. It's a pleasure to have you on here.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1:We are dying to hear all about you, how you fell into tech and a little bit about your background. If that's okay to get started, that would be a really good place to set the scene, please.
Speaker 2:Absolutely yeah. So to be honest, I think you probably hear this all the time, but I think, like a lot of people, I fell into tech.
Speaker 1:I hear that so often, which is nice to hear that people make it in all different routes.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. It's definitely one where I just kind of fell into it. To give you a little bit of a backstory, my journey into the tech industry began after nearly around a decade working for Santander, so a really large UK bank. So you would have thought that after that experience and that time that potentially I would enter the field of finance afterwards within recruitment. But ultimately I really needed to change. So tech it was.
Speaker 1:So how did that? Did somebody introduce you to that? Did you know somebody that worked in tech and you thought you know that's a really good career, right?
Speaker 2:Well, not so much tech, but I was really contemplating what to do next after Santander. When I was with those guys for all of that time, my two little boys were quite small and I just really needed a change and my brother actually was somebody that was in recruitment at the time and he just said to me look, jenna, you've got this huge sales experience background for being in sales within Santander. Why don't you see if recruitment could be something you could be interested in? He's a recruiter. He doesn't do tech, he actually does education, recruitment. But ultimately he was somebody that you know. Him and I were really talking about what's next and I didn't even know what recruitment was. To be honest, I had no idea what he did and kind of what it entailed, but he was the person that got me interested, say, in recruitment. But the tech piece was really just. It was my favourite company that I interviewed for and it just so happened that they were in tech.
Speaker 1:So you went from that fall over to I'm going to found my own business. That's quite a leap. That's quite a leap of thinking you know what. I want to change career paths and actually then thinking I'm going to become an entrepreneur. Yeah, tell us a little bit about that. I mean, you started your own business. That's not for the faint hearted. So tell us a little bit about that and your company?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. There is a bit of a. You know there's a bit of a couple of points that we've missed out here. So I had 10 years in the tech industry and about four or five years in the recruitment industry. Sorry, 10 years in the bank right in Santander and then had about five years in recruitment. So fundamentally I merged all of that experience together and really I suppose that experience as a whole, those that 15 years, led me organically to start Peradro Group, and we can go into that in a moment. But I think, reflecting on my time at Santander, I realised how fortunate I was to be surrounded by like-minded women. I think we unintentionally fostered a community that nurtured and supported one another. And then my experience in both internal and then external sales team and the external sales team being the recruitment teams, I think led to the creation of Peradro Group organically, just because I was trying to figure out okay, how can I, how can I merge the best of both worlds here? That was really how that all kind of come about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Can you tell us all about Peradro Group and what are your aims, what are your missions? What was your vision for the company when you started?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I think we fundamentally are a niche business that's solely focused on building meaningful partnerships with our clients to help assist them with their diverse hires and pipelines, but on top of that, we really provide a consultative approach with the education piece around not just the hiring but also retaining talent. To truly understand how recruitment agencies function, and particularly say contingent recruitment agencies, you must understand the backbone of the processes of the industry. So you'll have, for example, most organizations they'll have between like 50 to 100 or sometimes more clients than that that they're servicing. So the main focus of the consultants in the agency, underneath the service element, you know, naturally services extremely important, but underneath that you've got these core metrics of speed, volume and urgency. They're extremely important factors when you're working in a contingent recruitment model.
Speaker 2:So I think, when we were thinking about Peradro Group and when I think about personally those words that I've just mentioned to you a moment ago, how does that factor into diversity when your target pool of people is so small?
Speaker 2:So how do you effectively service each client without ultimately missing, you know, a group of people, specifically women, like, how do you manage that? And I think that's what I was talking about earlier on with Santander. Is that that experience at Santander naturally made me curious about community in a female space, because it was so heavily female led for that period of time. And then going into the world of agency, which is more male dominated and also the process is lean more towards doing something unintentionally. But you're you're intentionally, unintentionally missing out on a bunch of people when if speed and urgency and all these things are really critical, then You're bypassing. Maybe you know that you may be going through, say, like 20 or 30 pages of people before you find one fee like female that's qualified, with the right skills and expertise and unfortunately that's just not going to work in an agency because you have to deliver to so many clients all at once.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love the fact as well that you mentioned, when you started, not just hiring but retaining talent, and because it's such a big thing in the tech industry that the ladies that do come in as well, halfway through their career you know they come in after they graduate. By the time they reach their 30s, they are dropping off and they're leaving the industry, and there are there are lots of reasons for that, but you're, you're absolutely right, you know, you almost did. You notice that as a business and thought you know what. Actually, as you said, there is a very small and pool of talent out there female talent. So you know, what else can we do to help companies to retain that when, when?
Speaker 2:they do find them. Yeah, exactly, and I think that's the thing that we can control, right? So, my, there's so many wonderful companies out there that are tackling all elements of this issue in their own way. We obviously, naturally can't tackle all of them, and I think we were trying to figure out where can we add some value here, where can we make a little bit of a difference?
Speaker 2:Because, look, the gap, the gender gap in STEM fields is such a complex issue. You know one of the main factors and I've done quite a lot of reading, you know, naturally, as you would in this in this space, because you know one of those factors is the difference in between, in, beg your pardon, occupational preferences between men and women. So research has shown that men are generally more interested in things such as objects and machines, for example. Well, women are more interested primarily in people, right? So that difference in interests is evident as early as early adolescence, it seems, and it's reflected in the observed numbers of men and women working in different fields. So if you've got more more men interested in engineering, science, math, stem, and women are more interested in psychology and the social and health sciences, that's obviously a huge, like you know, disparity there. That not without understanding all of the elements to that. You know how do you address something like that and while you know occupational preferences, a significant factor it's it's not the soul calls of the gender gap in stem right, you have the social and the cultural factors you know. You know gender stereotypes, lack of role models in the STEM fields. So I think addressing these kind of broader societal issues is really crucial for closing that gap in STEM. And for us at Peradro group, we can't we can't do it all, so we were trying to figure out, you know, where can we add some value in this extremely complex issue?
Speaker 2:And you mentioned a great point earlier on actually, around you know women, they tend to drop out a much faster rate than men and this is actually called a leaky pipeline is what they call. It actually is typically the one of the main factors of that is motherhood. So I think it's around 40% leave the full. You know their full time employment after having their first child and they typically don't come back to industry. And I found that to be the most shocking part of it all and I've thought about this, probably too much.
Speaker 2:I've thought a lot around this and I think in my own opinion and this really is just my own observation and my own experience, I suppose but I think it speaks to community and I think the reason why I say that is if we compare nurses to engineers, when nurses are of childbearing age and they go and they have their children, they come back to industry time and time again, in the numbers that they do. So why is it that engineers don't? And I, as I mentioned, this is only my observation, but I think that communities and having a tribe of women in the same position of you when you do return to work, and being able to have shared experiences and understanding with one another which is why nurses, you know they have that predominance, you know more on the other side, which is more of a female field Makes a difference. So how do you tackle that issue? And it's so.
Speaker 2:It's so intense, isn't it? And it's so granular. It can start, you know, right at the bottom. I think for us, when we're educating our clients and this is why, for us, the retained element is so important is because that just it will take so much time. It has to start somewhere. So if you have a good, you know workforce where there is more women in the field, they will stay women, retain women, like it's a fact. So that's going to take time to get up to that point, if we can, but that's what we're trying to do.
Speaker 1:I completely agree and it mirrors a lot of the conversations that we have at she Can Code, because, you're right, you get those ladies that enter into the industry from graduation and then they reach a certain point and then they leave.
Speaker 1:That might be for motherhood and other reasons and they leave. But you don't hear many conversations about ladies coming back after maternity leave, for instance. But also, on the other end, we do hear a lot of ladies that are transitioning into tech for the first time from different careers and a lot of ladies who actually retrained whilst on maternity leave to come into tech for the first time because they saw it as an opportunity to be able to work flexibly, to be at home with their new children. You know all of those benefits, but it's almost the ladies that have been in the industry have somehow felt like they can't return and have those wonderful benefits that the ladies that have never been in the tech industry are seeing for the first time. So you are right, there is a disconnect there because with nurses, as you pointed out, for instance very female-focused industries there is that community and the ladies do come back in after maternity leave or other reasons that they've left. So you're absolutely right. There is work that needs to be done.
Speaker 2:There's almost connect those dots that you can come back Exactly and, like you say, I think there's so many elements to it, it's not a one-size-fits-all issue.
Speaker 2:I think it's extremely complex at all levels and I think when I speak to the part about why women are not coming back to industry, you know I'm talking about my own kind of experience there through Santander.
Speaker 2:I think the reason that I stayed so long at Santander was the flexibility and the fact that I had such shared experience with my peers, you know, with most of them being women and most of them having small children. I think that being able to share, you know, being able to go to work and say to your peers and your colleagues and friends, if you like, oh, you know, had to do 20 loads of washing last night and my husband's away on business or whatever you know, and you're all kind of in that same boat, whereas I think if you're the only woman in an organisation or in a team, or you're not the only, but if there's only a handful of you, you may be looking at your male counterparts thinking, ah, like you're not struggling as much as I am, I'm tired. You know, my kids had me up. You're doing these, you know so, and that's really like my own observation, but again, it's just extremely complex.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, when. Was that one of the reasons as well why you decided to start your business? You kind of you just noticed, actually, that there is a gap there. There is a gap for companies as well, just crying out for women in tech. I mean, you worked in recruitment. Is that something that you had heard from clients as well? That we're just dying to diversify at work for awesome. We're really struggling.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's fun and really it was really challenging, I think, to understand that at the beginning, because a lot of clients will tell you that they want more diverse talent, but ultimately they don't know how to execute that. And not just they don't know how to execute it, they still want to hire quote, unquote the best person for the job. And so there's a real like moral kind of quandary there, as in you're thinking to yourself okay, the best person for the job. Well, I agree with you, Mr client, I think we should find you the best person for the job, but if your pipeline is fully men, then you're going to hire a man, Whereas if you can take some time and have some care and diligence with someone that's focusing on, you know, making that a little bit more diverse, that pipeline pipeline then ultimately you can hire the best person for the job. But you've got at least an option whether or not that to be a woman. And that's what I was, that's what I was thinking a lot about before we started.
Speaker 2:Peradro was how agencies typically work and you know, a real world example is If you're on a search, for example, there's a lot of things that you do as a recruiter. When a search comes onto your desk, you check out the job description, you put a job advert out. You then set up a project on LinkedIn. You reach out to your existing network, you go to your other channels, whether that be via events or social media or whatever. So all of these steps are in place. It's like a carbon copy steps that you do as a consultant.
Speaker 2:And when I was thinking about Peradro Group, I thought, wow, how is it going to be possible that clients are going to have a healthy mix of diverse pipelines when the consultants, unintentionally, are not going to take the care and diligence needed to find women? If you have to scroll past 20, 200 men before you find one woman that's qualified? Most people won't do it. They just don't have the time and also, they need to earn money for themselves.
Speaker 2:It's a sales job, it's not. You've got a target and you have to perform. Otherwise, If you're not performing that say, then that's a bad place to be for a salesperson. So when I was thinking about Peradro Group and when we were really trying to figure out okay, how do we do this effectively? Because it's all okay to say that that's going to be the avenue that we're taking. But how do we actually action that? And I think that comes down to your existing network that you've built throughout time. It's going to be really difficult for someone that hasn't got a network such as ours to come in and be able to do those things at speed from the ground up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So, in terms of your aims, what are your aims as Peradro Group? Do you, as you said, you mentioned earlier the leaky pipeline. Is it your aim to fix that leaky pipeline or have your aims changed slightly? Now your company has got going and is moving forward?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the honest answer to that is that it always changes.
Speaker 2:We're a new business and I think any new organisation doesn't really have a clear roadmap. It's forever evolving. Right now, for us, we would love the opportunity to grow on the existing relationships we have. So because we are a small business, we can't physically have too many clients that we work for because fundamentally we don't have the reach for that. So for us it's more around really targeted partnerships with certain companies that are on this journey of diversifying their pipelines and trying to become an extension of that brand over time. So, whereas, as I mentioned earlier on agencies are volume and quantity, we're trying to be extremely quality driven in that way, so that for us, I think it's forever changing. If you was to ask me a couple of months down the line, it might be a different answer, but for now it's just building on those existing relationships and meaningful partnerships and doing what's right for the client, not just for now but for the many years to come in the two, five, 10 years of that company's growth, understanding how we've made the difference for that perceived growth in the future.
Speaker 1:Yes, definitely I love that. Yeah, and you spoke before a little bit about a lot of companies want to do things at speed and you're absolutely right in terms of women in tech and trying to even change a company's culture and diversify their workforce. That's not an overnight fix. That is far more about but finding quality relationships and a lot of people that we work with. I love the clients that we have because they don't just tick a box either, and a lot of people that work in diversity. Think you know what? I spent a little bit of budget on something that came under diversity and I've done my tickbox for the year and that's it, whereas we love to work with people that see it as far more than that and it's something that is really mitted into your whole company DNA rather than just I've spent, you know, 2000 on that for the year. I'm done.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly. But I mean, and that's just natural for us like human beings, right is that we tend to kind of always see the. We play the short to medium term game with game. We're not always thinking about that long term goal, right, we're thinking about the here and now. So I get it and I think, like you said it, you know you hit the nail on the head. It's such a long term goal that just starts off very small and then it's like an avalanche. It will just, it'll just get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. But it has to start, you know, just very small changes across the board.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. And what about our listeners today? How can? She can cause community. Get involved in what you're doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I think I thought, I thought a lot about this.
Speaker 2:I think it's, I think it's wonderful that you have the community that you have.
Speaker 2:From my own perspective as a whole, not just to get involved, you know, with what we're doing and what you're doing, but the industry as a whole I would love to see more referrals from women in the space, because I think that when you're as a recruiter, let's say, or as a hiring manager or an internal talent team, your day is filled with applications coming in, whether that be from job ads or whether that be from messages that you've had back from all of the outreach that you've done, and I think that most of the time, 95% of that outreach that comes to you, that then new action is not women, right?
Speaker 2:So it won't be female engineers, and that's a whole other thing that we can go into another time, but it won't be that. So, referring your fellow peers, colleagues, friends, so if you're happy in your role, that's great, and if someone like myself or other types of organizations reach out to you for positions, funnel that down the line as far as you can go and get it to be a past the parcel type exercise, because the more visibility women can have from all angles, so that they're not just being lost in the inbox, if you like, with all of the other kind of applicants and everything else coming through, and you're directly going out to somebody for a position. I think is extremely valuable and I'd love to see more of that.
Speaker 1:Yes, I couldn't agree more. And you're absolutely right. People can very women can very easily get lost in that inbox. Or, as you said right at the start, if ladies do apply for something and they're 20 pages in, then, yes, making sure that those ladies are visible or just having somebody that is mindful of that can only make a difference.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly Exactly by passing all of those applicants to find one. One woman is. It's a lot of time, a lot of time, a lot of effort, care, diligence. It's not easy at all, so it has to be intentional. So any any refer like referrals, just wonderful. Refer your friends, refer your colleagues, get them out to people and don't worry if you think they're not right for the job. You know it doesn't. It doesn't matter what. You want the conversation to be had so that that person can then refer them to the right place if necessary. You know networking should be viewed across all industries and it isn't really but networking in all facets of however you want to determine networking, but it should be viewed as everybody's net worth. It's probably the most critical component of, I think, business and just human interaction in a business setting. It's so important.
Speaker 1:Yes, I agree, and we spoke a little bit back. Well, networking and community there and how that can really help ladies to retain ladies is while having that network and feeling like they're you know they're part of a community that they can come back to, for instance, if they've left for Matleef. I wanted to ask you a little bit about why do you think women are not attracted to roles in the tech sector in the first place. Is it's there something about it? We always say on here that the tech sector has a really bad PR issue. We just have people look at the tech sector and think it's going to be boring, you're going to have a boring job, you're not going to make much impact, and then actually, when you get in, it's a completely different story. Is there something that you've seen about what people, what women, say why they're not attracted to roles in tech?
Speaker 2:Well, I think it goes back to the issues that we were mentioning earlier on you know with the differences, the occupational preferences between men and women.
Speaker 2:You know that can't be overlooked. We are different and those differences are evident. You know across literature and you know across the board. So that's obviously a critical factor that plays into that. And I also think that community is another huge factor. You're not. You're seeing, you know lack of representation in the space. You know if that, if a little girl is seeing when she's watching things or she's, she's seeing things on the TV, and that you know it's a little boy playing with Lego, for example, because you know that started there and it's not little girls in that, in that space.
Speaker 2:I mean, I actually did a STEM course at my son's school, so it was a day or he's in year three now my youngest, but at the time there were year one students and I tell you what it was, what the, the, the, the girls in the class absolutely loved building Lego. They loved so much, like I was absolutely blown away at how interested they were in building the models and I tell you what they were bloody good at it as well. And so I think that cultural and societal factor has to play into that On top of you know what we're seeing with, like I mentioned earlier on, with the differences between men and women and what little boys and little girls are interested in, absolutely, but I think would that be different if there was more visibility for little girls in that space? I don't know, and that's yeah yeah, and what happens when?
Speaker 1:when you're young and then in between their university and life, after how that changes and then ladies decide no, that's not for me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know right, it's so I wish I wish that we had the answer. I wish it was as black and white as you know, having a right and a wrong answer for it. I don't think there is one. And I don't speak to a lot of women outside of the field, if you like, or if they, if I've spoken to women outside of the field, they still have their hand in it, as, say, a consultant, or working in, say, like back office teams, for example, still in in the engineering field. But so I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. I wish I had the answer because then you could tackle it if you actually knew. Right, this is what we need to change, but you know, we don't know. There's hundreds of things that potentially could be a factor.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so that is ladies coming into tech, or girls wanting to take up STEM subjects. What about companies? What can they do to more to close the tech gender gap?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think. I think, look, start with the basics here. You know, hire purposefully, understand your pipelines and future growth of the business and where you see the organization going, Make sure that you have real, inclusive maternity and paternity leave. If there are female leaders and senior members of staff, you know, create a mentorship program for the junior members of staff that ultimately naturally builds out a community, which is wonderful. Graduate programs right, I think, understanding that a CS degree isn't the be on end all of a person in the field.
Speaker 2:Elon Musk has no comp science degree. Does that mean that he's not a quote unquote programmer? Well, no, there's a huge argument to say that he is, you know one of the one, a really good programmer, but he hasn't got a comp science degree, right. So he's Elon Musk, for goodness sake. So you know, there has to be other attributes outside of the degree that someone possesses in order for them to do well in a position. So that part of it, because that can be really extremely frustrating from our part that a comp science degree degree in a lot of cases is the be on end all. And you know, just for women that's just so detrimental because, like you mentioned earlier on, and it's so true. Women come in and out of the field and they don't typically have the way into tech that maybe you know men do so.
Speaker 1:And they haven't missed the boat as well, that if you didn't do that 10, 15 years in, doesn't matter.
Speaker 2:Doesn't, doesn't bloody matter. My goodness. There's so many examples of this that you could that you could pull upon you know in history and using you know different people as examples to prove that that's nonsense, really. Women, as I mentioned earlier on women retain women. So building those teams out, having more female faces in the teams, matters for the retaining piece. It's a really long road to close the gap Right, but, like I said, what we're trying to do is be really intentional when educating our clients about what they can do, and I would say what I mentioned a moment ago, probably on my top four or five things to start with and then build it out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I couldn't agree more and we're almost out of time. I wanted to ask you quickly Do you have any advice for our listeners and anyone, anything that you wish you had been told before you fell into the world of tech?
Speaker 2:Yeah, don't, don't be scared to apply for something that you don't have 100% skills to do or you don't hit. You know eight out of 10 of the markers on the on the JD. You know. Just apply, speak to as many people in the space, outside of the space, gain some knowledge, enjoy it. You can really. You know it's such a wonderful industry to be involved in and you know you are fundamentally changing the world and I think more representation in our world with people that represent us as women is only a good thing.
Speaker 2:So don't be scared, don't not apply because you don't have, as you know, as much of the attributes as you think you should have, and do do what makes you happy. Don't feel like your. Your journey into, into tech has to be one way and that's the only kind of perceived you know, perceived benefit, I suppose, of getting into it just one, one direction. It just doesn't. It's so it can be completely fluid and it's it's. It's down to you to be brave and start applying and start speaking to people and enjoy the process of it. All would be one of my biggest pieces of advice to women out there that are thinking about getting into the industry. Just give it a go see if you like it. If you don't, you don't. But fundamentally I think most women do.
Speaker 1:And you know. A lot of what you just said also applies to yourself as an entrepreneur and falling into tech and starting your own business. I am curious is there anything that you wish somebody had told you before you started your own business?
Speaker 2:Oh, so many things. How long do we have Be kind like, be kind on yourself. You can't do it all. Understand that you get better every single day, like 1% better is still better. And just be kind like, be kind to yourself. You, you, you think that you have to be 100% at everything. I can't be, I can't be 100% of. You know a fantastic mom, a fantastic wife, fantastic business owner, fantastic cleaner, dog walker, friend. You know, just be kind to yourself. You sometimes these things, you'll be great at one thing and not so great at the other one day, and then it will completely turn around and that's okay. That's what I wish someone would have said, like it's okay to it's okay to feel that you can't do it all.
Speaker 1:And I believe you agree, as, as females as well, we're always, we're almost told that if you're not doing all of those things or you're not doing them all well, you're almost failing in one area, and you are absolutely right that I think more ladies do need to be a lot kind to themselves and almost talk to themselves as you would talk to your best friend, because you probably wouldn't tell your best friend, or, by the way, you know you're failing in this area, in that area, you know we don't tend to do that.
Speaker 2:You'd be nice to your best friend and say you've got this secret, you know it's fine, you'll be okay. So absolutely be kind to yourself is. It's tough out there for everybody, right? Not just for women, for men, for all of us, right? And I think being kinder to yourself is probably one of the most wonderful gifts you can do to yourself. Yes, I agree.
Speaker 1:That is lovely advice to end it on for today, because we are already out of time, but thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to come and have a chat with us. It's been a pleasure.
Speaker 2:No, I've loved it actually. Thank you so much for your time it was. It was really wonderful.
Speaker 1:Thank you for everybody listening, as always. Thank you so much for joining us and we hope to see you again next time.