A Conversation with reacHIRE’s Addie Swartz about Leveling the Playing Field
They recently launched a new product called Aurora, that aims to help women build up their soft skills for business using content, advice, and community. Aurora impacts employee engagement and instills a sense of belonging by helping women feel more connected to their peers and more confident in their work.
And so about 10 years ago, I had the idea that wouldn’t it be great to create a formal on-ramp for people who had taken time off, for whatever reason. Over the last 10 years, we’ve learned so much about what it takes to help individuals, both men and women, succeed in coming back into newer environments with different skills.
Building on new tech skills going into new industries that didn’t exist when they left and using new technologies that didn’t exist when they left. And having them be super successful, we bottled it up into a digital platform called Aurora, which helps more women from different backgrounds grow and thrive at every stage of the Pipeline.
That secret sauce could most likely help people who were just starting their careers and in the middle of their careers, do a better job of navigating them. ”
So I think in this world where career paths or non-linear, we’re now in a world of hybrid work, people with the pandemic have really been isolated in their homes and that connection to other individuals and colleagues across the organization is far more limited.
There needs to be new tools and new technologies that really help better support and create connectivity and belonging. It’s this opportunity to layer on coaching, group connection, some professional development, and just common sense feedback from peers, all in one place that both in a nonlinear/linear fashion, can really help drive better career outcomes, more loyalty, more connectivity, and more long-term retention.
We have a test drive model where we not only are experts in recruiting/identifying great talent whose skills can be transferred into these new jobs and different jobs, but we actually support them along the way with coaching, the Aurora platform, that helps the returners get back.
So corporations like T-Mobile, Wayfair Fidelity, Inmar, a cybersecurity company, and lots of others, have really embraced this because they’ve seen the power of bringing a cohort of people in, having them be specially selected, specially trained, then getting that support along the way.
Think about the power of Aurora and the ability of many organizations to embrace Aurora to help more of their underrepresented groups, grow and thrive. We need to harness the technology that’s out there, to create community-supported environments and allow people within an organization to connect with each other for more support.
So when we first launched, it was really an early career platform for women who were just starting their careers, to help them better navigate, because we know that women fall behind early and they never catch up.
And then we have the Aurora Accelerate Program, which layers on top of the platform, this great leadership development opportunity and experience that allows women to grow and thrive with a senior executive, who’s already gone through and succeeded in corporate America, who’s now guiding them and coaching them on how to be more successful.
How do you know how to better navigate around different people who may have a different way of working than you do?
We know coaching is so powerful, but it’s not about coaching somebody out of an organization and thinking about what they want. Aurora is a virtual experience where you’re with a group of other people within your organization.
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