April Featured Member– Sally Printz!

Meet Sally Printz, our April Second Shift Featured Member. Sally left NBC after a long career in strategic marketing and communications. She opened up to us about how she successfully transitioned from a corporate career to opening her own cause marketing consulting business and tips on her winning pitches. 

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You had a very successful career at NBC Universal and transitioned to a creating your own consulting business. What made you take the leap and what are the benefits and drawbacks of stepping away from the corporate world?

I left NBC Universal as part of a corporate restructuring and because of my role and tenure there I was fortunate enough to receive a generous severance package.  This was a luxury that many people don’t get and I recognized that from the start and decided to be mindful of not wasting the opportunity that severance offered, namely, the chance to really reflect on what I wanted to do next.  After one high profile, demanding job after another since college, I was burnt out and in need of more work/life balance.  

Working as an independent consultant came naturally to me as I had done it successfully earlier in my career when I wanted to transition from finance to marketing. I was confident that I still had what it takes to be successful working on my own again. To be sure, it is not for the faint of heart and takes a lot of self-awareness and strong network to pull off.  The benefit of calling my own shots about which projects I’ll work on and which I’ll turn down is really appealing. The drawbacks, however, can be significant at times: from not having medical benefits and paid leave to the isolation of working with minimal interaction with clients.  Marketing is a very collaborative profession. From brainstorming with other colleagues and working as part of an interdisciplinary team, to pitching ideas to clients and responding to their reactions, it’s a very intimate experience. Most consulting gigs lack this level of collaboration and instead offer consultants to come in for an occasional meeting or to chat via Skype–nice but not the same as having an actual seat at the table.

How did you find The Second Shift and how does being part of our network help you?

I had been growing frustrated by the “black hole” aspect of sending out resumes and waiting and wondering whether or not they’d ever been received.  A friend of mine had read about The Second Shift in the NY Times and recommended I check it out. The article’s title “Helping Moms Lean In, But Not Too Far” resonated with me and the more I learned about The Second Shift, the more it felt like the right fit.  

Four aspects of the company were (and remain) particularly appealing to me.  

  • First, I love that it is a company “by women for women.”  
  • Second, the concept of putting formerly valued and still valuable employees to work in new and different ways appeals to the environmentalist in me. It’s as is The Second Shift is applying the concept of “reduce, reuse, recycle” to working moms.  
  • Third, it became a real chore always hustling for the next client.  My projects are often all consuming and, as a result, I often didn’t have time to line up my next project until my current one was ending.  This created gaps in between jobs that often left me worried about money and bored waiting for my next assignment to materialize.  
  • And, finally, I hated – as in HATED – having to chase down payments from clients.  

From a member’s perspective, The Second Shift runs like a well-oiled machine. The site is easy to use and logically set-up. The staff are accessible when I have questions too and, most important, treat me like a valued member of their team, one they advocate for with clients.   Even pitches I’ve submitted that ended up not landing the job have led to some really terrific new contacts.  

You recently started a new project through The Second Shift and your pitch stands out for its focus and clarity. As a marketer, do you find it easy to market yourself? How do you think about and craft such winning pitches? (See your pitch below)

First, thank you for complimenting the focus and clarity of my pitches.  Those are two aspects of my writing that I’ve worked hard to develop over the years, both for the purpose of making my work more impactful for clients as well as for marketing myself.

When it comes to writing winning pitches, it always starts with research. I start by reading the company website and digging into the background of the principals. If need be, I’ll also look up relevant industry events or info about the company’s competitive set. Top level research for sure but just enough to seed my pitch with info that demonstrates I have a sense of what the company faces and I’ve taken time to learn about them.  From there, I craft my pitch based on the tone and vernacular of how the brand and its staff represent themselves. No doubt this is a more time consuming approach but it reaps benefits in the end as it allows me to connect with the client in a more customized way. Traditional or generic pitches simply don’t cut it anymore.

Like most people, particularly ones who work in marketing, I’ve walked into conference rooms with prepared presentations based on client RFPs only to have a monkey wrench thrown at me before the meeting’s even begun.  It wasn’t easy at first, but I mastered learning how to stay calm in the moment, listen to the client’s new direction and pivot on the spot.  I take the same approach to my process for writing winning pitches: it’s all about the pivot and finding what will connect me to the reader on the other side of the screen.

THE WINNING PITCH:

“To Whom It May Concern: I’m a “big creative thinker with big creative concepts” and a track record to prove it. The mission of DoSomething.org is one that I care deeply about and that I have been immersed in since long before social advocacy was “a thing.” My expertise as a brand strategist and corporate social responsibility programmer has allowed me to help businesses “do better by doing good” for companies in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors. By way of background, I am a seasoned professional who excels in high-energy, collaborative environments. My most notable social advocacy programs have been for NBCUniversal, Nickelodeon, and the National Hockey League, among others. The common thread in all of my jobs has been my approach to create and monetize public affairs programs that benefit people by “fun-raising” in order to fundraise. Towards this end, I’ve created campaigns that can be scaled, monetized and, most importantly, valued by the communities I served. My successes are the result of finding new ways to emotionally connect my audience to the cause I am marketing and then making that cause feel relevant, accessible, and necessary. Experience has taught me that the key to the success of any initiative is in engaging employees and making them brand ambassadors for the program right from the start. Colleagues rely on my exceptional communication and organizational skills to produce consistently impactful marketing partnerships. Whether my team had three people on it or thirty, my humor, energy, work ethic, and willingness to role up my sleeves when needed, has inspired the people around me to overcome what others often considered insurmountable obstacles. I’m certain that I would be an asset to DoSomething.org, one that can and will make an immediate impact to the organization’s mission. My resume is attached for your review. What’s left to say other than… Let’s Do This! Sincerely, Sally Printz”

Thank you Sally– we also love working with you and are happy to chase down your well-deserved money. 

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Matrescence + Motherhood

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One of our earliest Second Shift team members just had her first baby and it brought us back to the magical moment when your life as you know it ends, and you are reborn with a new identity—parent. Dr. Alexandra Sacks, a reproductive psychiatrist, says this transformation is called Matrescence and it is a biological shift in women whose impact is not fully understood or acknowledged.

Dr. Sacks is a panelist at our San Francisco event on May 2nd. She brings a scientific understanding of the ways women change (for the better, of course) when they have children and how that influences their work and families.

Dr. Sacks can you please define Matrescence ?

Matrescence, the developmental phase of new motherhood, is like adolescence –a transition when hormones surge, bodies morph and identity and relationships shift. Our culture appreciates that adolescence is a time of physical and emotional awkwardness for most teenagers, because we understand that change is hard, and transformation on all of these levels simultaneously is stressful. The same is true for matrescence.

You wrote the amazing article “Birth of a Mother” in the NY Times about how much change women go through when they become mothers. Why do you think this particular topic is one that we don’t really talk about?

For motherhood, our culture has become preoccupied with a ‘bliss myth’ that the ideal transition to new motherhood is filled with joy and ease. In my office, I hear from women that their matrescence story has moments of physical, social, and psychological complexity; these ups and downs are much more like adolescence than another time in life when there is less change and chaos.

During the matrescence transition, many women find themselves feeling lost somewhere between who they were before motherhood, and the picture-perfect but unrealistic image of who they think they should be now. Too many women are ashamed to speak openly about the ups and downs of their experiences for fear of being judged. Many worry that they are destined to be bad mothers, when they’re experiencing natural and widely shared

Changing the topic a little—There are many ways that being a parent changes you physically but it also changes the dynamic between partners with women often taking on an unequal burden of responsibilities. What do you advise women who are struggling with career, guilt, and managing family responsibilities?

The foundation of co-parenting is making sure that both parents feel supported in their division of parenting labor. Whether childcare is evenly shared or one parent takes on more of the work, the division of responsibility to should be agreed to consciously and collaboratively.  But just as there’s more to your family than childcare, there’s more to co-parenting than the logistics how you split that work. It’s also about giving each other permission, encouragement, and support to take better care of yourselves, one another, and your relationship.

Thank you!

Dr Sacks is a featured panelist at our San Francisco event focusing on breaking down bias toward women in the workforce and helping companies recognize and combat unequal workplace practices. #breakingbias

Please join us: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/breaking-the-motherhood-penalty-tickets-45449441503?aff=es2

rsvp@thesecondshift.com.

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Building a Sustainable Career

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Armed with an MBA from Stanford and a successful career as a Wall Street and Silicon Valley investor, Vanessa Loder was climbing the corporate ladder when she realized she was exhausted from “leaning in.” In a remarkable career transition, she took a look at the pressure women put on themselves and realized she had the tools to help them succeed without burning out. Vanessa is now a leading expert on women’s leadership and mindfulness– she hosts retreats and created an online career coaching program and she is the co-founder of the Alliance for Parents in Tech, a collaborative of moms leading the parent’s groups at many of the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley.

Vanessa is one of the panelists at our event on May 2nd at HoneyBook and shared her hard-earned wisdom about the modern workplace and the stress women put on themselves to be everything to everyone.

You make the argument that driven and ambitious women are leaving the workforce because of the pressure they are under between work and family and what is needed is to create a “sustainable career,” what do you mean by that?

A sustainable career is one that is based on a more expansive definition of “success” that goes beyond money and power to incorporate an individual’s personal values. Typically, this means your definition of success will include things like time allocated to caregiving (for young children, sick or elderly family members), self-care, flexibility, creativity, time for hobbies or other pursuits outside of work, etc. It also involves taking the long view of your career and seeing it as a marathon, not a sprint. For many women today, we’re having children later in life and our prime breadwinning years and prime child-rearing years are overlapping more than ever before. Plus the number of dual-income families has increased dramatically.  Women have entered the workforce, and yet still bear a great deal of responsibility for household and childrearing duties. Basically, women are working in a system that was created for a man with a stay at home wife. It’s a recipe for exhaustion. Working to change the current system is one piece of the puzzle. And, remembering to make choices that help you to thrive personally as well as professionally will allow you to have a sustainable career. It’s taking a holistic approach to your life and investing in all areas, not just career at the expense of everything else. And we also need to reframe the conversation to take into account that investing in the individual and investing in personal well being is good for the company too! (this is something that many tech companies already understand)

Why do you think women “burn out” more than men and how is that affecting pay equity and women leadership?

Research shows that women have more of a tendency to multi-task and also have more role overload where we’re doing multiple roles at the same time (employee, mother, activity organizer, etc.) which leads to exhaustion. Danish mothers have, on average, one and a half hours of leisure time every day that is spent in “pure” or child-free time to themselves. American mothers, in contrast, have about thirty-six minutes a day to themselves. Part of the issue is the culture in the US where being “busy” has become a sign of prestige. I see a lot of women who take on a great deal of responsibility, both at work and at home. Learning how to set boundaries and say “no” without feeling guilty is a vital skill to any women leader these days. When women burn out, we all suffer. Companies lose out on talent and diversity, women aren’t represented in key leadership positions (and women are typically the most likely to advocate for policy changes that will benefit women) or given a seat at the table to ensure pay equity. Plus, our families suffer when we’re burned out and exhausted. It’s hard to be fully present for your loved ones when you come home depleted from work.

From the outside there is a perception that tech companies and Silicon Valley firms are at the forefront of progressive policies and work structures– is this an accurate view from the inside?

Many tech companies are now offering paid leave for both caregivers (not just mothers or “primary”), job sharing and flexible work schedules, which is a step in the right direction. When you look at some of the paid parental leave policies, and other benefits for new parents as well as overall physical and emotional well-being, there are several tech companies at the forefront…although I might argue they’re at the forefront of a very lagging country. Overall the US still has a long way to go, we rank alongside Papa New Guinea as the only 2 countries in the world without any national maternity leave policy. It’s ridiculous that we’re the only developed country with no national policy.

Thank you Vanessa! We are excited to learn more next week at our member event. Don’t forget to RSVP if you are in Bay Area and join us to discuss how to break biases against working parents. Check out Vanessa’s retreats and online coursework designed to help women navigate life’s choppy waters and create a mindful and sustainable career path. 

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Introducing Amy Henderson and tendlab.

On May 2nd we are hosting a member event in San Francisco with a fascinating panel discussion about what happens to mothers in the workforce from various points of view: psychologically, financially, professionally. All of the panelists have expertise in these areas and come armed with research, statistics and actionable tools that can be employed to help advance the careers of working parents and break down the isolation and inequity of the motherhood penalty.

We want to highlight the women taking part in this panel and their incredible work starting with Amy Henderson, the CEO and co-founder of tendlab. Amy was instrumental in organizing this event and is a thought-leader in the conversation about the benefit of working mothers on the workforce. She brings neuroscience, game theory, management studies, evolutionary biology and interviews with hundreds of executives together to support her research on the positive impact of parents on the companies who employ them.

You created Tend Lab to teach businesses how and why to support their working parents.  What are some of your wins?

We’ve had great success in working with companies who invest in the development (or expansion) of parent groups. When parents can meet to learn from each other and advocate for their needs within the company, it empowers everyone, even non-parents, to perform at a higher level.  We’ve found that when non-parent allies participate in these gatherings it builds a bridge of communication and understanding that positively impacts the way teams engage with each other.

What do you think are the persistent stigma that won’t go away?

There are three pervasive myths that undermine all parents, both in their careers and at home. tendlab research debunks all of them.

1.  Mothers are better than fathers at caring for their children, especially when they are young.  

Neuroscience research shows that men’s brains’ are sensitive to childcare experiences.  In other words, when dads show up for parenting, especially in the first year of their child’s life, they alter their brains in ways that allow them to forge the same deep bonds mothers experience with their infants. Dads can be as instinctually responsive to the needs of their newborns as moms.

2.  Becoming a mother undermines a woman’s ability to perform in her career. She will be less ambitious, more distracted, and will lose her professional edge.

Our research shows that, in the long run, having a child can enhance a woman’s ambition, focus, and professional capacity. The women who thrive as working mothers are those who prioritize finding support for themselves and their families.   Building or joining a community of other working moms who can help us normalize and de-stigmatize the alienation and shame so many of us experience, and who can also help us recognize the ways we are being positively transformed by motherhood, is particularly powerful

3.  Prioritizing good relationships with our kids will have negative repercussions on our careers.

We’ve found that showing up for Motherhood allows women to develop skills that are not only relevant, but necessary, for success in the rapidly evolving workplace.  Carving out time to be with her children, even if it seems to be at odds with her career success, can allow a woman to evolve into a more potent version of her former professional self.

Do you think there is a gap between what companies promote about their cultures and what they actually do?

Absolutely.  Many companies advertise themselves as parent-friendly.  And while many of them may even have great perks and policies (like extended parental leave, etc.), if the managers and leadership do not recognize the value of their parent employees, it will be a difficult place for a working mom to work.

Thank you Amy! If your company is interested in working with tendlab to create a positive and supportive environment for working parents, or if you are a working mom interested in learning more about Tend Lab’s community building workshops for career mothers, you can reach Amy by email –amy@tendlab.com

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Go Girls!

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This is the speech written by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, two New York Times reporters, upon winning the Pulitzer Prize for their investigation and reporting about Harvey Weinstein and his history of sexual harassment. It is also an ode to their daughters and what they hope will change for their futures based on the story they uncovered. Below is the full speech and it is worth reading to the end.  Enjoy. 

Jodi Kantor:

This might seem strange to say, but two of the people we’re closest to in the world have no idea who Harvey Weinstein is, and they don’t know a thing about our reporting on him. When our investigation began, Mira Twohey Rutman weighed 12 pounds, had never eaten a bite of solid food, and had a mother who was still home on maternity leave. Violet Kantor Lieber, at a year-and-a-half, was a relative giant. She was just learning to go down the slide at the playground and liked grabbing phones so much that by the end of the summer, she had managed to accidentally Facetime Ashley Judd.

When these girls are much older, and mature enough to understand terrible violations, and humiliation, and pain, we are going to sit them down and tell them the story of our investigation, and our team’s work, and how all of us became part of something much bigger than ourselves. We will attempt to explain how one day we were working on an incredibly tough story, and then just a few days later, we started to see change happening all over the world.

Megan Twohey:

Here is what we’re going to tell them:

The easiest part will be telling them about the women who came forward, because those women will already be inscribed in the history books, their names synonymous not with humiliation or victimhood, but with courage, truth, and optimism that things can change.

We’ll tell them about Ashley Judd and Laura Madden, the first to speak out on Weinstein. One is a movie star from Tennessee. The other is a former Miramax employee who lives in Wales. But their motivations were exactly the same.  As Ashley put it: “Women have been talking about Harvey amongst ourselves for a long time, and it’s simply beyond time to have the conversation publicly.”

Zelda Perkins and Ashley Matthau, both silenced by settlements, spoke out of a common belief that the law should not be twisted to erase abuse or muzzle women who want to help protect other women. In 2015, Lauren O’Connor documented stories from inside the Weinstein Company that sounded exactly like the ones women were telling us from 25 years before. Gwyneth Paltrow went from being known as Harvey Weinstein’s special star to being known as a special voice speaking out about what really happened in those hotel rooms. Rose McGowan, Katherine Kendall,  Hope Exiner d’Amore, Cynthia Burr, Erika Rosenbaum: All of you are so different, and yet your stories about Harvey Weinstein are so similar.

Two distinguished writers named Salma Hayek and Lupita Nyong’o poured their memories into essays for the ages that The Times was so proud to publish.

Jodi Kantor:

What all of us on this team will remember about this year was the stream of constant conversations with women in so many industries who were finally ready to share what they had faced. Tonya Exum, a Ford factory worker in Chicago, endured sexual trauma while serving in the military, only to be groped and threatened on the Ford factory floor. After she reported it, her co-workers told her she was “raping the company.” Her colleague Suzette Wright spent 20 years yearning for an apology from Ford, which finally came after Susan and Catrin’s story was published, from Ford’s C.E.O..

Dana Min Goodman, Julia Wolov and Rebecca Corry, three of the comedians with stories about Louis CK, kept us laughing on the phone even as they took the risk of describing experiences that shook their careers.

After telling their stories to Katie Benner, the entrepreneurs Lindsay Meyer and Kathryn Minshew took further action, using their influence to fight for changes in the boardrooms and offices of Silicon Valley venture firms. Natalie Saibel, Jamie Seet, and Trish Nelson, employees of the Spotted Pig restaurant, all agreed to be photographed for Times, but only if they could be together in the shot — a symbol of their courage, and also their solidarity.

These women did not do anything to get harassed or assaulted or humiliated. They had every right to preserve their privacy, stay silent. Instead they took a leap of faith, and told us their stories, and as a result, all of our children will benefit.

Once Megan and I understood the essence of the Weinstein allegations, we realized that part of our job was to give the women a mountain of evidence to stand on: documents, internal emails, settlement records, human resources reports. Our goal was to break the he-said-she-said-cycle, and show how much evidence there was for what these women were telling us.

We didn’t want to publish a first story that set off debate about what had really happened. Our aim was to publish a story that would cause debate about how so many allegations had accumulated at all.

We want our daughters to understand that this work is not about celebrity, or even individual predators, but about our team’s discovery of what now seems like an entire system of silencing women and erasing their experiences. Settlements that prevent victims from warning others.

Nondisclosure agreements that intimidate witnesses. A massive failure by human resources departments.

Megan Twohey:

One thing that every child needs to learn is how to confront a bully. We want our daughters to learn from the best: Dean Baquet and Matt Purdy. Working under unimaginable pressure in an astounding news year, Dean and Matt made it clear exactly how we were to deal with Harvey Weinstein: firmly, fairly, and most of all, on the record.

Our two girls, Mira and Violet, know Rebecca Corbett as “Aunt Rebecca,” who has bought them toys and soft dresses since the day they were born. But one day we will explain that Aunt Rebecca is actually a titan of American journalism. She’s the person who pushed and pushed for The Times to publish the original N.S.A. investigation and kept the story alive by encouraging the reporters to just keep learning more. She was so deeply at one with the Weinstein investigation that in the final days she stayed in the newsroom until 3 a.m. to worry about every single choice of word. And even after we broke the first story, she kept pushing us — and Susan Dominus, Jim Rutenberg and Steve Eder — to probe the particular moral horror of the Weinstein story: How could someone have racked up 40 years of these allegations, and instead of stopping him, why did more and more people help him?

Our daughters will also know the heroic role of Rory Tolan, who deserves a medal of his own for high-stakes copy editing — the kind done under legal threat, in which one word out of place can trigger a lawsuit. The kind done at 2 a.m. The kind done just before the moment of publication, with Dean Baquet, Rebecca Corbett and Matt Purdy all leaning over his shoulder and reading off his screen.

Jodi Kantor:

In fact, as our investigation came to a climax, we felt a bit like everyone in this room was leaning over that computer, coming together to confront a bully and protect the vulnerable. David McCraw, the calmest man alive in the face of legal threats. Arthur Sulzberger, who has protected so many reporters from so many angry subjects over the years. Arthur, perhaps it’s fitting that your time as our leader closed with a confrontation with Harvey Weinstein, a first-class threatener, an ardent believer in his own influence, and a man who proved all over again the depth and constancy of your commitment to our journalism.

New York Times readers, New York Times subscribers, if you’re listening out there, we’re all going to tell our children that you did something historic too. Millions of you came together to pay for this work, to sustain not just this investigation, but all the work of this newsroom.

Megan Twohey:

When our daughters are  really  mature, we will show them Ronan Farrow’s articles on Weinstein. Those will be required reading in our households, and in many households beyond, for their sensitive, powerful depictions of physical and emotional pain.

We will tell the girls how their fathers, Ron Lieber and Vadim Rutman, and Violet’s older sister, Talia, poured their own love, faith, patience and sacrifice into this work. Vadim, Ron, Talia: You are the hugs that we come home to, our relief from this work, but also the reason we do it. Talia, you know that Jodi and I are journalists, not activists. But the two of us, and all of the other reporters around the country who worked on these kinds of stories, did so with the hope that girls your age will know nothing but dignity and decency in the workplace and beyond.

Jodi Kantor:

So that’s the way we’ll tell most of the story to Mira and Violet. But we’re still not sure what we — or they — will say about the most important part, which is the ending. Years in the future, when we describe to our daughters the abuses we wrote about, they may say: Oh yeah, that still happens all the time. It happens at my summer job. It happens on my campus.

Or will they be shocked at what will seem like a bygone era, and say: Did people really think that used to be O.K. back then? Mom, how could that have been allowed to go on? And really, you were there when things changed?

The answer to that question is not up to us. It belongs to the rest of the world now. The only thing that the two of us, and this team, can contribute is to keep reporting. And that’s exactly what we intend to do.

Thank you.

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Working Girl

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We are loving this article in Macleans about how the focus on super cute kids with their parents at work memes are adorable and inspiring… unless they are your own children at your own workplace. As we finally end 3 weeks of various school spring break schedules we are reminded of the reality that working and parenting is hard… and combining them is mostly a losing battle. At some point over the past 3 weeks, many of our children have had to come to work with us and the experience is never as good as the idea might have seemed. 

This is an especially good description of the experience of trying to work and parent simultaneously, “it’s like talking to one person while surreptitiously listening to another conversation behind you: you might be able to fake your way through, but chances are the person you’re talking to is getting a lot of vacant “Uh huh, uh huh, interesting!” from you. Afterward, I felt proud of myself, like some come-to-life working-parenthood meme, but the accomplishment was doing many things at once, not doing any of them especially well.”

These memes are popular because it’s something we can all relate to and they are funny because they are true. What isn’t funny is that issues like lack of affordable childcare, lack of flexibility, unequal pay, few female role models and executive decision-makers are just some of the things that drive women from the workforce–remember Diane Keaton in Baby Boom? The same issues from 1987 are still real today… just with less shoulder pad. 

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Now that our kids are back in school full-time it is easy to go back to our regular routines but let’s not forget one thing… summer vacation is around the corner.  One of our co-founders who will go nameless (rhymes with penny) recalls a recent moment when she brought her 8-year-old to work and was trying to focus on a meeting while her child was simultaneously trying to steal Cokes from the office fridge and play games on her phone, “the reality is having small school-age children and full-time work are basically incompatible for four months of the year if you factor in summer, winter and various vacations. That is a lot of time to be distracted, dealing with schedules and logistics without the safety and routine of school.” 

That’s why we are here, to provide opportunities for women who at various stages of their personal and career journeys and why we say #makeworkworkforyou! 

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Rethinking the Network Effect

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Here at the Second Shift we often hear that headhunters cannot find women for senior-level roles and board positions. We don’t believe that achieving gender diversity is a “supply-side problem”. We have a network of thousands of women looking for these types of positions, so we know there is no shortage of qualified female talent. We believe the key to achieving balance lies in improving hiring practices to eliminate bias. And this means that hiring managers need to tap into new resources during the recruiting process.

The Second Shift offers a vetted network of exceptional, professional women available on-demand. All of our members have deep professional experience including at least 15 years of expertise in their fields. The women we work with bring maturity, pride of work, and unbridled enthusiasm for new opportunities to utilize their skills. If you are challenged to find strong female candidates, we invite you to tap into our network, which we are currently focused on growing to be even more diverse.

As promoters of female talent, we believe that we have a responsibility to ensure our own talent pool is diverse as possible. We recently took a good look at our own recruiting methods and realized that our own word-of-mouth recruiting approach was limiting the type of diversity we want to see in our candidate pool. It’s our goal going forward to reflect not only gender diversity but also all layers of diversity within our gender framework including racial and sexual diversity. We truly believe in the benefit of intersectionality and we are making an effort to go beyond recruiting from our own networks to find women who are different, yet qualified, but don’t know of us yet. We’re joining new organizations, attending new events, and getting active with new groups via social media, and we are becoming more diverse than ever before.

If increasing gender representation within your organization is an objective, then you too must begin to move away from the “network approach” to recruiting. Facts are facts and the data shows that when employees tap into their own networks, which tend to be comprised of similar people, a lack of diversity is often the result. In one particular study cited in a recent SHRM article, 71.5 percent of those surveyed referred individuals of their own race/ethnicity and 63.5 percent referred applicants of their own gender.

As movements like #MeToo and Time’s Up continue to raise awareness of gender inequality, the need to create gender diversity at all levels of an organization is becoming more important than ever before. In a recent article, Anita Sands, a global technology and business leader who sits on the board of directors of three public companies, states that “dropping old thinking and approaches” is key to getting more women placed in senior roles. She suggests changing things up by rethinking the criteria used to judge candidates to open the field to new talent, interviewing women before men, and utilizing companies like The Second Shift to source from to a wider array of candidates.

Join us in the effort to shift the workforce in a new and more equal direction. Work with The Second Shift and you can tap into our diverse talent pool and expand your own network with ours! Get in touch today –info@thesecondshift.com. Refer candidates for membership to our growing network at members@thesecondshift.com

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Meet Michelle Reeves– our March Featured Member!

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Michelle Reeves is a perfect example of the saying, ‘if you want to get something done give it to a busy person,“ she owns and runs two businesses and takes marketing projects through The Second Shift for clients such like Microsoft. Michelle is also part of our ecosystem– she hires our members to do work for her businesses because she personally knows the quality of our talent pool! 

1. How many jobs do you have right now? I can’t keep track of the businesses, side hustles, cities….

I’ve always described myself as a business addict and historically I’d find myself working on 3 or 4 businesses or consulting projects simultaneously. I’m the owner of David Family Wines and a co-founder of The Accessory Junkie. For the past year, I’ve been wholeheartedly consumed by building The Accessory Junkie. Growing fast and innovating our model coupled with nonstop travel around the world I’ve transitioned away from working on several businesses and now focus just on that one. However, I love to connect with other founders and help them with their businesses from time to time. I see it as an important part of the business ecosystem. 

We all end up helping each other. There’s plenty of room for us all to thrive, we’re better together.

2. Do you have more hours in the day than most people? Is that your superpower?

The Accessory Junkie is almost 18months old and over the past year, it’s expanded quickly demanding more energy and time. While I can’t make more hours in the day, I try to find ways to multi-task and cram more into each minute. I find the most productive hours for me are 4am – 6:30am. In the quiet of those dark hours, I can focus with great clarity and assurance knowing there won’t be any interruptions from the kids or other calls coming in. I use that time to work on company strategy, build creative campaigns and look at the financials of the business. By 6:30am when my family starts waking up, I feel like I’m ahead of the day. Then, I can take the time I need to help my 3yr old and 5 yr old get ready for school and not feel like every minute I’m with them is a minute I’m falling behind in work. As a mother, I’ve also noticed how waking up on my own schedule (even though it’s 4am) feels good. I try to go to bed early, around 9pm, and psychologically it helps to wake up at a time I decide, not when an alarm or little people come jumping into bed 🙂

3. You have successfully won two jobs through The Second Shift – what is your unfair advantage?

The first half of my career was spent in the agency world. Advertising and marketing agencies are an intense training ground where you’re constantly changing hats for each client. Creating new campaigns, new messages, adjusting your communication style for different client personalities, and looking into the different ways each brand operates. There’s a rapid pace of learning that never ends. I think that experience helps tremendously in understanding what’s most important for a client and being able to pitch it and deliver it quickly for them.

4. Why did you choose to hire using The Second Shift for your own business?

Having met other members of TSS I saw first hand the caliber of talent in the network. I like how efficient the process is to post a job and how fast it is to get the word out. I’ve tried other platforms for job postings before and it becomes quite time-consuming to go through every application. The majority are not qualified and as The Accessory Junkie is a fast growing business we don’t have the luxury of time to interview and vet candidates who aren’t a great fit. We love the vetting process of TSS where candidates can only apply for jobs they’re pre-qualified for.

4.I would love your thoughts on how you look at pitching for projects and selling/branding yourself

Be specific. While there are many things you can do well, identify the one thing you can do the best that the client is looking for and be specific about how well you can do it.

5. Here is one of your winning pitches– why do you think it stands out?

I try not to overthink it and keep it brief. Giving a toppling example of the direct impact your work has had is important. Adding in a few numbers that show the depth of your experience or specific results is crucial. Don’t be afraid to sound confident. Give enough info to excite and intrigue but leave them wanting more so the natural conclusion is they want a phone call with you.

michelle@davidfamily.com – Hi, I have 18 years of international marketing experience and the am owner/co-founder of several consumer brand businesses and also own the trademark for leather label packaging in wine. I understand the unique challenges during an early raise and have worked with companies across all stages to write their investor decks. These companies have all successfully raised $200K – $1.5M in early stage funding using the materials I produced. I would be happy to share examples of my work. I have specific experience in beauty, I helped craft the investor deck and refine their in-person presentation skills to raise $1.2M (with angels and VC). Thank you for your consideration and I look forward to the opportunity to work with you. Best Michelle

You can hire Michelle, or other expert women go-getters like her by posting a job on The Second Shift. Michelle is currently looking to hire a PR pro in the LA area for her company Accessories Junkie– log in to pitch or refer a candidate by emailing members@thesecondshift.com

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Getting To Equal Requires Tapping into Diverse Talent Networks

International Woman’s Day is a day designed to celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. It’s also a good time to ponder the root causes of the gender pay-gap (recent research indicates that women earn just US$73 for every US$100 a man earns) and give some thought to the solutions that will close the gap.

Last week, in celebration of International Women’s Day, Accenture released their latest research on creating a culture of equality. Their Getting to Equal report revealed that there are “almost three times more women on the fast track in organizations with at least one female senior leader than in organizations in which all senior leaders are male (23 percent and eight percent, respectively).” The professional services firm defines a “fast track” woman as one who reaches manager level within five years and leads her peer group in terms of advancement in the workplace.

Getting to equal by recruiting more female senior leaders shouldn’t be a difficult task, but many organizations struggle to do so. In her recent article on getting more women on boards, Anita Sands explains that creating diversity in boardrooms is a challenge because most searches for new members begin by asking current board members for candidate recommendations. When members tap into their own networks, which tend to be comprised of similar people, the approach tends to perpetuate a lack of diversity. Generating a more diverse slate of candidates for senior roles hinges on tapping into new and larger pools of potential candidates.

We get that for some organizations, especially those that are currently heavily led by men, tapping into a network of qualified women can be a challenge. That’s why we exist. We make finding top female talent easy.

The Second Shift delivers a solution for the pipeline issue. We offer a vetted network of exceptional, professional women available on-demand. The women we work with bring maturity, pride of work, and unbridled enthusiasm for new opportunities to utilize their skills. Accenture states that “increasing the percentage of women leaders from 0 to 35 percent leads to the biggest gain in women’s advancement.” We’re here to make that shift a reality for your organization. Are you ready? Post a job on The Second Shift today! Reach out to us with any questions—info@thesecondshift.com

#makeworkworkforyou #ondemandtalent #thesecondshift.com

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Women’s Day Re-Cap

https://www.facebook.com/The-Second-Shift-346930705470892/

Last week Jenny and Gina traveled to Seattle to celebrate International Women’s Day with our local member community. We were hosted by our friend Amy Nelson, founder of the remarkable co-working space The Riveter. While Gina met with our clients at Microsoft  (ABC– always be closing!) Jenny and Amy had a wide-ranging discussion about founding a business, what an MVP is, the cost/benefit of taking VC money, how to set an intentional on career goals and trust the universe to deliver. Check it out on our Facebook page! More member events coming to communities around the country in the next few months– so stay tuned to our social channels and newsletter to see when we are coming to your area. 

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