 Live from Houston, Texas, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Now your host, Jeff Brick. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Brick here with theCUBE. We are live in Houston, Texas at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women Computing 2015. About 12,000 women, 13,000 people all together really coming together to talk about technology, to talk about recruiting, to talk about diversity. It's a really unique conference. It's like nothing that we've covered in the 70 conferences we'll cover this year. And I think the celebration word really sums it up because there's just a lot of positive energy here. And we're really excited to be here. And I'm psyched for our next guest, Gunjan Agarwal, VP, talent acquisition and M&A for Ericsson. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So VP of talent acquisition and M&A. I don't often see those two in the same line. That's a unique title. Yes. And the reason why we have these two sitting together is because it's all about bringing in competence. Ericsson is going through a huge transformation and we are bringing in competence either through mergers and acquisitions or through our recruiting. So that's why both of these sit under my team. So do you do M&A deals specifically targeted for great talent acquisition as well as maybe great technology? Is it two kind of separate tracks? We do. Acquisitions are done for various reasons. But one important aspect of acquisitions for us is to be able to integrate the employees from the acquired company. And so that's where our team is specialized to ensure, for example, what is our employee value proposition? Talking about that right from day one when the employees of the acquired company come in. And then some of the acquisitions which they do of course are for competence rather than for market share growth or customer acquisition. Right, that's great. I mean, I think that's a pretty consistent story with a lot of people in their M&A activity but I don't know that it's so kind of overt where you're specifically saying, hey, we want great talent and this is just another venue to bring in that great talent. Yeah, I mean, it's really natural but somehow it hasn't caught on. Yeah, very good. So we're here at Grace Hopper. So Erickson is a big sponsor here. Talk about your presence here at the show and kind of how it's changed over time. Yes, so we dipped our toes in last year. We were a participant at the Grace Hopper event last year and this year we decided to be a platinum sponsor and we are here. We also set some objectives. We hope to recruit 150 bright talent right from early careers all the way up to mid-level and senior talent. How many? 150. At this show? Yes. Wow, that's a lot. But there's a lot of talent walking around this auditorium. Yes, and all our interview schedules were booked so we've been doing very well so far. Oh, that's great. So we talked a little bit off air about really diversity and we know we've talked with a number of guests that having a diverse set of views in a team delivers better outcomes. And it's the right thing to do for all the right reasons, the moral reasons, it's the right thing to do. But it also has benefit because there are better outcomes and there are business benefits. So I know you said you've done a little work to really put some numbers behind the perception. I wonder if you can share some of that with us. Sure, absolutely. And to all the audience listening in and tuning in, they would know that diversity in tech is a pertinent issue right now and a lot of companies are doing a lot to change the lack of gender diversity and the lack of overall diversity. So a lot of efforts are being done and Ericsson is no different. If I rattle off all the things that companies are doing, we check the boxes on all of them. So these are all kind of the baseline type of things that everybody's trying to do. Yes, and we've done more than that as well. So for example, if you think about being transparent and sharing your diversity numbers, we did that last summer. If you talk about senior leadership really embracing it and saying what is their aspirational target, our CEO Hans Westberg and our chief HR officer, Bina Cheresia, they have openly said that we want to get to 30% gender diversity in our workplace by 2020. We are at 22% right now. So 30 is not a lofty aim if you think about it, but it is pretty big given a population of 115,000 employee base. And did you guys do the survey last year, the Anita Ward survey? I think so, I'm not 100% sure, but we participated, yes. So then all the other things in terms of, we are a very data-driven company. So right from the minute when we look at the candidates late, we look for diversity in that. Employees that are going for training and getting nominated for mentorship and a senior sponsorship. We look at gender diversity representation in all of those. We have even done things like made sure that our job descriptions and our website, our communication out there to candidates is gender neutral. So we did a gender bias wash as well. We are doing a lot of unconscious bias training in all. So if you think about all the things that could be done, we are doing that. But I think I have something interesting to share, which is a lot of companies which are doing this are following a shotgun approach. We did a study last November. We sponsored a study and our head of HR took quite a lot of interest in that. We looked at... Have a little live TV, so we got a little crackling going on overhead. We'll soldier through though, that's all right. All right. As long as there are no fireworks. Yeah, no fireworks yet. Yeah. So we looked at the 2,200 jobs that we had posted in United States last year in the year 2014. And we looked at, we were really curious to find out what happened to all the candidates that apply and those that get selected and look at that data from a gender perspective. So we had about 52,000 applications for these 2,200 jobs and we studied them right from application to selection stage. And surprisingly, we found that the women that were, the percentage of women that were applying versus the percentage of women that were getting selected, the women that were getting selected, that percentage was higher. So our issue was not an issue of unconscious bias. Our issue was not that our managers were not selecting women. Our issue was actually that we were not attracting enough women to apply for Ericsson. And one of the reasons why we are here at Grace Harper as a Platinum sponsor and ready to hire 150 women is a direct result of that. Right, chop, chop, noise upstairs. But, you know, everybody keeps saying that it's two parts of the problem, right? It's a pipeline problem, which as you just mentioned, your guys was a pipeline problem, not necessarily a retention problem, but you need to work both sides of that issue. Yes, absolutely. Ha ha ha. I think it's just giving up. It's like I've had enough excitement. I think we're breaking all the Wi-Fi upstairs. Yeah, so you're absolutely right. I mean, it's not just is the pipeline dry or is the pipeline leaky? What is really the issue? In our case, actually the bigger problem is that the pipeline was not broad enough. But on the other hand, we do have things like I said, 3,500 of our senior leaders and managers have gone through unconscious bias training and we are now taking it to the next level. We are actually looking at the succession plans of our mid-level managers and ensuring that we offer them whatever is needed. They're not hidden, they're visible. Right. And they can move on. Well, I wonder if you're going to continue that study on with that same population to see the retention side of the equation. How far do they go? How does their advancement correlate to the other people kind of in their class, if you will? Because that would be an interesting thing to track as well. Yes, absolutely we will do that. There were actually two other very interesting findings and one was that we found interestingly that when there were women hiring managers, there were more women candidates applying. That is very interesting because if you think about it, a job description is just a job description. It doesn't say, hey, I'm a male hiring manager or a female hiring manager. So there is something there and our hypothesis is that maybe women hiring managers have a network which is more gender diverse and so they are passing on the job description to their network and getting more women. So that's an area as well which we will explore and then ultimately women staying in the organization, how do we ensure that they continue to grow and develop? Well, that's been a theme of the show too, right? Is that people need to see women in high places, right? If you're not at the high place yet, you need to see a path, you need to know that the company is supportive. So I don't know, maybe you need to put the names on the hiring managers, maybe you'll get more of the funnel through there. Exactly. Yeah, it's a great thing. So talk a little bit more about this Grace Hopper show and what it means to Erickson beyond just simply getting those 150 people, which is a pretty lofty goal. But how has this kind of changed the environment? So I think the biggest thing it is doing is it is changing the conversation back in the organization. Erickson is, being a Swedish company, it is a very non-hierarchical and a very collaborative and an open culture, it is a diverse organization in terms of its inclusion in the workplace. But having said that, we have not had a lot of women in the workplace. And then now with the senior women as well as all the level and the entry level that we are bringing here, we have roles assigned to them and so they would be expected to go back and we will have forums where we will invite them to share some of their key learnings. And we hope that will start a conversation. And then you guys are sponsoring students as well. I think that's such an interesting part of this ecosystem is the fact that people sponsor students to come and we've heard from a bunch of the students today on theCUBE about how meaningful that was, how that changed their path to get into computer science. I think it's such a tremendous event. So you guys did sponsor some students are here? Yes, we did. And actually in the morning today, we hosted a breakfast with Nora Denzel, who's our board member at Ericsson and also on the Anita Borg Institute board. And we had students there and some of them asked her questions about her own career. And that was very insightful because she was able to share with them the mistakes that she did, what she learned from it and hopefully they can take that away and learn from it. Right. Gunjan, next year when we see you on theCUBE here, what's going to be the new story? What do you think we're going to look forward to in a year from now? Hopefully I would be able to come and tell you that we've had great success and we are marching on towards our goal. Awesome. Well, Gunjan, thanks for stopping by. Thanks for being a Platinum sponsor and sponsoring some of the students and good luck on 150 new hires, a lofty goal. Thank you. Absolutely. So I'm Jeff Frick. We are here at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women Computing in Houston, Texas. We'll be here all day tomorrow as well for wall-to-wall coverage. You're watching theCUBE. We'll see you next time.