Last week an event was held at KPMG in Toronto to launch a new job board for Pride at Work Canada. This new board, powered by the TalentOyster Diversity Network, can be found at http://Careers.PrideAtWork.ca
As part of this event I had the pleasure of speaking for a few minutes and I'd like to share the content of part of my talk here. This isn't the full text because at the end I spoke to the various organizations who attended the event about some technical information on how this new site can interact with their existing career sites. Which if you are a programmer or hiring manager is exciting (maybe) but if you're not is a bit dry so we'll just leave that part out. I think the rest of the story is worth sharing though and here it is.
***
Good evening everyone. My name is Max Stocker and I am the Director of Technology for TalentOyster and I am here tonight to talk to you about the new Pride At Work Canada career site and my dad.
My dad is an immigrant, born in the UK, but raised and educated, including multiple universiy degrees here in Canada. My dad is also transgendered.
For many years she worked, in technology related fields for an enterprise level company. Then she worked as a contractor for several other large organizations but to conclude a long period of soul searching, about 5 years ago she went to Thailand and had a full sex change operation and hasn't had a real job since.
She still does work, on a volunteer basis for her church and for a local LGBT history organization but in terms of meaningful paid employment there is none.
To be honest there are many factors to why this is, but there is no doubt in my mind that the main reason that a highly educated, skilled and experienced person like my dad is not working is because of the way she looks.
At TalentOyster our diversity mandate covers many groups. Aboriginals, visible minorities, new immigrants, persons with disabilities and now, with Pride at Work Canada, LGBT. To us all of these groups, as different as they are all share a too common experience of bias and prejedice based ultimatley on who they are.
Defining terms like diversity or inclusion can be a navel gazing excercise but if I may define inclusion all the same I would say it is an environment in which nobody is being asked to, or forced to, leave part of their identity at home.
We don't ask people who have a different skin colour to leave that at home, or tell persons with disabilities that that's fine but leave it in the privacy of your own home. Things shouldn't be any different for LGBT.
I'd love to see, as Michael Bach was recently quoted as saying, our society move past tolerance in to acceptance but I don't think it will happen over night. What I do think though is that efforts by organizations like Pride at Work, and tonight specifically with this career site we can start to change these attitudes and encourage the formation of working environments, and, even a society that is truly inclusive of everyone. Including my dad.
Showing posts with label white-label. Show all posts
Showing posts with label white-label. Show all posts
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Friday, March 11, 2011
The TalentOyster Network : a combined approach to diversity talent sourcing
Even though (or perhaps because of) we work in the field, we can tell you that driving diverse candidate traffic is not an easy thing. The short answer as to why is the amount of market fragmentation that exists. There are many, many, many diverse communities and markets in Canada but most of them are, relatively speaking, quite small. It's only in combining them that a candidate flow strategy can really make sense which is one of the reasons we call it Canada's Hidden Talent Pool.
The creation of TalentOyster was based on the principle of funnelling candidates from these fragmented markets into one collective pool from the perspective of companies looking to hire. TalentOyster is different because it is the only diversity related employment portal that was built around a traffic strategy first and the only one deeply connected to the existing multi-cultural media community in Canada.
In this line, right from the start TalentOyster has been connected to diverse cultural communities across Canada through the media partner network of our parent publishing company. This has given us a great start when it comes to candidate flow but as we have learned a strategy more proactive than advertisements and editorial content in newsmedia publications is required. We initially moved on this strategy by being leading edge in leveraging social media with programs like our Tweeting of Jobs and pushing updates to candidates via email, RSS and SMS. But we realized that these aren't always enough either so enter the TalentOyster Network.
The TalentOyster Network is a network of white-label sites built on the TalentOyster platform and sites using the TalentOyster API.
Our White-Label sites leverage the trust candidates have in an existing community/media brand by wrapping a custom branded job-board solution built on TalentOyster and featuring the opportunity and employment content of our site for some of the affinity groups and communities we work with. Without all the buzzwords what does that mean? Well check out EpochJobs.ca, a Chinese language website, managed by a community trusted newsmedia publisher (EpochTimes) that features TalentOyster content. It's just one example of how we are expanding the funnel concept through our white-label network and we're adding more trusted partners in more affinity groups all the time, including Hispanic, South Asian, Aboriginal and LGBT.
The second and even newer way we are being more proactive in increasing our candidate flow is via OCEAN, a REST API for TalentOyster. OCEAN lets anyone interested to embed job search functionality and content from TalentOyster right into their own website. Sites can execute searches for job on TalentOyster, get results and then format and display them, however they like, to their own visitors. In some ways you can think of it is as a White-Label "lite".
Either way we're excited about our new funnel concept. We think by remaining the only diversity job board with a candidate traffic first vision we will continue to improve upon what is already the best streams of diversity candidate flow in the country. Because the more great candidates are connected to great employers the more everyone gains.
The creation of TalentOyster was based on the principle of funnelling candidates from these fragmented markets into one collective pool from the perspective of companies looking to hire. TalentOyster is different because it is the only diversity related employment portal that was built around a traffic strategy first and the only one deeply connected to the existing multi-cultural media community in Canada.
In this line, right from the start TalentOyster has been connected to diverse cultural communities across Canada through the media partner network of our parent publishing company. This has given us a great start when it comes to candidate flow but as we have learned a strategy more proactive than advertisements and editorial content in newsmedia publications is required. We initially moved on this strategy by being leading edge in leveraging social media with programs like our Tweeting of Jobs and pushing updates to candidates via email, RSS and SMS. But we realized that these aren't always enough either so enter the TalentOyster Network.
The TalentOyster Network is a network of white-label sites built on the TalentOyster platform and sites using the TalentOyster API.
Our White-Label sites leverage the trust candidates have in an existing community/media brand by wrapping a custom branded job-board solution built on TalentOyster and featuring the opportunity and employment content of our site for some of the affinity groups and communities we work with. Without all the buzzwords what does that mean? Well check out EpochJobs.ca, a Chinese language website, managed by a community trusted newsmedia publisher (EpochTimes) that features TalentOyster content. It's just one example of how we are expanding the funnel concept through our white-label network and we're adding more trusted partners in more affinity groups all the time, including Hispanic, South Asian, Aboriginal and LGBT.
The second and even newer way we are being more proactive in increasing our candidate flow is via OCEAN, a REST API for TalentOyster. OCEAN lets anyone interested to embed job search functionality and content from TalentOyster right into their own website. Sites can execute searches for job on TalentOyster, get results and then format and display them, however they like, to their own visitors. In some ways you can think of it is as a White-Label "lite".
Either way we're excited about our new funnel concept. We think by remaining the only diversity job board with a candidate traffic first vision we will continue to improve upon what is already the best streams of diversity candidate flow in the country. Because the more great candidates are connected to great employers the more everyone gains.
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