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Wheel, an Austin, Texas-based health care tech start-up specializing in virtual care, began 2021 with just 40 employees. In a little over a year, they’ve quadrupled in size, and recruiting manager Greg Troxell notes the company’s commitment to diversity has been an integral part of this growth—65% of Wheel’s engineering team is currently from an underrepresented background, he told HR Brew. We recently spoke with Troxell, who has a decade of experience as a recruiter, about his work for Wheel.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
How would you describe your specific job to someone who doesn’t work in HR? I manage the talent team at Wheel, and our focus is to grow each part of our company to reach our revenue goals, while focusing on DE&I and building a company culture.
What’s the best change you’ve made at a place you’ve worked? When I joined Wheel as their first technical recruiter, they didn’t have anything built out. So I implemented some DE&I practices and built out interview processes…building the infrastructure to scalable hiring.
Could you elaborate on any of the specifics of those changes? Right from the beginning, we wanted to commit to diversity, and it was even the simple task of adding an EEOC statement to our job descriptions…On our technical side of the house, we removed our tech stack [from the job descriptions], because we didn’t want anybody [to] feel like they’re not a fit because of something we put on there. We removed a lot of the “must have a degree in computer science” and “must be coding in X languages.” We decided to move our search toward “we’re looking for people.” Engineers can typically learn a language as long as they’re willing to…So looking for engineers, instead of for specific tech stack, that enabled our search to go remote, which is a wide pool, but also any candidates that are working in an open source tech stack, which is similar to our environment. If they didn’t have the same coding languages, it’s something that we were willing to spend the time to ramp them up on.
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We started enabling a diversity sprint, so when new roles would open up, we would do a DE&I sprint. For three weeks we would be sourcing for candidates from an underrepresented minority group…And we would only introduce candidates into those pipelines that are coming from underrepresented backgrounds.
What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job? That all we do is press a button and the perfect candidate is hired.
What’s the most fulfilling aspect of your job? You get to change people’s lives. A job/career change is a massive life event. If we truly get to understand someone’s passions, and we can give them a job that matches, that is extremely rewarding. Seeing them come into our environment and excel is such an inspirational thing to witness. It gives you more motivation to do your job and give great experiences.
What trend in HR are you most optimistic about? Why? The importance of HR and talent is what makes me so optimistic. Three years ago even, the access talent teams had to executives was way more minimal. Now, you can see the importance leaders are putting on it. I think an essential organization is one that allows HR and Talent a seat at the table, and that’s happening more and more now.
What trend in HR are you least optimistic about? Why? Automation in the candidate-sourcing process. I think until we can be certain bias is removed from AI, then it’s unethical to use. We have to understand how important the job is to find someone for a job in our organization. Every time AI removes someone from the process due to bias, you prevent someone from getting their potential dream job, unethically.
Tell us one new or old HR tech product or platform that’s made your life easier, and why: Gem and Ashby. Gem for the time saved for recruiters, and Ashby for empowering recruiting teams to be data-driven. Ashby provides great reporting and dashboards for teams to use.
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