Many of us have experienced that sinking feeling of finding out, after starting a job, that it’s just not the right place for us. How might you avoid that situation? We speak to entrepreneur, environmentalist, and public speaker Izzy Fenwick, co-founder of Futureful: New Zealand’s only values-based and skills-based recruitment platform. It effectively matchmakes employers and employees for compatibility and capability – and initially doesn’t include away information about ethnicity and gender!
At Capsule, we’ve written a lot of stories about women at work. We’ve noticed that many of these topics are very much intertwined: pushing back against hustle culture, why perpetual striving might not make us happier, working-mum guilt, letting go of perfectionism, battling burnout, juggling work with the mental load and SO many more.
Then we got to wondering about what working women really want. As in, what do we actually want – rather than what are we ‘meant’ to want. Also, are there things that we don’t yet know we want, but might realise we want if we find out more? Are there more things we could ask our employers for? And what changes might we want to see in the workplace?
Welcome to our series What Working Women REALLY Want. If you have story ideas, or are keen to be interviewed about a topic, please email us at [email protected]!
A few years ago, Izzy Fenwick started working for an organisation that knew she was gay. “I was shocked when someone in my team told me I’d go to hell for marrying a woman. We were on a flight, so I was trapped in a seat next to her.”
“When I ended up raising it with management, they were horrified. But there was no tangible action taken after that – I was young and didn’t even know what to ask [management] for.” The colleague left a while after the incident to study. “I have no idea whether management ever spoke to her about it.”
The incident got Izzy contemplating something. “There is such a big difference between a general sentiment that gets thrown around [by organisations] about wanting to be inclusive, compared to actually having safety mechanisms or policies in place to enable that.”
“I thought ‘are there other people who don’t know what to ask in a job interview to determine whether they’ll be safe as a person of colour, a gay person or a woman?’.” Or potentially as all three. “For people from minorities or marginalised communities, it’s way more important to understand what an organisation is or isn’t committed to doing in this space.”
“And whether or not you’re from a minority or marginalised group, how do you get the information you need front and centre?”
“How do you tell the difference between an organisation worth working for, and an organisation that’s saying all the right words to make you think it’s an organisation worth working for?.”
“I was working in the corporate-sustainability field and I had friends reach out asking ‘where do I look for a good organisation to work for regarding sustainability?’. That’s a lot of labour for one human to do, to help her friends, so I thought ‘is this something I could digitise to do more broadly?’.” They did some research – and found that talent was keen on using a platform to work out who was worth working for.
Enter Futureful, New Zealand’s first values-led and skills-based recruitment platform. (Izzy co-founded it with Carolyn Mortland, who also works in the sustainability field.)
An entrepreneur, environmentalist, and public speaker with a background in psychology, Izzy inherited her passion of “mainstreaming corporate responsibility for people and the planet” from her father, Sir Rob Fenwick, a leading environmentalist and businessman. He died in 2020, before Featureful was born. “But he played a role in inspiring Futureful because, as well as conservation, his passion was the corporate-sustainability space.”
The Values Match-Making Process
It’s not unlike matchmaking: both sides can see if they’re a good match.
As a job-seeker (let’s call you a talent), you build a ‘talent profile’ online, including detailing your experience, strengths, skills, and how you’d describe the perfect workplace. Then you can look at a potential employer’s talent-pool profile. “For instance, you might want to know what their corporate-responsibility or diversity commitments are. You might find out, for instance, if they’re open to hybrid work, part-time work, or school hours.” Izzy calls these things ‘compatibility and capability’ metrics.
Then you can choose to join an employer’s talent pool (or more than one). “You’re saying, ‘I have these skills, I like your organisation, and I’d like to be contacted if the right thing comes around’.”
Something fantastic is that the platform doesn’t disclose the ethnicity or gender of a potential employee initially, to help prevent conscious or subconscious biases. “Employers actually like that,” Izzy says. “A number of them are trying to remove bias from their [hiring] process with some other system. But Futureful does that for them.”
As a talent, “your name gets changed to a plant and a colour, so you might be Purple Fern.” An employer can see Purple Fern’s talent profile. “If they like the sound of Purple Fern, they can request to contact you and, at that point, learn your name.” They won’t see any identifying details until you give permission.
All this saves job-seekers time and effort. Because, if you see a job listing, you have to do your own research on a company and, even then, might not get enough quality information. Or you go into an interview fairly blind.
“Something we’ve heard a lot from people who have used Futureful is ‘it gave me the answers to the questions that I wish I could have asked in job interviews, but that I didn’t have time to ask because I was too busy trying to be who I thought they wanted me to be’.”
“My mother used to give me relationship advice, saying ‘you have to be able to be the person that you are’. I think that’s an interesting way to think about how we go into these work relationships. We sign a contract, may end up working there for years, yet we don’t often have that upfront transparency about whether this will be a supportive, empowering workplace.”
Career Cushioning
I’d previously heard the term called ‘career cushioning’, where you’re essentially keeping an eye out for a better job, even if you like the one you’re in. “We call them passive job seekers,” Izzy says. “It’s like, ‘I’m not unhappy at work, I just think I could be happier elsewhere if the right thing came along’.” If you’re happy enough where you are, you’re probably not combing through job listings, so Futureful – by putting skills not ads at the forefront – is designed for you.
Skills-based
Organisations that use the platform don’t get a plant-based username, but they create their own profiles. “It’s simple for organisations to do it themselves through our online process, but we do offer to do it with them. We may help them identify parts of the organisation that they might not even realise are interesting [to employees].”
“Something organisations need to get their heads around about Futureful is that you don’t post job ads to recruit talent; instead you open a talent pool, and have that pool of talent ready and waiting for when you’re hiring. Because when you’re only doing reactive hiring based on posting job ads, you start narrowing your expectations. In the language often used in job ads, you can indirectly exclude some people who might be great. Using a job ad is like using a fishing rod. Using these talent pools is more like fishing with a big net.”
“Employers can see the quality of talent, and may have someone in mind should a position come up.” Employers pay Futureful a fee – starting from $83.25 per month, with a free trial for the first three months. Job-seekers don’t pay.
Currently, Featureful has 2000 talent profiles, and 63 talent pools.
Skills not ads
Izzy would like to see skills-based hiring prioritised over job-ad hiring more widely. “Because if you’ve only got job titles, you’re trying to fit square pegs into round holes – so why not look at the skills needed to do the job? We were inspired by a report from the World Economic Forum, talking about the shift towards skills-based hiring to create more agile, dynamic organisations.”
Izzy hasn’t comes across anything quite like Futureful and would like to take it international. She’d also like Kiwibusinesses to show they’re rejecting the global pushback against DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) practices.
“We see Futureful as a way for businesses to change the way they do business, through recognising the value of their environmental, sustainability and social commitments. It gets them great high-performing talent and, when you feel connected to and proud of where you work, you’re more productive.”
And that’s good for everyone.
