Career Growth Advice from Allyn Bailey, Human Resources Leader | Career Tips for Women in Human Resources

2B Bolder Podcast – Episode 87
Featuring Allyn Bailey

Episode Title: #87 Allyn Bailey: Pioneering Hiring Strategies at SmartRecruiters

Host: Mary Killelea
Guest: Allyn Bailey



Mary Killelea (Host): Hi there. My name is Mary Killelea. Welcome to the To Be Bolder podcast, providing career insights for the next generation of women in business and tech. To Be Bolder was created out of my love for technology and marketing, my desire to bring together like-minded women, and my hope to be a great role model and source of inspiration for my two girls and other young women like you, encouraging you guys to show up and to be bolder and to know that anything you guys dream of, it's totally possible. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy the conversation.

Welcome, welcome to a very special episode of the To Be Bolder podcast. Today, I have the privilege of hosting a guest who's not only a master of their craft, but also possesses an uncanny ability to captivate audiences with her no-nonsense, call-it-like-it-is approach and charisma. Allyn Bailey is a true trailblazer and talent marketing thought leader. She is a highly experienced talent acquisition leader who previously held a global role at Intel and is now executive director of hiring success at Smart Recruiters. She has been a leading voice in the talent and HR industry advocating for innovation and purposeful adoption that allows companies to meet the challenges and opportunities that the rapidly changing future of work is providing us. She offers tailored transformation workshops, leadership coaching, and collaborative change design sessions to help businesses identify their team and organizations change triggers and craft a roadmap for continuous evolution. Allyn, thank you so much for being here.

Allyn Bailey (Guest): I'm excited to be here. So great to have a chance to chat with you.

Mary Killelea: Thank you. I'm so excited. Okay, so let's start. Now, this is what I usually do because, you know, the point of this podcast really is to help other women who are trying to figure out what path they want to take. So, will you please start with sharing your journey from your early professional experience and kind of how you ended up where you are today?

Allyn Bailey: Absolutely. So whenever I tell this story to people, I always talk about the fact that it is a tale of twists and turns that I couldn't have planned if I attempted to and has a lot to do with leaning into what I started to excel at and then look for the opportunities and see the opportunities that were laid in front of me, right? So being prepared for those opportunities no matter where they might come from. So today I am in the TA tech space, the HR technology space, that is not where I started. My degree is actually in child and family studies with a specialty in infant brain development. So not at all what I had planned to do.

I started my career actually working in the early childhood space and building early childhood development programs. I worked in the military for a while with their early childhood programs and really leaned into and spent a lot of time training teachers. And I found when I was doing that work that I loved the idea of not only the work in the early childhood space, but really what I was able to do when I was able to work directly with teachers and help empower them and encourage them and start to build their skill sets. And I loved giving workshops, I loved engaging with them, and I loved learning new ways of doing things. So, I did that for quite a while, almost 10 years. And it was, it had just started a new position for a company that was contracting actually with the NSA. And I had a friend who worked at Intel and she said, hey, you do training and development stuff, I'll get a bonus if you apply for this job. I thought, okay, fine, I'll apply for the job. I mean, whatever. And I said, fine, I'll go and apply for the job. I mean, it was a training and development job, actually in the marketing space working with the Intel and Sight program. I didn't really fully understand what that was. I didn't know what that was. But I went through the interview process and something I said along the way intrigued them.

And they hired me and that started my journey into the world of corporate America and really starting to understand marketing, spending a lot of time trying to dissect and understand how you build strong marketing programs. Because my job was to train our cooperative marketing partners on what our marketing strategy was, what our guidelines and policies were, why they existed. I had to learn it, right? Which is often the case when you're a trainer, you have to learn the stuff, you're getting ready to train. And I found that I really loved it. I had not only an interest in helping others do it well, but I found out that I actually had a penchant for understanding marketing and started to get deep into researching and understanding so I could explain it to others.

That led to some work around looking at the experience that was being created for our channel partners and how could we really lean in and create a better experience for them. In that process, I got to work with some really fabulous individuals who were doing something at the time which we call action research. Today we call it user-centered design, human-centered design, we call it doing design sessions. I learned the process of gathering customer and stakeholder feedback, building strategies around that. I learned how to code data, both qualitative and quantitative data. I went, oh my God, this is even better. I like this. This is problem solving at its core.

I moved out of training and started doing user-centered design work inside the organization working for other teams who were looking to do and solve big problems. How can we apply these UX principles? That's the work I did for a very long time. It's really focused on the experience design space. That was a blend of how do brains work, which then led to how do you teach people, which then led to how do you market to people, and then how do you understand what drives them and pivots them. Taking that psychology to understand how you can help drive change, whether it be large or small scale change. That's where I rooted myself and had the opportunity through a variety of different ins and outs. I jumped off, did my own thing for a while, came back to corporate America, had the opportunity to do some experience design work before experience design was cool. Did a really great, fascinating project. Learned a lot about what made Intel at the time really tick from an employee perspective. I was working alongside sharing that data out to an individual named Delique Brosh, who, fabulous woman, I learned so much from and it was great coaching mentor for me. She said, hey, you're doing this thing, it's really interesting, but we've got this problem in the candidate space. Will you come and help us look at that? I thought, well, sure, how could that be any different? I'll do that.

I never left the TA space after that. From there, it was about understanding candidate experience and then understanding technologies and understanding how those all apply. Applying all of these principles over time into different roles that I took. Everything from building out recruitment marketing strategies to then building out large scale TA transformation change programs to implementing and driving TA tech stack implementations to then writing my own consulting firm and driving my own consulting work across multiple companies. Now working at Smart Recruiters where I lead a team of consultants and drive all of our implementation and technical services organization. It's a combination of all those pieces. The reason I say the story is not a path anybody could have drawn. It is a path of seeing a through string, which was around problem solving, asking questions, being curious, and then being open to whatever door opened up and not being afraid. Walk through it and say, okay, that job title might not be something I've had before, but I think it's something I can do. I'm going to try it. I've always been of the mind that what's the worst that could happen? There's been some worse, sure, but there's been more good than that.

Mary Killelea: It's funny that you answered the question I was thinking, and that was where did that can do attitude come from within you? Have you always had that since a child or is that just the confidence that you built over time?

Allyn Bailey: I think I've always had that to a certain degree. I think it is a, maybe it's a little bit of naivete, right? Maybe it's a little bit of narcissism. I can look at something and go, of course I can solve that problem. Right. I'm self-aware enough to admit that. I think it's not just a can do, it's an inability to be okay with status quo. I've never been okay with that. Right? I remember, I mean, I was, before it was cool to do it back in the 70s, I was an early middle school protester against abuse to animals and anything. I'd hear a story, and something would kick in me and I'd be like, I can solve this problem. So, I'd pick up my little picket sign and I'd have my little clipboard and I'd run and I'd grab signatures. I remember sending my whole set of signatures to Revlon at the time and I got a form letter back, but that felt like success. I mean, those were always within me, those kind of moments of like, if I see something, it's never been in my nature to just kind of sit back and see what happens.

Mary Killelea: Well, for full disclosure to those listening, you were my boss at Intel and when I was doing talent acquisition or talent recruitment marketing, and I will say you were great to work for because that can do attitude was just permeated within our team. And that was one thing that really I enjoyed deeply.

Allyn Bailey: Oh, thank you.

Mary Killelea: As a talent marketing professional, what would you say are the roles today that are shaping the industry or changing or evolving in the industry? And I know that's a loaded question.

Allyn Bailey: Oh, it's a loaded question. I have huge amounts of opinion on this. I get blasted all over the place because I'm a little, again, surprisingly, I don't usually waffle on one side or the other. I form an opinion and I go deep into it. Listen, I am out there very strongly saying, in the world of technology and the way it is evolving and what was happening in the technology space, especially with the advent of generative AI, which is different from other AI, right? And the fact that it trains itself, it's based on these large language models. It's not as complex to execute. You add that into transition. So, we're already happening in the ability to automate at scale. We're starting to be able to patchwork these things together. The end story here is, I think we have to be really clear, particularly in the recruitment space and in the recruitment marketing space, there will be very few live humans in this process going forward. Now, that doesn't mean there isn’t opportunity, right? I think the opportunity is in those people who start to understand these technologies and understand how to apply them and build strategies that can support, like building the recruitment marketing strategy is still something that is a creative exploit, right? It's not necessarily something today that is analytical. There's analytical potential, but you have to have a sense of creativity. We're not there yet with our technologies where they can be creative at that level. They copy and repeat so far, right? So, I think humans are still going to need to be in that space and they need to understand how they can leverage technology that will then execute these visions that they have at scale.

I think there's other opportunities as well, right? For all my friends who are copywriters or writers out there, I'm a writer myself. I love to write, but guess what? I'm also a huge fan of generative AI. Why? Because if you understand now, you can take on a role as understanding how to craft prompts, understanding how to leverage this technology to expedite what you're creating, it can be hugely impactful, right? You can do big amounts of stuff with it. So, I don't think it replaces, again, I don't think it replaces, but I also don't think it's as simple as it's just this extra hands to help you. It's more invasive than that, but those people who get really good at the things like understanding how to drive prompts, understanding how to insert it in the right parts of the process, understanding how to build a strategy and then insert technology to execute it, they're going to find a world that is really exciting and new and thrilling and fun stuff to do. People who get stuck in this is how we do things. I'm going to add these 10 steps to the process to validate and to check everything that happens are going to get left behind because companies aren't willing to be slow.

Mary Killelea: I love everything about that. I'm a huge fan of AI marketing and the power of it and the enablement it does for all of us in our jobs. The early adopters are going to be the ones prospering. Can you talk to the differences between employer branding and recruitment marketing?

Allyn Bailey: I can. Yeah, absolutely. So, employer branding is setting a story about who you are. What is the flavor you leave with people? How would they describe who you are and the essence of what you are? How would they expect you to engage with them? All of those senses of expectation, the definition of who you are for them, what you set up in terms of your framework for how they look at you as a brand. That's the employer brand stuff.

Recruitment marketing is actually a very tangible exercise. It is leveraging the employer brand. It is influencing the employer brand to a degree depending on how well you do it. But it's really about really doing very targeted structured marketing with a goal and an intent in place. So, employer branding goals, that's about brand growth development and sending an impression with people. Recruitment marketing is about doing something very specific, trying to drive people to take some sort of specific action. So, it's a very, again, that's why I got into the recruitment marketing space. I'll make that connection to experience design. Recruitment marketing is like the experience design space of the recruiting process. This is where we are developing how do you get people to come in as leads? How do you help them take action? How do you encourage them in the mess of things that are in front of them to want to jump on the next opportunity? How do you bring them in the door for a particular job? These are the things that a recruitment marketing person is doing using their really good marketing chops. Whereas an employer brand person is doing things like building a brand story, focusing on look and feel, trying to build cohesive alignment for the impression that a brand leaves.

Mary Killelea: There's so many things I want to talk about. This is fun. So, one thing that I thought was, I guess, eye-opening was understanding the importance of the data when it came to talent marketing or recruitment marketing and being so closely tied to the recruiters and the pipeline. You've been good at understanding data. What advice do you have for people and how they can empower themselves to be better in their jobs by telling a story or understanding the data and what should they be looking for?

Allyn Bailey: Right. I think sometimes what makes data feel overwhelming to people is they're trying to look at this raw set of numbers, indicators, and output and say, what does this tell me? I felt like an epiphany. I'm looking at the dashboard. What does it tell me? I think that's where we fall down. I think when I think about data, I start from the perspective that says, what is my question? Start with your question. I even say it's from a pipeline perspective. What is the question you're trying to answer? Is it how to get this particular type of population or why would this particular population be interested? Or where are these people finding their information? From your why, now you can start to go in and start looking for the right data to say, what information would I need to answer that question for me? Now I go and look at all my data sources and start to pull the ones that tell the story.

The other key piece about using data is don't oversaturate yourself with data. Again, in the age of AI and all these other pieces, we start to think that we have to have all pieces of information at all times to make decisions. I tell people, think about just like you would build a communication touchpoint map, think about building a data touchpoint map. What I mean by that is say to yourself what decisions or actions are you needing to take at various different times in the process or in your workflow or wherever? Then what specific data would you need to make that decision at that time? What information would you be looking for? Then you go to the question of how will I collect that information? Instead of assuming you have to have your entire list of the 50 million things that you need and collect it on day one, instead think about, oh, I don't need to know X here. What I need to know here is this information. Here's how I'm going to go collect that piece and then be able to draw the lines between how you get to it.

The other big trap we fall down with data is that when we have multiple places where data can be inserted or put in at different times in the process throughout those components, what happens is that we start to have data inconsistencies. We get tied up in that, et cetera. I think actually the biggest lesson I learned from the work I did in my early days in research around qualitative and quantitative data analysis was to realize it's about trends, not specifics.

Mary Killelea: That’s interesting.

Allyn Bailey: Allowing yourself to not get caught up in, oh my God, in this report from LinkedIn, it says I have 50,000 clicks. On this report in my CRM, it says I have 42,000 clicks. They're not the same. Let me go and solve that problem. Instead, say, do I see the same trend in the data? It's still going up or down and by about the same amounts. If it does, the exact clicks matter very little to you. What's important to you is what's the trend? Start talking about the trends. That also means change how you report your data. Instead of reporting specific numbers, talk about percentages. Again, talk about the trends. Tell people why they should care about that number. Don't just give them the number. Those types of things help from a data perspective and data storytelling.

Mary Killelea: That's awesome advice. What advice do you have for other women who are building their careers in the talent marketing or related fields around talent acquisition? What steps can they take to navigate and thrive in an industry that's fairly young? Companies in austere times, that's where they're making some of their cuts. They're not hiring, so they're cutting back on the recruiters. It's a snowball. Any advice?

Allyn Bailey: Yeah. I think the number one piece of advice I would give is it is okay to enter in a transactional role if you're not going to survive if you stay in one. Particularly if you're looking to build a career in a space. Here's what I mean by that. I know some fabulous recruiters. They're wonderful. They're fabulous. They are amazing women. They do fabulous bits of work. It is by nature a transactional role. It has a beginning, middle, and end to it. It's very structured in that way. It's always open for influxes of volume of what you need. How many of those people do you need at any given time? Taking those opportunities, using them as a foot in the door, but then keeping your eyes open for where that door opens up for you in this space to be able to leverage your passion and interest in TA to go into roles that are less, I would say less fluid, less risky, right? For roles that provide more opportunity to provide strategic insight, program management, analyst roles, right?

Also, the other thing is that if you're particularly in the TA space, whether it's in recruitment marketing or in generalized TA, don't get siloed in your picture that you live in the TA world, right? Because TA is young, just like you said. Recruitment marketing is relatively young. It's sandwiched around a whole bunch of other slightly more mature businesses or business groupings, whether it be your corporate marketing teams or your if you're in the TA space, perhaps your training and development teams, right? That are kind of augmenting you in the HR space, even your business development teams, your teams that do process analysis. All of these teams around a TA team where we kind of intersect are also great opportunities to pop out of TA, but use your same insights and knowledge to expand yourself in those spaces. So just like the story I kind of told, right? Don't get stuck by a job title. Instead, think about what are you able to do with that role and how does it move you into the next piece?

That's my biggest piece of advice. Don't get, don't, I'm not a person that's a huge advocate of sitting down and saying, I'm going to map out my five-year path and say, I'm going to have this job and I'm going to get these competencies and I'll get this job. You know, theoretically that works, but I think the world's changing too fast now. I think that it's the same issue I have with my teenage daughter. She's a sophomore in high school and we have this conversation all the time and she's like, one day she wants to be one thing and another thing. I know that's pretty normal, but I also think it's hard even as an adult to give advice in that space now because I can honestly tell her what jobs are going to exist.

Mary Killelea: Right. Exactly.

Allyn Bailey: It's about what capabilities do you have and do you have a mindset that opens you up to use them?

Mary Killelea: Right. Yeah, absolutely. Totally agree. How do you approach building strong relationships and collaborations with professional network? Any tips on establishing meaningful connections with colleagues, mentors or industry peers? I know you're out and about quite often.

Allyn Bailey: That's how I do it. I'm out and about. Actually, it was so, it's funny. I fell upon that and it really did change my career. So, I mentioned Delisha Brasso I worked for when I first came into the TA space and in my role, one of the first things she said is said, listen, we're trying to have a better outside in perspective. Will you go and go to a couple of conferences and find out what's going on? Right. And I never listen in most jobs don't really have the opportunity to do that before, right? And I especially not in not a kind of go learn, but just go find out. Right. And what I started to do was have coffee with people and chat with them. And then I see them in one conference to another conference. And then we'd have a dialogue or conversation on LinkedIn. And I started to build a network of people who actually became a network of friends. And I think that to me is how professional networks actually start to get built.

We sometimes again, and you could do this inside your own company, you can do it outside your company, however big your world wants to be is absolutely fine. But it's about starting to figure out how can you go in and start navigating the conversation away from just the work, which we can both be hugely passionate about and have a great dialogue about. But then how can you start to spend a little bit more so you start interacting with individuals as humans? When you start to do that, you start to build these connections, which are broader and deeper. So another great example is I have a group, the Talent Rebel Alliance that I started years ago with a fabulous friend of mine, Tracy Parsons. But we started that, actually, she was doing consulting as a vendor who was working for me. What we were working at Intel we met each other and had some great conversations. And over a couple business trips, sat down and had a couple glasses of wine and talked about our lives and what we were interested in. And from there, it sprouted into something else. And I think that's oftentimes how these things happen. Not necessarily fully organic. You have to be a little purposeful about it. You have to kind of pry yourself out there and take the risk. But you have to find your opportunities to make sure you get yourself in those spaces.

So here's my biggest advice. So, if somebody says, hey, you know, can you go check out this conference? Or they're going to say, hey, we're going to pay for you to go to X conference. Go to the conference, but don't spend 90% of your time in individual sessions sitting there as just absorbing information. Be really purposeful and say, I'm going to find out what cocktail hours are happening afterwards, what breakfast conversations are happening, who's hanging out by the water cooler and just insert yourself in those spaces. That's how it happens.

Mary Killelea: That makes a lot of people listening uncomfortable.

Allyn Bailey: Hugely. It's usually uncomfortable. I say this, listen, and most people don't realize this. I'm actually a very big introvert. I have huge amounts of social anxiety. Right? Now I'm lucky I finally got into a space, like I said, where I go to these places and part of what happened is, is I met a couple of people and sitting in the side in the corner and one of the kids, right, I'd have a conversation so I've got to know them. So, I'd be comfortable with them. So, I go to the next one and I see them and I immediately go over to somebody else. I inadvertently created strong relationships because I was trying to find a safety net because I was petrified. You just go out.

I mean, I remember I went to one conference, one of my very first and one of those first years, and it was literally a cocktail party before the session started and they had all these games set up at these tables and you were supposed to walk in, grab your free glass of wine and your shrimp wrap and find this table of Jenga and play with these people that I didn't know. I have no, I mean, that was like, I thought I was going to pass out. I was petrified and I found myself standing over in a corner, you know, with the little round table, sipping my wine going, I can't leave, I can't leave, don't let yourself, let yourself leave. And interestingly enough, this gentleman came and stood next to me and said hello and I was just so happy somebody said hello and I said hello back and it ended up being Kevin Grossman who runs the candy now and was part of the talent board and I learned and got to build that connection. And then the next conference I went to, I found him and he walked me to the next party with him.

Mary Killelea: Oh, that's amazing. Yeah.

Allyn Bailey: But yeah, you say you just tell yourself over, I'm not going to leave. I'm not going to leave. I can stand here.

Mary Killelea: Right. I love it. Yeah. No, that's great. Great advice. Showing up 90% of it. Do you and Tracy still have the podcast?

Allyn Bailey: It's such a great question. Yes. And we do, we theoretically do. We actually were quiet for a little bit of time. We both had very different things happen and we switched jobs at places and whatnot. And we're actually kicking back up again, we just started recording again.

Mary Killelea: I'm so glad. I really love it. So, say the name of it to continue.

Allyn Bailey: The Talent Rebel Cast. We're on the evergreen network. Same network as Chad and cheese and Matt and Alder and a bunch of other search and Patty who are out there kind of in this kind of HR community was built there. Yeah, we're not only there, but we're also now getting ready to start expanding out into some more kind of curated events and kind of kind of bringing women in the TA space together, particularly in the recruitment marketing or in the marketing space and having more robust conversations. So trying to be trying to be for others, what people were for us when it was standing in those cocktail parties, not anybody to talk to, right?

Mary Killelea: Amazing. I'm so glad to hear that. So, throughout your career, you've undoubtedly, I mean, everyone does encountered various obstacles. Do you have any specific advice for maybe like how you approach challenges?

Allyn Bailey: So, this one, I don't take no really well. I've been found to be soft and I can solve it. Don't tell me no, or God forbid, don't let me change something. And then, you know, revert it back after I've already done all the work. And by the way, I've had that happen. Yeah, right. And I remember those first moments that first time. And I just thought, oh my God, why am I doing this? I had a whole existential crisis, like years of… So here's the deal, you're going to have setbacks. Think about it, setbacks. Things are going to bounce back. Not everything's going to stick. People are going to tell you no. You have to find out what your why is and find out even the little moments to make your why happy.

So I'm going to give you an example of my why. I told you from the beginning, I found out early on in my career, what I loved was working with people and helping them expand the vision or the idea and take it out and get bigger with it, right? That was why I trained teachers. That's why that got into the training and development space. And then, kind of, that's always been about equipping others, right? And so, for me, what I've latched on to is those moments where I've been able to maybe change or not change, but I've been able to work with people and now they're going out and doing great change. So, I don't know, I'll give you a great example. I don't know if you remember Carla, Carla Gugliani, who Carl used to work with us at Intel. She started as an intern when I first started working with her in Costa Rica. And she did recruitment marketing work. Okay. A long time was kind of in that space and really was kind of side by side as we kind of evolved over that kind of 10-year period of doing Dark Center. Just last month, I was at RecFest. I randomly looked to see who was presenting and she was presenting on stage as the global head of recruitment marketing for HelloFresh.

Mary Killelea: Fantastic. That's awesome.

Allyn Bailey: And as we had a great conversation, we had tea afterwards, and she talked about the work that she's doing and it had such threads, right? So, these places we all gone together and the things we all learned together. That to me, those are the moments that make me go, okay, so this didn't or didn't work or et cetera, but look what we were able to do as we come together as community and we expand and grow.

Mary Killelea: Yeah. Right. That's awesome. And so, let's talk about DEI for a minute. Again, with austere times, I think some companies have really deprioritized this and we know how good diversity is for business. What strategies do you employ to ensure inclusivity and diversity in talent marketing efforts? And how important it, I mean, I guess it goes without saying, but I want your opinion on how important is it for companies to prioritize diversity in their recruitment initiatives?

Allyn Bailey: It's really important. And I'm going to tell you, I think the number one most effective tactic I've seen and the one that really makes a difference at the end of the day is being really purposeful about the net that you're spreading out. That's why recruitment marketing has such a big role to play in the DEI space. It is about not just having the right messaging and not just having the right role and not just having the right brand associated, kind of employer brand piece. It's about targeting in the right space with the right message that resonates and drives forward. I mean, that to me is the space. And it goes as simple as I did some, one thing that I love in the TA Tech space I'm in now is I'm learning about these technologies. And I may not as a recruitment marketer, necessarily leveraged, right? Job marketing distribution engines that allow you to do much more tailored targeting or to have use analytics and views that tell you what demographics are, with a particular audience that you're going after. I think we spend a lot of time worrying about will people get interviewed? Will they feel like they have a viable voice as they go through that process? I would say if you fill the pipe, you fill the pipe with diversity, diversity will end up at the end because there's no choice.

So, I say it's all about targeting, right? And I mean, I say targeting being really good at knowing where to go. You need to, so wide net, but not just generic wide net, focus net where people, where the people who are targeting are at, right?

Mary Killelea: So, let's follow this up with a discussion on the importance of retention and progression.

Allyn Bailey: No, well, yeah, that's it. It's such a, that's very, very, very, yeah. I said, I said we could get them in. I didn't say we could keep them, right? Therein lies the other problem. Listen, retention and progression doesn't get fixed until internal mobility gets fixed. And internal mobility does not get fixed until we fundamentally have a paradigm shift in who's in control, the employer, the employee. We're there. I think that we are going to see major shifts in this. It's going to be driven from the bottom up. It's not going to be some big corporate initiative. And we'll start to see these shifts happening, but that's how we're going to drive, I think, retention and progression. People leave because they're stagnated, right?

Mary Killelea: That's the number one reason people leave jobs.

Allyn Bailey: Right. I mean, listen, I'll give, you know, we're Intel. I'll be very blunt about it, right? I left Intel three times. I did not like Intel. I came back, obviously, but guess what? Every time I left, I left for a higher paying job with new opportunity. And when I came back, I came in to a higher paying job with more opportunity that I would not have gotten had I stayed internal and worked my ladder up. That would not have happened. And that's not speaking just to one company. That's all companies. We know that. That's what I say is about internal ability being fixed. I don't know how to, that's like the big elephant in the room. I don't know how to fix that one. That one needs to get Tracy out to come talk about. She's in it. She's got internal ability on speed dial.

Mary Killelea: All right. All right. Well, hook her, hook me up with Tracy as a guest. All right. Since we're on the fun topics, let's talk about remote work. What's your opinion on remote work?

Allyn Bailey: Thank God.

Mary Killelea: Right. Good. Right. Well, I'm so glad we're aligned on this.

Allyn Bailey: Okay. You already have this conversation years ago when we start, when we're working together. So listen, I was remote before it was cool. Yeah. In fact, at first I have to tell you after about the first two months, I was like, would all of you people go back to work in your offices? Because you're asking me to now do that. I like, I don't want to be on this video thing. That's not how I remote work, et cetera, but that's okay. I've now adopted it. Right. It's not only, it's not only a good thing. I think that it is a fallacy to assume that people are going to go back into the office, no matter what people, what companies try and drive through. There'll be moments, right? We'll have little hiccups. Um, but I think the genie's out of the bottle.

Mary Killelea: Yeah. Yeah, me too.

Allyn Bailey: And for women, by the way, this changes the game, right? Um, it changes the game, but it also means we have to learn new ways, um, to navigate and to manage, right? I mean, when I was remote before remote was cool and my daughter was younger, in particular, also being the head of a household and trying to run that and do all those pieces, listen, I had to learn the tricks of navigating that in a way that still allowed me to be productive to be able to, to be in the places I needed to be. Right. It meant I had to do things early on that I've now continued throughout my career, which is I flex my schedule in very weird ways, right? My teams are in Europe nations. The meetings are happening at 6 a.m. I'm on the call at 6 am, but I'll take off at two. Right. We'll get back on at 10. It’s not about working 24 hours a day. It's about finding the ways that the balance, right?

Mary Killelea: Yeah.

Allyn Bailey: I think people who are unsuccessful at this, particularly women, are women who are trying to make this line up to the old way they used to work, but do it in this new world in which they're now having to navigate home and work at the same time. So, looking at it saying, I'm going to work eight to five, and that's how I'm going to block my meetings and be down. Every rest of my life is going to work around that. Right. And we're all going to be fine. And guess what? That doesn't work because kids still need to go to school. And there's three people on the computer because, maybe your spouse is online as well, and you need to readjust and there's all these other elements. So it's not just remote work. It's remote and flexible work. Those things have to go together, and you have to plan for it in a way that allows you to continue to be effective and productive.

Mary Killelea: What does to be bolder mean to you?

Allyn Bailey: Making yourself stand in that room when you want to leave. Yeah. That's what it is. It's making yourself stand in the room when you want to leave or sit in the, as anxious as you may be, or as much self-talk as you may be having in the back of your head to walk into the meeting rooms where you're not sure you should be invited. And when you got there, not necessarily because of your title or your role, but because somebody thought you had something to say for a moment and they opened the door, a little crack for you. Being bolder means not only take your seat, but stand up and be seen while you're there.

Mary Killelea: Amazing. Is there anything that you would do differently if you had to start off your career again today?

Allyn Bailey: Oh dear, probably. Yeah. I said, if I got a plan, that probably wouldn't be helpful. I do sometimes wonder if I had, um, if I had gone into that to be bolder space earlier, like, but if I'd allowed myself to go there earlier, what would that have done? What if I had not been afraid? All those moments where I didn't do something because I was afraid or there was some message I was telling myself. I'm sure I could come up with a list of those. I'm already in my head thinking, oh yeah, that moment I stood there and went, right. And that's okay. I mean, we all do them and actually, those are the things that taught me not to do them again. And hopefully I learned quickly, right? So I guess, you know, everything happens for a reason. You get to where you're going, but I'm sure. Yeah. I would be bolder sooner. I would be, and I would let, I would not be afraid, um, to use my voice.

Actually, I think the number one thing I would say particularly coming from the corporate America. So first I worked for the government, right. And I worked in corporate America and in those spaces, the one thing, none of those, those, those areas teach you to do is to be unique, identifiable as an individual. They're all about kind of being part of the board, right? And I bought into that and about, I don't want to be seen out there in public. Um, I don't want to, you know, don't, I'm not going to be too splashy on LinkedIn. I'm not going to put my own post up. I'm not going to blog, not going to do these pieces. Um, somebody's going to see it. They're going to be irritated at me. Oh my God, what's going to happen? I wish I had ripped that band aid off sooner because it accelerated and expanded my career options. It made me more comfortable in my voice. It helped me find my voice in a way I wasn't able to do beforehand. And, I think that a lot of that fear we have around that is misguided in a way, right? I mean, I think that again, once I started doing it, nobody, nobody really ever told me to stop. So, I didn't.

Mary Killelea: Yeah, no. And I think that aligns really nicely for the younger generation with the creator economy. You know, I mean, I think through the doing, they're finding their voice sooner than being in the boxes of government corporate or, whatever someone else, the safe box, the safe box.

Allyn Bailey: I've got my brand guidelines for what hashtags are going to be. Right. Yeah. The minute I said, Oh, whatever. I didn't care. And realize that, you know what, I was never particularly when you started doing that stuff, I wasn't in a role that anybody who is in the, in the corporate world, who would have seen it, would have paid attention in the first place.

Mary Killelea: Yeah. Right.

Allyn Bailey: Yeah. So I think, gosh, if I had done that five, 10 years earlier, what, what doors could have been open that I didn't see?

Mary Killelea: Yeah. Um, besides your podcast, what other good resources are there for people who want to spin up on this topic?

Allyn Bailey: Okay, great places to go. So, um, so I just think just in general, there's some really interesting thought leadership happening out there around the world of work. And it's very, and I think thinking about it is really helpful for us as soon as we think about where we're going with our career. So, I'm going to advocate for, um, I'm going to fangirl over a woman named Heather McGowan, um, who does some fabulous stuff around the world of work. Amazing presenter has some really interesting stuff. Check out her LinkedIn and thought that's just, she'll tag into all sorts of cool stuff. I think that there's another group out there called the catalyst organization. I think it's Catalyst Organization, Catalyst Group. Um, there's doing some interesting stuff about how to support change makers and building kind of the community around change leaders so they can start to support each other in that space. So those would be my two biggest recommendations.

And then the other piece I would say is find your support out there. Find your mentor, your person who isn't going to tell you no, but it's not always going to tell you yes. And may give you the advice that you need to hear and connect up with them. And I have to tell you, I learned, that's building those relationships were key for me. It's changed how I go and look for work. Now I will not work for people who I don't feel like are actually mentors. That's what I think people need to do.

Mary Killelea: It has been awesome talking to you. Thank you so much for being here.

Allyn Bailey: As always a pleasure. Oh, of course. Thank you. So great to catch back at Mary.

Mary Killelea: I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the episode today. It was really fun chatting with my guest. If you liked our show, please like it and share it with your friends. If you want to learn what we're up to, please go check out our website at 2bbolder.com. That's the number two little b bolder.com.