Milena Berry Podcast Transcript
Milena Berry joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.
[00:00:12] Brian Thomas: Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Milena Berry. Milena Berry is the co-founder and CEO of PowerToFly, the fastest growing global platform dedicated to fast tracking economic equity by upscaling and connecting underrepresented talent to roles in highly visible sectors. Milena’s on a mission to partner with top 100 brands to bring them a slew of diversity solutions provided through the Power2Fly platform.
Milena was born in Bulgaria and moved to New York City a week before September 11th to pursue a master’s at ITP New York University. Prior to co-founding Power2Fly, Milena has contributed to numerous startups and had a blast being the CTO at Avaz.org, where she oversaw the technology to support growth to over 30 million members.
Milena is a frequent commentator on how companies can diversify their teams, especially in tech. Her work for PowerToFly has been recognized in Business Insider, and she was named Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business in 2015. Her biggest accomplishments are her four children, who constantly push her to rethink what work life balance means.
Well, good afternoon, Milena. Welcome to the show.
[00:01:19] Milena Berry: Thanks for having me, Brian. It’s lovely to be here.
[00:01:22] Brian Thomas: Absolutely appreciate you jumping on. We talked about this before we hit record, but do traverse quite a few states around the country, North America and beyond, as you know, 50 countries now.
So just love getting up and meeting new people. So, I appreciate your time. We’re going to jump right into these questions, Milena. You’ve got quite the career in marketing, technology, robotics, an instructor, and now you’re the co-founder and CEO of PowerToFly. Could you share with our audience the secret to your career growth, and what inspires you?
[00:01:52] Milena Berry: Yeah, thank you. It’s a great question, and it’s funny because career trajectories never Make sense when you’re thinking of them ahead of time, it’s hard to plan ahead. And then when you look retroactively, it all makes sense. And, once that led to the other, if I think about it, but the one common theme when I sat down and reflected on this question is that I have always pushed myself and I so always challenged myself and I have always been So keen on learning.
So, when I was lucky enough to land a CTO role, I was very, very new in the tech world period. So, there was so much to learn that got me up every morning. I’ll check my phone before brushing my teeth. I was so excited to learn and work so hard as a result, right? And it was the same thing when I later on decided to co-found PowerToFly and Started my journey as a CEO, now I have a 10 year tenure doing this, but there was time when I had zero.
and so that’s definitely one of the themes in my career of challenging myself and always wanting to learn.
[00:02:58] Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. The biggest, I would say theme around this podcast from all the guests I’ve talked to here is, is curiosity, right? Willing to learn, jump in and have some passion.
And again, I think that’s kind of the magic sauce or at least the major ingredients of the magic sauce for people that do what they do and make the world a better place. So, thank you for sharing that. Milena, you’re very passionate about everything you do. We just mentioned that a little bit.
Can you tell us where this passion was first ignited?
[00:03:26] Milena Berry: Yeah. So, I think it’s always been there with me in many ways. If I really think back to my childhood and some of the early signs of entrepreneurship that I had when I was 12 years old or 14 years old, growing up in communist Bulgaria.
But for me, things really crystallized about 10 years ago, the year that I really co-founded Power to Fly. And it was the same year that Red Burns, who was the founder of an amazing program at NYU called Interactive Telecommunications Program passed away at the age of 80 something. And I had gone to that program.
That was the program that got me to arrive in the U. S. and to really change my life and gave me a lot of opportunities. And I graduated about 10 years. prior to that. So, 20 years ago, right? I’m dating myself. And and it was really amazing for me to reflect on, okay, my life has not been easy, right?
The immigrant queer mothering tech path I was on. But no matter that it hadn’t been easy, I had also been so lucky, and I had so many people paid forward and invest in me. And it was time. I felt it was time to start giving back. And to start thinking, how am I going to contribute to the wider good and to the bigger social mission?
And how can I help others who are on a similar journey? And I also watching all the conflict in the world transpired this week is an example but also 10 years ago was still like very messed up world, lots of people displaced by war lots of conflict around the world.
And I felt that connecting folks to jobs is one way to help folks out in a hard situation. Right? Like you can really change somebody’s life. The best way to transform a society is by creating sustainable jobs. It’s not by giving handouts or, like that’s not sustainable change. That’s aiding the moment when people are desperate, but to actually have sustainable change, you need to think about jobs.
So that’s what really started the inspiration around PowerToFly. My own journey as the woman in tech actually finding work life balance in the workplace and staying and growing a career, right? Which I know is the outlier and then realizing that companies lack diversity, and they just needed a little help to know how to connect with underrepresented talent how to retain them once they’re there, right?
And so that’s why Power to Fly was born to really help organizations attract, hire, retain and grow diverse talent.
[00:05:54] Brian Thomas: Awesome. Thank you again. Love the story. This podcast is all about, I think all podcasts are about stories, but appreciate you telling us your journey, how you got there and really that passion.
As I mentioned, it was first ignited and passion is so contagious. It’s such a great thing. And I’m glad that you are inspiring and helping others. Love your mission. Thank you so much. Milena, your Power To Fly opportunities continue to grow and flourish. Can you share a couple of examples where you’ve helped women overcome a challenge or maybe completely change their career?
[00:06:24] Milena Berry: Yeah. So, the first thing I’ll say is that, Power To Fly is actually focused on all underrepresented talent, not only women. It’s something to keep in mind as you think about our community, and you know who you can find on Power To Fly. My favorite stories are always coming in through all of our channels.
We have a channel called Warm Fuzzy feedback on Slack, and it’s just wonderful to see our community benefit of this organization that we’ve created. And to give you an idea, right? Folks can really feeling lost in the black hole of applicant tracking systems in organizations because they never hear back.
Like the recruiting process really is very broken. The traditional recruiting process of an applicant applies to a job, lands in an organization. People who applied on job boards almost never hear back from the company, right? Like it’s such an unlikely recruiting channel now.
vice versa, by the way, for companies who end up spending most of their time. getting applicants from their inbound applicants, they don’t get the qualified applicants they’re looking for. So most of the time their highest netting effort in terms of recruiting ROI is the outbound efforts that they’re making.
And that becomes particularly more important for underrepresented talent. But what ends up happening because of this model that we have, that we’ve worked out, talent can actually go and meet with companies in our virtual career fairs, in our summits, in our dedicated events. They can go and visit what we call chat and learns, which are interactive sessions, meeting a company executive and learning from that right back on that, like folks want to be learning.
It’s part of their career journey. Power To Fly is very infused with learning. And again, we create that connective tissue. Which is how we really brokering these connections that end up resulting in job opportunities, and we also do a lot of upscaling and I mean, some of our offerings were also very hands on in negotiations and specific job offers.
And I still remember a developer getting a 75 percent raise by working with Power To Fly from one job to the next. And so those are the stories when it becomes so tangible and so real what we’re talking about when we’re talking about that gross salary equivalent of the jobs that prior reply has brokered to filling.
That’s when you, you know, our impact can get measured in the billions, right? Hope that makes sense.
[00:08:40] Brian Thomas: Yeah, no, that’s awesome. And we talk a lot about, going that extra mile here on the podcast, that customer experience. And what I love, what you do is you really take the computer or the machine out of these ATS, right.
For these job applicant systems that are so automated now, and you’re actually doing that handholding and bringing that human touchback, which is so awesome that’s the best way to do it, right? I think we need. The machines obviously, but we need to do a better job and I appreciate what you’re doing out there to make things better.
Milena, last question of the day, we’re a tech podcast and platform, and we’d like to ask every guest if you’re leveraging any of those new or emerging technologies in your business. And if not, maybe there’s a cool tool or app you found useful. You might share with us.
[00:09:23] Milena Berry: Oh, absolutely. So, I’m really excited about AI in general.
GenAI. GenAI specific. I think we’re leveraging our newest product that we just launched actually is allowing companies to search for underrepresented talent, depending on whatever their goals are. So if they are lacking entry level, Asian folks, they can search for that. If they’re lacking white males above 50, they can search for that, right?
And so it is really a specific tool that allows you to target folks based on their identity. And we definitely use AI for multiple parts of that application. And also, in terms of the, just the recruiting workflow, getting completely disrupted by Gen AI. I think there’s just so many tasks that recruiters do that can be automated or semi-automated or made easier, including content creation, right?
Like recruiters that are like sales folks, they need to write content just like a salesperson, a business developer representative would write their cadence. The recruiter needs to write a cadence. They need to also explain why it’s This job is the right fit for this candidate that they’re reaching out to.
All of this can be made a lot faster and a lot better with these new gen AI technologies that are happening this year. And it’s a fascinating time for HR tech. I think we’re finally getting We’re finally arriving to the agenda of tech transformation, right? HR. I feel like every other department went first, but it is, it’s a really exciting time in HR tech and the consolidations of enterprise software that we’re going to see in the next three years and the robustness of the features that we have is going to be exciting.
Really cool. and it’s just a super fun time to be an HR tech.
[00:11:05] Brian Thomas: Thank you. And you’re absolutely right. We need to take advantage of especially Conversational, Generative AI right now, but again and you know, this, let’s keep that human touch in there. It’s such. Such a great thing to touch the world human to human.
And obviously let’s let the machines do the boring mundane stuff, stuff that doesn’t require human interaction. Milena, thank you so much for being on today. It was such a pleasure and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
[00:11:32] Milena Berry: Thanks for having me, Brian.
[00:11:34] Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Milena Berry Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
