Efrat Ravid, CMO, ContentSquare.
“If you come to our office in France or the U.S. in New York, or even in the U.K., the diversity there is amazing,” said Efrat Ravid, CMO of the New York City startup, ContentSquare, a digital platform to help online and mobile businesses improve their digital experience, “If they are good people and they are interesting, then [we] are hiring them.”
Even with the recent onslaught of tech companies looking to diversify their own rankings and head counts, Ravid seeks to emphasize that she and the hiring staff at ContentSquare are not simply looking to fill particular quotas in an effort to display diversity. Instead, Ravid and her team are hoping to lead by example, showing that when a company seeks someone who can bring something different to their team, and does so without worrying about what category of life they fall under, diversity can happen on its own.
“We are not Google that we have 20 pages [telling] us how to behave, it’s just normal for us to behave this way,” explained Ravid.
“The people we hire, they’re all very open-minded,” said Ravid, who believes that it all stems from the company’s young CEO, Jonathan Cherki, who founded ContentSquare in 2012 and has since grown it to over 200 employees, all of whom, as Ravid tells it, speak with different accents and are as diverse as they come.
ContentSquare’s open-minded, perhaps very European approach, not only works to broaden the scope of individuals of all walks of life within their ranks, but it’s also what led to the hiring of Koda Skurzewski, who was eight months pregnant when offered a job.
“I’m happy to be working with a forward thinking company who has developed technology I’d never seen across any verticals. As a former Head of R&D and innovation, this is what we strive to create every day. I heard about ContentSquare and I had to be a part of it,” Skurzewski said.
“You know, I also asked why are you hiring me,” Ravid recalled back to when she was employed by another company at six months pregnant, “and they said you know, we see you as an investment for many, many years … so this is one [reason] and the second reason is we love kids. I have three kids, the CEO has two kids … what I would advise [to other companies] is just to be open minded about the person. The fact that they’re having children just means that they’re more responsible and they definitely need the money. You need daycare, you need more clothes you need more food — all the things and it means that they’re ready for commitment, I mean it’s part of our lives, you cannot say that if they’re having kids they cannot be professional.”
With a tech team made up largely, and as Ravid says coincidentally, by women, Ravid and her team don’t really fully understand the interest and intrigue in a major company hiring a woman in the late stages of pregnancy.
“To me, you need to hire people because of the energy, because of their background, because they want to be committed, how trustworthy they are,” explained Ravid, “It’s about time that we all adapt to the modern world — it’s a little annoying that people are surprised about this.”
“It’s really organic, I won’t say that we are more women than men, I need to calculate, we have a lot of women, but I don’t know if we are more men than women in every aspect of the business,” continued Ravid, “we don’t look at the gender.”
Ravid, as an Israeli, comes from a culture of strong women, all of whom are trained army fighters. In her culture, gender is not defined by limitations and clearly pregnancy is not either.
“I have two girls and a boy, and to me, what I do, is that I really push the next generation. This generation — our generation — we can adapt, we can push regulation, we can change but you still see blogs like the guy from Google — so to me where we need to focus outside the company is to appeal to the next generation,” explained Ravid, “Where I want to focus and put my energy is the next generation because if we start it very, very, very young, it will be natural for them as well.”
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