Diversity in Action - Sqreen x The Allyance
💖 The purpose of The Allyance is to help both companies and candidates: companies wanting to reach excellence in hiring and candidates wanting to find the perfect companies.
🎸 While The Allyance is working on a diversity audit to empower Sqreen, we want to put Alison Eastaway in the spotlight. She is not your typical HR Director / VP People. And, you know what? We love it!
__ __ __🔗 DIVERSITY IN ACTION N°3
ALISON EASTAWAY
Let’s meet Alison, VP of People at Sqreen and discover an unique personality!
__ __ __Who are you? Tell us everything!
My name is Alison, I’m 31 years old. I was born in Sydney, Australia. I have been living in France for the past 9 years. I began my self-taught career in the HR field 10 years ago, in the oil and gas sector. This was a great training, mainly because this sector has plenty of parallels with tech: new jobs you’ve never heard of, engineering, complex skills… For the past 2.5 years, I have been leading the people function at Sqreen, a cybersecurity start-up with offices in Paris and San Francisco (and team members in 14 other locations!).
🎸 🏍 On the personal side, people are often surprised to hear that I like to listen to metal music and have a motorcycle license. I also greet my cat Kitty with a “Hello, Kitty!” every morning.
What does a Vice President (VP) of People do?
Right now, we’re in a high growth phase at Sqreen. So I am involved in a ton of topics we might not traditionally think of as HR (especially in France).
✨ My role is to go pretty deep into the business, technology and sales in order to help everyone prepare for what’s coming next. In other words, figuring out what people are great at and what they need in terms of structure and support in order to put them in the best situation and ensure success. This unique partnership creates a lot of value.
We love two things in particular about you, can you tell us more about BotBot and your unbiased cat?
🤖 BotBot was born out of a late Friday afternoon conversation with a new colleague who had just moved to Paris from Latvia to join Sqreen. He was stuck on a logged user problem. When talking through this problem with him, I drew tiny little robot faces on the whiteboard to help us think through it, and (absolutely no thanks to my advice!) he found the solution! This robot thing gained a name “Botbot” then became a running joke: we were making up scenarios like “BotBot at the VC meeting”, etc. I decided to write her story and gave the book away for free at tech events. Yes, it matters that BotBot is female: representation matters in pop culture like in the boardroom.
😻 “Unbiased cat” came up this year during the first 2020 French lockdown. At Sqreen, we all agreed early on that nobody needed to apologize for family and pets walking behind the camera during video conferences. My cat Kitty quickly became my sidekick during interviews, obviously because she has this habit of sitting anywhere. Cats are so judgemental that I call her my unbiased cat: she judges everyone equally, no discrimination.
🐱 Alison Eastaway and Kitty, a very unbiased cat and unique HR expert!
How and why did you start working on DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion)?
👩🏫 Like anyone who is part of an under-represented group in tech, I never had the luxury to learn about DEI in books, it was learnt by experience - and not always pleasant experience.. I remember my first professional experience with DEI during my first HR job. The team got so excited because we had hired our first female engineer in a mining site in Queensland. But our joy was quickly replaced by the realisation - we didn’t even know if we had a women’s toilet onsite! Well, it’s a bit the same in tech: hiring women without an inclusive structure to welcome them into, is simply not enough.
Have you ever faced discrimation during a recruitment process?
Of course I did. Being white, cisgender and straight means I belong to a lot of over-represented categories. But I’m also female, foreign and non-tertiary educated, which puts me in some under-represented groups as well. Once as a candidate, a CEO asked me: “how do we know you won’t leave us in the lurch to go back to Australia to have children?”. When I tell this story to men they can’t always understand why I still took the job, but people from under-represented groups do - I needed it. This story is very mild compared to many others that women in tech have experienced. Which is a real problem.
👊 Another experience was on the other side of the table as a HR person. I was interviewing a female candidate for an engineering role and the male employees were worried that she didn’t have strong examples of speaking up enough at her last job and might not be a fit as she wouldn’t challenge the status quo. In the end we reoriented the interview to better let her demonstrate her skills rather than focusing on the past. Good news is: we hired her!
What are the key learnings you can share about how DEI is addressed at Sqreen?
🤍 It can be hard to understand how all the potential actions work together. Here’s our baseline though: we want to be explicit on what’s acceptable and unacceptable and who has the ownership of DEI, meaning that allies and overrepresented groups should be responsible for the majority of it.
We also know that language is crucial: using accurate pronouns, not saying “guys” for a mixed group… For instance, saying “we should hire a diverse person” is well-intentioned but not correct, even awkward (diversity is a function of a group)! To open the discussion about the different privileges we might each benefit from at Sqreen, I shared a 50 statements checklist with the team which led to some great productive discussions.
👉🏻 The key learning is to think in terms of groups, but still keep structures in mind. With these different strategies, I really hope that one day the diversity conversation will have switched and we’ll be sitting around saying “how can we bring more white men into tech?”.
What’s the project you are the most proud of?
Well, the Code of Conduct is not perfect, but it’s definitely a baseline about DEI. In the context of the recent Ubisoft scandal, I realised that I wanted to avoid blindspots and put this in place before we needed it. Sharing this strong statement internally and externally allows us to communicate about our standards and invite scrutiny.
I truly want investors and candidates to ask us about it, even in a challenging way - and to especially ask the over-represented groups about this. I want to show and guarantee them that we’re dedicated to improving DEI. At first some of the team didn’t get why having a CoC mattered, but when they saw that the first people to respond to this statement were part of underrepresented groups they realised its importance! This proved to me that words have power. Was I a writer in another life? Maybe.
When you reach out to communities, you want to avoid tokenism. How do you overcome this fear?
✅ We don’t believe in tokenism: we don’t celebrate hiring women and people from other under-represented groups. I hate the “diversity hire” label. Really, the worst thing you can do is to make a candidate feel that they’re a token.
At Sqreen, I sometimes have to remind the team that a new woman joining the Sqreen team is not the end of the road, rather the very start. We know that we need different perspectives and exposures in the team - diversity is the strategy, not the goal. That is why I’d rather talk about “core skills to the role” and “cross-functional skills” in hiring, to avoid the inevitable “she’s not all that strong technically but she has great soft skills” which isn’t the compliment you might think it is ;).
What’s your point of view about Diversity & Inclusion? Are French companies good at it?
➡️ Honestly, it is super easy to be critical about France. I mean, Australia is 10 years ahead on these topics and still not good at it! What I can say is that France is catching up, with limitations such as the prohibition of collecting ethnic data. The other issue is that most resources about DEI are written in English. When you’re not fluent and comfy enough in English, it can be hard to learn about that topic.
How do you describe yourself? A Diversity Advocate? An ally?
🌈 Though I do not have a label I am comfortable with, I guess that ally is the best description for me. Being part of a ton of overrepresented groups and working in an executive position, I do have influence and power on other people. The term “advocate” makes it sound like we need to promote DEI, which I’m not okay with.
I mean, I have been working in DEI for 10 years and I truly wish I did not have to. I do not love DEI, obviously because I would love it not to be a topic anymore in tech! So yes, I am excited for the problem to be gone, which would stop us from having the same old conversations. But until then, you’ll hear me talk about it quite a lot :)
What would you recommend to other companies who would like to start working on DEI?
I have a fairly strong opinion about companies that are not genuine or even interested in DEI. In my view, the talent market will shift towards companies that really deserve it. I want to focus on companies that will do better and create a new standard. As I always say, I would help someone endlessly and for free if their intention is genuine. But as soon as I feel that’s virtue-signalling, I’ll stop. It’s not my job to educate people - especially from over-represented groups about things they can easily read about.
Why would you recommend other companies to work with The Allyance? How do you know Caroline Chavier?
🙌🏻 I know Caroline by reputation, follow her on Twitter and obviously heard about WIMLDS Paris. In fact, Caroline worked with people I admire, like Morgane, my favorite recruitment sourcer. Truth is, it helps to have a French-centric expertise and it is crucial that someone understands that context as well as she does!
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CONCLUSION
A few words from Caroline, The Allyance CEO:
“Alison is one of the few HR people I admire. First, she is atypical, creative and one of the most daring professionals, in Paris. She has a sharp eye for identifying structural issues and generating the right amount of efforts to find creative ideas!
I strongly believe we need more people like Alison to move the needle towards a more diverse tech industry. If you want to better understand what energetic and constructive mind Alison is, listen to the podcast below”
✔️ Want more?
➡️ If you are interested in knowing more about The Allyance, you can get in touch with us and book a free conversation with Caroline Chavier, at the bottom of the page: https://www.theallyance.one/ or write to her: caroline[at]theallyance[dot]one
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: ✒️ Léa C, The Allyance Contributor:
“I joined The Allyance 1,5 year after Caroline and I met at a ionnalee’s concert! I am a freelance translator and content writer (French, English, Spanish and German). I also work as an administrative employee in the health and data science sector. So, I am not far from Caroline’s core topic! I am very active as a volunteer in social and environmental NGOs, where I always try to put intersectionality at the center of actions because I am convinced that every cause is linked to one another. It is readily apparent that Caroline and I share a lot of common interests, which is why we as friends decided to work together!”