21 - NFL Rooney Rule + VMware's Minority and Female Recruiting Pivot

In episode 21 of The HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Tim Sackett, Kris Dunn, and Jessica Lee come together to talk about The Rooney Rule and VMware’s new commitment to include a minority and female candidate in every search at the company.The gang also discusses how often they’ve filled up their car tanks during quarantine, and something called Generation Zoom. 

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1:30 - How many times have you filled your gas tank during quarantine? Jlee has only filled her tank once since March!

3:00 - Who doesn’t love a best friend duo that runs together? KD and Tim went running in Celebration, Florida together. KD was on Zillow on his phone the entire time they ran in the community and Tim was dying. 

5:45 - KD has been reading a lot about “Generation Zoom”; our younger generation that has been learning through distance learning. Jlee talks about how her young kids may have trouble learning in the future since they are losing a lot of development time in school. 

9:00 - Do you think there will be a dip in SAT and ACT scores in the coming year? Tim is interested to see where the data falls. 

10:45 - First major topic of the day: The Rooney Rule. This NFL rule places interview quotas for minority candidates for coaching positions. Tim talks about how more minority candidates have been put into the interview process and what it’s meant in hiring minority coaches. 

16:00 - Jlee discusses her own personal experience getting an opportunity that she might not have based on her resume and how she relates to the experience of Mike Tomlin. 

18:00 - Tim talks about some negative views on the Rooney Rule and how often coaching positions are planned and picked out far in advance. 

20:00 - KD and Jlee bring up another positive of the Rooney Rule, in that it forces forcing hiring managers to look harder and potentially finding special people that they may not have been able to find before, even if it’s not for that particular position. 

22:30 - Second topic of the day: VMware’s CEO (Patrick Gelsinger) announced their company would commit to interviewing a POC and a woman for every single position. KD thinks this sounds similar to the Rooney Rule. KD and Tim praises VMware and other companies who have come out recently with new processes and practices to help diversify their workforce. 

26:20 - Jlee brings up potential backlash from recruiters and other hiring managers. She notes that leaders need to give recruiters some leeway in order to reach performance metrics and new interviewing goals. 

29:40 - How will this new hiring practice work in practice? KD brings up the self ID process and when it comes into play in the hiring process. Jlee discusses the data recruiters will be giving to hiring managers and how they will report that they are meeting a certain requirement. 

33:00 - KD reads VMware’s CEO statement again to Tim and gets his reaction. Tim thinks there are many aspects to this new rule that need to be addressed in order to be successful in finding the best possible candidates. 

36:00 - Pat (CEO of VM Ware) is a new best friend of the pod!

36:20 - Jlee and KD praise the leadership at VMware for going ahead with this announcement and implementation of the rule instead of getting bogged down in details and complaints. 

38:45 - Jlee and KD talk about the concept of equality vs diversity, with KD bringing up Salesforce’s move years ago to grab the high ground of equality.

41:00 - HR Famous would like to congratulate Patrick Gelsinger from VMware on a job well done with their new version of the Rooney Rule.