Hire Like a Rocket Scientist | Sally Thornton | TEDxDavisStWomen
well done thank you recruiting in San Francisco and down Silicon Valley can generate some pretty interesting conversation with sometimes fascinating characters from startups to big companies but one of our most common requests is to hire the what we call Purple Unicorn now maybe you have tried to hire a purple unicorn it is when you list all of the qualities and traits that you hope would come in some magic person who can't wait to work for you so when I got a call last year from Eric Romo who is a rocket scientist and starting a company called alt space VR it's a virtual reality uh Communications company I kind of thought this might be the purple unicorn call so even though he was employee number 13 at SpaceX a Stanford grad I kind of thought he might have a narrow view on how to hire and what I learned was actually he had a very broad lens and he asked my company to help him find his head of product now what what he said was really important to him was that his head of product be considered female or male so he wanted us to really focus on helping him build a leadership team from the very beginning that was gender balanced now for maybe the two of you in the room who don't know the data on women's percentage of representation on Executive teams in Corporate America it's a slim 14% And The Science shows us why we most most likely hire people who look like ourselves it is just this bias that we have and it's actually the number one predictor as to who we will hire But Eric being a rocket scientist was not going to fall into the similarity trap and he looked at the data and said 85% of consumers are women if I want to build the best product I need to focus on having the voice of the customer in my Executive Suite and not fall prey to the bias that exists thank you and there are certainly a lot of good reasons to think about diversity in the Executive Suite that go beyond gender but this isn't a diversity story this is an economic Story the research from Stanford Clayman to McKenzie to Shark Tank okay there's not really research there but both the Wall Street Journal and The Economist have revealing large studies that show that companies who have at least 30% women leaders running the companies have better Financial returns in fact one study showed that the return on equity was 35% higher so the important part as we think about this is why right 30% is this critical mass number that we need to make good decisions because we've learned if we have a table of 10 Executives at the room and there's one loone voice that's a woman we don't actually hear her and this is not horrible thinking this is just our unconscious bias we we can't help it our brains are programmed this way we code people according to traits and groups and is this fast thinking that is perfect if you're in a life and death situation but it works against us when we're thinking about how to run companies and build the best products the other challenge with fast thinking is when we ask the question who's the best person for the job as if there's only one person for the job as if the job is fixed rather than evolving and as if this person's going to work in isolation instead of who is the best person to be part of my team so I can lead the company well and build the best product so let's learn from the rocket scientists and the economic dat start your companies or evolve your current leadership teams to have gender balance in the Executive Suite remembering that critical number 85% of purchasing is done by women because you don't have to be a rocket scientist to hire like a rocket scientist thank you [Applause]