Suzanne Wolko: Mind The Gap Bias

Full Podcast Transcript – Suzanne Wolko

Hello, I am Katrina Collier, and as part of my mission to inspire all the people that recruit people to treat people better, I bring you The Hiring Partner Perspective (Unedited) podcast. Here you will hear from those Hiring Leaders who create true partnerships with Recruiters, HR and Talent Acquisition, because they know that it delivers a better result for the business and a better human experience. May this podcast inspire other Hiring Leaders to create better partnerships with their Recruiters and HR, and may it inspire Recruiters to create true and valuable partnerships with their Hiring Leaders. Because people make businesses succeed, and people matter. So let us begin.

Hello, Suzanne, and welcome to the Hiring Partner Perspective podcast which I have to thank the fabulous people at WORQDRIVE for supporting. Now I’m going to check this is it Suzanne Wolko? Correct? Yes. Oh, I had this vision of saying something different.

Welcome to the podcast. I’m so excited to talk to you today.

Suzanne Wolko 1:08
Thank you very much for inviting me.

Katrina Collier 1:10
Oh, you’re so welcome. We have so much to talk about. We’ve been talking a lot before he even came on air. So this is gonna be brilliant. You have such a hybrid of experience. Actually, I was just saying to you, I am kind of sitting there going, Oh, my goodness, I don’t completely understand it. So actually, can you explain to us what it is that you do? And what you’re up to now? And how did you get these hybrid of experience?

Suzanne Wolko 1:29
So basically, I had to take on all the roles nobody else wanted. So, of a lot of my career hasn’t really been by choice, and it’s funny in that way, I applied for a job and the Recruiter said, “No, I think you’re better at this job.” And she started my path to this hybrid career in Investment Management. All of my roles newly created, I’ve started as a Staff Accountant, which sounds very easy to understand. Very, I can put that in a pigeonhole. That makes sense. Absolutely. We were, we were a growing company in Financial Services, and my boss said, “You’re now the Accounts Payable Supervisor”, and I said, “We don’t have an Accounts Payable department, each of the Staff Accountants do accounts payable.” He said, “That’s correct, you’re going to build it. Go at it.” I thought.

Katrina Collier 2:20
Okay, then.

Suzanne Wolko 2:21
Okay. You know, I was like in my early 20s, I was only about three years into my Staff Accountant role, and I still get to keep the Staff Accountant job. No don’t worry, I was never doing one job. It was always more than one job. And he said, “We just want you to build it, go figure it out.” No script, nothing. Just figure it out. So that started me on a path of build it, fix it, solve it. Figure it out. Figure it out without a script, and just have fun with it and do it differently. So, it was great, because growing up in an Accounting Department, I think most people on the pole we’ll understand. Accounting usually has a bad reputation for saying no, they say no to everything. And they say no after the fact, and then you have to try to clean it up with Compliance Departments.

Katrina Collier 3:12
Oh, my God, how often does it happen? Like do, Recruiters who are listening will really get this. You’ve got sign off for the role, you’ve got sign up for the headcount in it, but then when you want to give them the offer, you have to get it again. Oh, my God, you’re so right. Oh.

Suzanne Wolko 3:25
Yeah. So, I did something crazy. I said, Okay, if I have to build it, I’m going to actually talk to all the departments that are involved.

Katrina Collier 3:33
Oh, my God.

Suzanne Wolko 3:33
I’m going to go to all the leaders that have budget and that are responsible, because they have a job to do, they’re not Accountants, it’s not their job to do Finance. Again, these are all going to be controversial in some ways. But I don’t think the guy who’s in charge of, or the woman who’s in charge of Sales should be going through, you know, and understanding the details of their depreciation of their furniture, and how that affects their income at the end of the year. So I started going to all the departments and saying, “Here, I want to be a partner to you like, how can I help you run your business? And what do you need from me? It’s more than just paying the bills it’s looking at, do we have areas to save money, and then worked with them to the point where, well they stopped going to my boss, they would just come to me and they would say, “Hey, look, we’re going to have a new client in this area. Can you help us understand what the costs might be, and how we budget for that? So we don’t get scolded at the end of the year that we’re over budget. We want to come in under budget, and if there’s any money left, can we give it as bonuses to our team?” So.

Katrina Collier 4:40
Wow.

Suzanne Wolko 4:41
Yeah, we tried to work together to find different ways to do things, and that’s kind of, you know, again, that’s where everything, the genesis of this came from. The build it, or we don’t know who can help here, you’re going to run this project team or we’re merging a business MET Mergers and Acquisition. Figure out how that works. So that’s kind of the basis of my career.

Katrina Collier 5:04
So how did you end up in the HR part? Cuz you’ve done that as well, and your qualifications in it as well. I do. How did that happen? Because I mean, Accounting, HR.

Suzanne Wolko 5:15
You know, and I’ve had a few Recruiters, sorry, to those listening, in an interview call me weird, because of the HR, Finance combination of, I feel like that’s an endearing term, I hopefully they didn’t mean it in any other way. But I’ve been working in the investment firm, and our London division decided to do a managed buyout with private equity money, and they came to me, the team in London, and said, “You know, we want you to leave your corner office behind, we want you to leave this team that you built, and we want you to crawl under desks and do IT work, we want you to build an HR Department, and we want you to manage all of the facilities in Philadelphia, you’ll be employee number 16, you’ll have no team, and you’re going to do everything in the office, that is not Marketing, that is not Client Services, and is not legal, so anything else is yours.” Oh my Lord. Somehow, sometimes, that’s that sounds awesome. I’m ready. Like, when you know, when do I sign up? It was in the same building complex. So I left my job on a Friday, and I moved my whole office and my pictures across the courtyard to my office in the other building. So that’s how it started, build an HR Department in Philadelphia, start hiring people here in the UK, so our laws are obviously different. Write a handbook, run payroll, process payroll.

Katrina Collier 6:45
But at least that bit falls in the accounting bit. That’s okay, I get that.

Suzanne Wolko 6:49
And the payroll stuff led to my other job down the road. But that’s how it happened. And we took a look and said, What benefits did we like it this big company? What do we want to do different? Because we had a blank slate to build something new.

Katrina Collier 7:02
Yeah. I think that’s where you would be an asset to any firm, just the, like build it up, and actually, I loved on your LinkedIn profile. So your summary on LinkedIn. I love this by the way. That you state your a “Slayer of this is how we’ve always done it mentality”, which of course, I love, because I’m a complete rebel. But that must also be challenging. Like maybe you can share one of your big wins where you have come up against that. “Well, I’m sorry, but that’s how we’ve always done it.” Because I’m sure any Recruiters are listening, going, “My Hiring Managers say that’s how I’ve always done it, so. “

Suzanne Wolko 7:35
Yeah well, I think I’ve learned is that, again, the higher, the senior leadership tells me to go change it, but people aren’t ready for change, and in some cases. Totally. We don’t need change. Sometimes a system does not solve a human problem, and I think for me, you know, it’s not about, because I’d seen it happen where, well, we’re putting the system in, learn it, like it, learn it. Don’t complain about it, right? You’re just force fed something. Yeah. That environment, that mentality, it’s not going to change overnight, and that’s where I would take baby steps, and it goes back to, you know, I was new in the role without a job description. I’m going to start talking to the senior leadership that will lead me in their offices. They were all men. I was in my mid 20s, as a woman in Finance. So not a lot of us in the wild at that time.

Katrina Collier 8:28
Yeah, I’m guessing we’re a similar generation. They definitely weren’t, you would have been really making waves.

Suzanne Wolko 8:33
Yeah, yeah, you balanced between being nice and aggressive, or some other words that I don’t want to use on the podcast. For Change Management, you really need to go and talk to everybody. Like when you get an accounting system, it touches Compliance, it touches HR, if you are bolting it on and you’re doing, you know, when you hire through, and it brings in all the information, you’re, you’re talking to pretty much everybody is touched. And a travel system, I think I one time figured out there’s about 10 different departments, or leaders that should be in a Sales call for a travel system. They’re traveling, they need to have something that works for them. So it’s all about working with the end user, but also understanding, do I really need to have again, I’m going to pick on the Sales team, but do I need to have the Head of Sales, logging into the system to figure out what his P&L is, when I can just send him something pretty quickly, and then talk about it. Right?

Katrina Collier 9:32
I wish this would have happened more.

Suzanne Wolko 9:34
Or maybe I could show his PA or his Administrative Assistant or his Chief of Staff. Maybe I can talk to somebody else on his team and not wait. They’re learning something new, maybe they don’t want to they don’t want to learn Finance, but so that’s it. It’s baby steps, but it’s talking to everybody else and finding what are you afraid of? Are you afraid of looking bad? Are you afraid of failing, or for the teams that I worked with? You know, we have to be cognizant Are you afraid you might lose your job to this automation, to this change. Yeah. You know, that is the concern we have to work around, and it’s a it’s very multi layered. And again, I overthink a lot of this, but I want to make sure that it’s done correctly and with humanity, and being kind along the way. And I think sometimes that’s lost because deadlines, KPIs, return on investment, and there’s a lot of disconnects when you’re trying to make changes.

Katrina Collier 10:31
That’s so true, and do you know, sometimes they don’t even think about the actual person using the system. So I had, I know you had from your point of view, but the I was talking to a Recruiter, and they’d been given this system because it had, it plugged in with everything. But it meant she had to do so many more steps that her repetitive strain injury was flaring up. And she was literally bawling her eyes out with me, she’s just going, I now have to click five extra times for this one step for every single candidate. And she was just someone who just asked her and she’d have explained, this is why we’re using this system at work through Recruitment, it doesn’t plug into HR doesn’t work, like you can anyway, anyway. I’m not going to rant about that.

Suzanne Wolko 11:11
That’s a great example, you have to understand when you’re configuring a system, I’m sure this work cuts that the either the Consultants or the IT folks or the Accountants or whomever is in charge of that system. They just ask those questions of their users. When you’re going through and mapping out. Again, I did things differently, I mapped out all of those steps for people, how can I make it easier for everybody? And a lot of systems are not configured correctly, in my experience, I mean, they just are not, and you want to make them customised for your team, and that’s another place of well, the system, this is all it does. It usually doesn’t it’s it’s a computer system, it can be configured and changed. So bring that up on the next time you need a change order that you don’t want to . At times you’d like to have something that clicks you know, once or twice,

Katrina Collier 12:05
Yeah, bless her, it was dreadful. We actually started talking on good old LinkedIn, because of a change of mentality that we feel is needed, and particularly in the middle of a pandemic. We connected over what I call the stigma of gaps, which is gone and 2021 is quite ridiculous. Um, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, because, well, I know your thoughts in it. But actually, you share your thoughts on this, bloody gaps. What’s so wrong with gaps. I’m pulling faces that nobody can see, oh the joy podcast.

Suzanne Wolko 12:38
I’m doing the same here trying to pick my words carefully, because this is a soapbox for me, and this I get very passionate about this.

Katrina Collier 12:47
Please, we can’t make change if we’re not passionate about making it and I need to hear this.

Suzanne Wolko 12:53
Yeah, so I actually, I actually posted on LinkedIn about a month or two ago, and a few people told me I shouldn’t get real on LinkedIn, because I’m in a job search. So don’t get real, it’d be held against you. But it was interviewing, I was talking to a lot of people in networking and finding a common pattern of people between the ages of 45, 55 and 60, who have been taken care of parents who are many of them have died. And they’re in these long job searches. One guy just landed an HR Director after 44 months of a search and had to move with him and his dog to another State, and I look at his experience I can show you later is fantastic. Why does it take 44 months, or and then I have another person, it’s, he’s been looking for a job for five years, he has not been employed in five years, he took care of his mother, he took care of her state. And for some reason, and it’s a little different, you know, in the UK, and Australia and places where gaps, like a gap year is acceptable. Here in the US, if you have taken any time off, it seemed negatively and I don’t know why and nobody can adequately explain it to say, “Well, you may have lost your skills.” It, 25 years of debits equal credits, I have, I still know how to close the books, I still know how to run a business, I didn’t learn I didn’t lose my skills because my mom got sick, and I’m not going to apologise for that because I took time to care for a parent.

Katrina Collier 14:20
Then, not only that, the skills that you will have gained doing that.

Suzanne Wolko 14:25
Aaah, the patience with the healthcare system.

Katrina Collier 14:27
Like the resilience, the patience, the, the depths of compassion, all of those skills that you don’t learn unless you’re in that situation that you can take into a workforce. It’s just.

Suzanne Wolko 14:41
I guess my question to Recruiters and Hiring Managers is, “Why are you seeing me as less than? Why did you just totally, you know, say my 20 years of experience no longer matters?” You know, because at the end of the day, it’s not your business and, and I didn’t for the longest time on my LinkedIn or on my resume. I didn’t put it on there. I actually molded it into my freelance and contract work. And I had a few Hiring Managers say, “No, that’s a red flag, this consultant, this contract work, I wouldn’t look at your resume for this job.” and she was doing an employee referral for me. And I said, “Well, I was taking care of my mom, she had cancer”, and and then she goes, “Well, then that makes sense. Put that on there, I would then interview you.” And I said, “Because you feel sorry for me.” I feel like there wasn’t this logical answer for me to.

Katrina Collier 15:33
It’s more of adjust, oh god this sounds dreadful. A justified break. Sorry, I can’t believe I just said that, it sounds freaking abnoxious.

Suzanne Wolko 15:40
I know, I know where we, you know, there are some returner programs for women and some men. Yeah. Who do workforce for children. You know, when I had a travel gap, or travel sabbatical in between jobs, everybody thought that was cool. Some of my interviews only focused on all the countries I was visiting, and how awesome it must be to live in Europe for a few months. So.

Katrina Collier 16:02
By the way, for people who are listening, and Suzanne has this incredible wallpaper right behind her that I really want to send her some coloring pencils for. It’s like different places that she’s visited around the world. I’m gonna do that you’re gonna get pencils. But on the flip side, you’ve also recruited people with gaps, though, haven’t you? I have. As well. Yeah, I hav. So it must be even twice as irritating because you’re going, I know I have got skills to bring that are of value. Because I’ve done this before.

Suzanne Wolko 16:28
Yeah. And in my other soapbox is going to be DEI with this, but I once hired a woman to be Receptionist to fill in for somebody who was on sick leave, and she had an MBA, and she had a great career, and she had a break. And I couldn’t figure it out. Like she had this break, and then she was working in Retail. And I didn’t ask my Recruiter said, I’m going to send you somebody who’s awesome. I didn’t even interview her. She was fantastic. And then probably about a month into it. It came up, I think she needed time off or her Mom and she starts telling me about her gap and how she can’t get hired. And I was just, I hadn’t heard of that before. I just saw it. You have skills. You know, if somebody coming out of college didn’t work for a year, we don’t say anything about that. That’s a gap. We think, well it’s a new Grad and taking time to land a job. So yeah, I hired her. She was a long term contract. I didn’t have headcount to to bring her on, but I absolutely was a referral and tried to help her get a full time job. And and I’ve done that also for you know, people who he’s too old, why would he want this job, and you look at it, and he wants this job to pay his bills to pay for school for his kids. He knows the pay, he’s going to actually earn more because of the total comp. And we’re going to have somebody who only wants to work the nine to five, he wants to be a solid foundation for the team. He’s not going to be leaving, he can train the next generation, and you will have somebody on the team. I mean, it just seems simple.

Katrina Collier 17:58
Yeah. And also you’ve got that wealth of experience that they bring and the different aspects that he’ll be learning from the young and the young are learning from him, and that’s, oh.

Suzanne Wolko 18:07
He’s still, he’s still there 10 years later. Yeah, loyal. Yeah. Yeah, I thought for him to join the team. I bought for a lot of people, when Hiring Managers said, I want X and I said, “Well, how about we look at this.”, and I did some tests and stuff around this, and just said, “Look, give, these people there’s nothing wrong with them. They didn’t get a summer internship because they couldn’t afford it, they had to work. and they have gaps because life happens. If somebody goes to say, rehab, maybe God, you know, love them, they took the time for themselves and their family, they go to rehab, that’s not our business, and that’s actually protected Healthcare. So you know, it, there’s a lot of different biases out there, and, you know, it’s a shame, and I’m hoping more people that start talking about it and start saying, I’m looking at a person with skills and experiences that match the job. It’s none of my business, if they had a baby, if they lost a baby, if they adopted a baby, if they had healthcare scare, because that’s protected here in the US, or, you know, they just decided, I hate my job, I hate my boss, I’m going to quit for my mental health and took time off. There’s, there’s nothing wrong with that, and I’m the first not to, you know, I’m not going to judge anybody on that. And I don’t think they should tell me that they, they learned all these things. You have a gap even now. What did you volunteer? What did you do in that gap? Did you watch TV and lounge around? No, I’m not watching Netflix during the day. If you understood how difficult a job searche is during a pandemic, and not during a pandemic, you wouldn’t be asking these questions. Now. I think I’m going to make clicking mouse noises which will drive my podcast guy nuts.

Katrina Collier 19:52
But literally, if I start. I’m going to go to the homepage of LinkedIn right now, because it is, it’s sitting on my, it’s typical my homepage doesn’t want to work. There’s a whole thing about gaps today, “Mind the Gap in your Resume.” and the advice is, like, be transparent about it. But change the narrative put down. Oh, this is what you’ve been doing, this is what you’ve been learning, and I thought “But some people just just aren’t, they might be having to be the carer, I mean, women are being mega impacted. Women who obviously apparent mothers, being terribly impacted by this pandemic, and they’re having to take on the full time mothering role, they probably don’t have time to learn anything or listen to anything, or they were lucky, they get to have a bloody bubble bath. So.

Suzanne Wolko 20:34
Yeah, I try not to get too upset, because, you know, on LinkedIn, the post that I posted about the parent caregiving, hundreds, hundreds of people are going through the same and one girl is in her 20s, she left a career to take care of her Grandmother, and now she’s Waitressing and can’t get a job back in her Marketing. So, you know, we need to talk about this and be and, look at it. But that’s the one thing where I do have to be, you know, have to restrain myself on LinkedIn, from the people who are saying, “Well, you should have learned something during the break.” Well, during the pandemic, I’m happy that my family is healthy, and I’m happy that I didn’t color in the wall. She so needs to color in the wall. So, I don’t think you know, if you’ve been through something, you now really, stop judging other people about it, do they have the skills, you know, they had it. They didn’t forget how to be a Lawyer because they took off a year, they didn’t forget how to do things. IT you can still keep your skills up.

Katrina Collier 21:33
The worst thing here as well as we get given really bad advice. So you’ll go to the Job Center and the Job Center will be go to the Recruitment Agency, and they’ll help you get a job. But Recruitment Agencies know that their end client doesn’t want to pay a big fee for someone who’s got a gap. So the gap gets bigger and bigger and bigger. So anyone who’s listening who has a gap, you need to get directly to the Hiring Managers, preferably the ones listening to this podcast, who are going to be really open to hearing from you. And it’s you’ve got to go direct. So the lady you’re talking about with the marketing experience, she has to be going straight to heads of Marketing, forget anybody in between, and getting known, liked and trusted. And it’s it as you’re saying, it’s a full time job looking for a job.

Suzanne Wolko 22:11
It is, and I’m not broken, I’m not broken, I’m not damaged, I’ve got a lot of value to add. Like you said, you go through life experiences, and I’ve had external Recruiters say the quiet parts out loud recently. And one said, “I was a risky hire.” He said, “You’re just a risk.” and I couldn’t, he couldn’t explain it other than to say, “Well, you haven’t worked with COVID gap, because of this COVID gap” and “You’re last job was X you’ve been doing contract work.” So you know, and then you have some other Recruiters and sorry for those on the call, there are some bad ones out there who have been saying our clients don’t want women over 40. Again, illegal here in the US illegal as well. Yeah, and. And Europe, and yeah, most places. Right, so now you have, we want diversity and diversity and age and gaps are apparently are still a taboo. So I think, you know, we all have to just talk about it, I can probably be the best person there, and Karen will have a gap. You know like, if you are going to penalise me because my Mother got sick, then Wow you have just. You really need to look in the mirror. Oh, yeah. You just told me who you are and who your company is?

Katrina Collier 23:24
Yeah. Something you said a little while back as well. You said, you trusted your Recruiter. So you were talking about the Receptionist with the MBA and you just said I just trusted my Recruiter, I didn’t even interview them. So, you’ve obviously had great experience partnering with Recruiters. A few. And obviously, this is a few. Yeah, I know, then. But the trusted few. But why did you partner with them? Because obviously, this my aim with the podcast is to inspire others to partner really well. So why did you do that?

Suzanne Wolko 23:54
So I had a small list, and it’s funny, because that small list that I had, I had a lot of money to use Recruiters. And they were great when I had the money, and I’ve seen in my own job search how they’ve all, most have forgotten me because now I don’t have the money. There are a select few. And what I did was I had them come into my office, I had the meet the team that they’re recruiting for, I had them get an understanding of what our culture was like. And then, you know, we we talked through, I don’t, you know, I want you to keep this open. I want to present a diverse slate to my Hiring Managers, and again, it goes back to I’ve hired people from ages 16 to 60 when I was in my 20s. I want to present a diverse slate and this is before DEI initiatives. And I had that trust with a few Recruiters here that they understood, and we didn’t go through miles and miles of candidates. Literally they sent me 10 resumes, I could pick five and we would hire one and usually the person that came in second was in my pipeline. And the next time a job came up, I called them and I hired them. So it was all about understanding what we do. I’m not ordering people, I don’t like that term, we have an order. I’m not ordering people, I’m, if anything I’m giving an opportunity to change somebody’s life, and that’s important, that’s really important, and you have to really, you know, look at it that way and find the partners who love their jobs, because they understand, it’s not just about the client, and my, my money that I get is commissioned to pay my mortgage. It’s about pipelining, it’s about relationships, and it’s about building these, these trusts that you can just pick up the phone and I would say to John, “This is the role I have”, and he said, “You know, this is my top person, she’ll be there tomorrow.”

Katrina Collier 25:50
Yeah, no, that’s so true, isn’t it? And the same applies, you know, sort of now the big switches, obviously, is lots of in house teams. It’s exactly the same, you know, their role is to be your trusted partner. Yes. And, yeah, so that you can do exactly that. And also, one of the things you hit on is how much time it saved you, because they spent that time upfront with you. And you let them in the office because, you know, sometimes Preferred Supplier Agreements and stuff, you know, Procurement stops people coming into the office, and it’s like, well, how are they going to understand your need, if they can’t come in the office crazy, crazy.

Suzanne Wolko 26:23
Well it’s also important if, you know, I was using an IT specific Recruiter who was an IT person, so understood when they were interviewing people. Oh that’s awesome. And I used Accounting Recruiters that were Accountants or had a background so that they knew what was on somebody’s resume, whether it was true or false, and how deep it went, in terms of experience. And I think internal Recruiters, they have actually a harder job because they’re managing more wrecks. You know, they don’t often have a time, they’re not on site, and in many cases, and they don’t get access to sit with the teams and say, “Show me for an hour what you do”, just so you understand it, because you need in HR and by opinion, to be more of a Business Partner, you need to understand what your company does, what all the jobs kind of do, and stop looking. Order Taking. Order taking. Yeah, I mean, I did order taking at a Pizza shop. That’s a little different than ordering people. Yeah. But at the same time, some of these Hiring Managers have these requirements. They want to order pizza with a topping, a different topping on every slice, and we all know, pizza shops don’t do that.

Katrina Collier 27:30
No, they do not do that. And it’s, and I think it’s so incredibly important for the internal teams to get into the business. They just, I really want them. If anyone heard my presentation at the In House Recruitment Expo. Might have had a little bit of a rant about this, you know, heads of Talent Acquisitions, being proud that their teams are so maxed out, they’ve got no time for learning. They’re making calls after hours, they’re, you know, no, I’m so don’t be proud of that. We are the people bringing in the people that make the company successful, and actually you hit on it I’ve not really thought about from the Hiring Manager point of view. I’m changing someone’s life, I’m giving someone an opportunity. And it’s like, what we do is so important. So my God, make the time. Absolutely. As well. So for any Recruiters who cannot get a Hiring Managers attention, have you got any tips for them for that? I know, I didn’t pre-warn you of that question. That was mean. How did you how did your Recruiters get your trust then? Ah oh.

Suzanne Wolko 28:31
Yeah, again, you know, and I think we talked about this before we started the podcast, my experience is really diverse and being the first to go to college, in hiring kids right out of the mailroom and teaching them. So with High School diplomas. You know, and I think that was really important for trust is, finding the right people is also looking at, again, diversity things like, I hired a lot of I say, kids, they were they were they were in their you know, out of High School and early 20s from different neighborhoods that would never get a chance to get into Finance. Right now, the way the systems and there’s just too many barriers to find these folks. And I think in building these trusts, you have to show you know that you are really invested in these teams, because you’re trying to again, you’re changing lives, but you’re trying to create internal mobility you’re trying to create, help managers with succession planning. The worst thing you can do is when we have turnover because people are bored or not challenged, and as a Hiring Manager, my MET, my boss hated this, but I told the teams when I interviewed them that this was a two year job, I will give you access, I will train you, you will be bored. I will show you everything you can learn about Accounting and this company, and you should want to move on if you don’t get poached from other departments. And that’s how you have to build trust, you really have to be invested. And if you’re working for somebody who takes pride in torturing you, working outside of hours or not being able to breathe, please walk away, please talk to a mental health professional. I mean, that is not, that is not healthy. Jobs nine to five, or eight to five, or whatever it is. Yeah. We shouldn’t have to, you know, live to work. We work to live and if the pandemic hasn’t taught you that, at this point, that there’s a lot more going on than, “I didn’t get to have lunch today, because I was, you know, doing X, Y, and Z” and your manager rewards you for that. Please walk away. Yeah. I can help you find a job, I help people find jobs, I can’t help myself find a job but I do help other people find jobs.

So we will find you a job, we will I’m gonna make this my mission. Somebody wants to hire you because you have this extraordinarily brilliant Finance and HR background, and you’ve got a get it done mentality. Everyone should snap you up. Easiest way to find you is on LinkedIn or where should we send people? It is? It is LinkedIn is the easiest way to find me on all the other social channels. So Suzanne Wolko?

Yes. Suzanne Wolko on LinkedIn. On the other social channels, I write a travel blog on the site. So if you’re on other social, it’s a Phila Travel Girl. It’s Phila Travel Girl. My Twitter is hr/travel since I’m not traveling right now. Um, so if you google me, don’t be surprised when you see me with, you know, with animals in Africa or something. That’s usually what you’ll see first is my travel stuff.

Katrina Collier 31:45
Well, that’s what we need to do, we just need to find you a job with the animals, that’s it. Your dream job. I’m traveling with animals, right? I’m not goin there, we’re not going there, we’re not going there. I can see your face going there. Anyway, I can see this little twinkle of I’ve worked with many of those.

Suzanne Wolko 32:05
Yeah I used to be on the Board of an animal shelter. So yeah. Oh, that is so lovely. They’re more, they’re more compliant than you know, having to deal with, you know, sourcing talent.

Katrina Collier 32:16
Oh God let’s not go there. I think we are going to have to have around to this. Anyway, thank you so much for your pearls of wisdom. It has been so good to talk to you, and of course, just reach out on LinkedIn if anyone wants to get in touch. Absolutely. Thank you so much for the time.

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Transcribed by https://otter.ai