Advocating for Non-Traditional Talent

Alejandra Ayala is an Online Candidate Specialist at Google and the Founder of Puente Tech (Puente means Bridge in Spanish), a career placement company focused on helping professionals transition into the Technology sector. She has a nontraditional career path into the world of tech and seeks to help others like her break into the industry. You can view the full interview here.

Jocelyn: You have an interesting story about how you got into Recruiting in Tech, tell me about that.

Alejandra: I love that question. It's one of my favorites. I was one of these people when I was graduating high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. College wasn't a top priority. In my family, it wasn't the traditional pathway. I am a first generation Mexican-American and both of my parents are Mexican. I come from a working class family.

My dad is a retired janitor and my mom is a housekeeper at a hospital. So we grew up working class, really humble, and just work really hard. I've had a job since I was 15 years old. 

I went to community college and I was like, wow, college is so boring. I can't do this. I'm not doing well. I'm not a traditional learner, but I do pick things up very quickly. 

So I began working in hospitality and I loved it. I come from the Disneyland resort and that's the first place that was like, “Hey, I don't know if you know this about yourself, but you're a leader.” And I was like, what? It got to the point where they were like, it's time for you to apply to be a lead. And I was like I've only been here for a year. How could you want to promote me? 

I went and applied and I became a lead. They sent me to all these leadership courses. I love Disney. They really have the top training. I became a core trainer and a staff development person where I was really working with the core team developing and training new cast members. 

Time went on and I was ready for a new challenge. I moved to the Bay area because I took a self-development class and I realized that one of my childhood passions was to be on the radio. I did a trade school program to be a broadcaster. I got on the radio because my cousin knew a guy that needed an intern. I became an intern but I was like, ‘Oh, bills.’ So I started working at a Marriott, given I had a hospitality background. 

At that point in my career I began to think about different problems inside of a company. I started to wonder things like: 

• What would it be like to work with people that were similar to me? 

• What would it be like to not have so many rules?

• What would it be like to have new ideas? 

I started trying it and very quickly noted this is not the environment. I started thinking, well, what is the environment? And as I started developing myself in  different areas and I realized that I wanted to go to people. I started wondering who even hires these people. And then I was like, ‘Recruiting. They do that.’ So let me go learn about recruiting. 

I applied for this Recruiting Coordinator position at Adobe as a contractor and the hiring manager called me. She was like, I see that you've managed events before, but I would love to speak to you about this role. Her name is Issa Hernandez and she is one of the only Mexican leaders at Adobe. 

She wanted to give me a shot. That's how I broke into tech. I just focused on talking about what I was good at, not focusing on what I didn't know about recruiting, which was everything. 

That was an awesome experience and also the toughest job I've ever had. The volume and quality and speed that has to happen all at once. I'd never experienced before. Then I was recruited to Google and I'm finishing up my two years right now. I think in three years of working in tech, I've learned more than seven years of working elsewhere.

Jocelyn: I’ve heard you talk about working in tech and not having a college degree. Can you talk about how we are limiting the talent we look at by requiring college degrees for many of the roles in our companies?

Alejandra: Yes. I'm a huge advocate for non-traditional learners like myself. Companies are missing out on tons of talent. There are a lot of people that didn't have the resources or the discipline or the structure to have success in those areas. And it really adds a lot of pressure to people when they have a lot of student debt as well.

The thing about not having a college degree, I think some of the biggest obstacles for me were in confidence. I thought ‘I don't know if I earned my spot.’ I never thought I could work at Google without a college degree.

I think that it just added another layer because I'm already Mexican. I'm already a Brown woman. I look a certain way. I speak a certain way. My name is a certain way. And then when you know so much about recruiting and bias, you're just like, ‘Oh man, I don't know if I'll ever have a real chance out there.’ 

Now that I've been here for two years and I specialize in putting together job descriptions, little by little we're moving away from it. For most of the roles at Google, we no longer require it. But to be honest with you, it's almost like they're just saying that to be nice sometimes because although it's not on the JD, the type of experience that is required will be very hard to get if you don't have a college degree, but it’s a start.

I look around and I'm the only one without a college degree on my team. But at the same time, we're on the same team. We're literally at the same table. And there've been many times when my approach is actually what drives the conversation forward. So that's something that I'm really proud of and something that I'm known for. 

Jocelyn: Tell me about your company Puente Tech which you founded last year. Your initial goal was to help people transition into roles in tech like you did but talk to me about how that started and what it is now. 

Alejandra: A lot of updates in that area. Originally Puente tech was a company created to transition people into tech, I'm still kind of doing that. Where we are right now is that my business partner is focusing more on her career and I'm focused more on being a People Operations Consultant. So I’m branching off on my own. And I started doing a lot of career coaching. It turns out that I love coaching people.

At first, I actually refused to be a coach. I was like, I can’t be a coach, everyone wants to coach. But I started getting really empowered when the people I talked to were getting results. I knew someone who was like, ‘Hey, I think you can coach me on my interviews.’ And I was like, ‘I don't coach people.’ She was like, ‘Okay, when you're ready, I'll be here.’ Finally, I thought, maybe I could try this. So I reached back out to her. She had been looking for a job for a year and a half, and she got a job after three weeks of working with me.

Then she didn't stop there. She told me, ‘Now that I've got my job, I know that I'm not going to want to be there for a long time. I was wondering if you could be my career coach and you could help me create the career I want. I'm going to need a few promotions and I think you can help me get there.’ It’s been really rewarding for me. 

Jocelyn: That’s awesome! I know that you have done some work with businesses as well with Puente Tech. Can you talk a little bit about what that work has looked like and are you planning to continue any of that?

Alejandra: Yes. I love the work I've been able to do. We started off doing storytelling workshops. But that wasn’t challenging enough for me. I really wanted to get my hands on strategy. I started working with a few organizations and my main client is a tech nonprofit. And some of the stuff that I've been able to do with them is around team culture and a leadership evaluation. I was able to evaluate where they stand as an organization, identifying areas for opportunity and how their employees experience the organization. 

I also built an inclusive hiring practices program for them because they didn't have a hiring process. 

And I think my absolute favorite was when people got promoted and people got raises out of my evaluation and they were women. And I was almost in tears because I made a difference.

Jocelyn: You are also working on DE&I and gamification? Can you tell me about that product and how it works?

Alejandra: Yes. So this is the most innovative thing that I've gotten my hands on. I am working with a company that focuses on knowledge as a service. They did a case study on how people learn and we learn much better if we're seeing something one minute per day, versus going to a three-day course. 

So that's the idea behind gamification. We are creating our own DE&I modules. Modules are little tiny learning segments. And we say gamification because you're going to learn about a topic like imposter syndrome and the impacts of that in the workplace through a game—you actually play a game on an application on your phone that has a bunch of little questions to assess your behaviors and your habits. 

We can track the backend analytics. We can see if our teams are playing, if they’re getting certain questions wrong so that we can build a workshop around something that the staff is not understanding. And we're doing this to introduce diversity and inclusion topics to companies. We're still in the development stages of it. But the first one that I'm going to show to a potential client is going to be on imposter syndrome for people over the age of 55. That totally blew my mind because I am talking about Black and brown people, I'm talking about things that are very much top of my mind for me, but I never considered that people go through age-ism because I don't deal with that.

Jocelyn: If people are looking for you and Puente Tech online, where can they find you?

Alejandra: They can find us at puentetechjobs.com and for me LinkedIn is going to be the best. 

Jocelyn: Anything else to add? 

Alejandra: You know, I would say for anybody who's listening I really wanted to come here and be fully authentic about my journey. I originally wanted to give you a really organized story and I was like, that would not be anything like me. So, thank you so much for interviewing me, for asking me the questions, and for getting my name out there as well.