Karen Catlin
#womenhelpingwomen
After spending 25 years building software products and serving as a vice president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, Karen Catlin witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, she knew it was time to switch gears.
Today, Karen is a vocal advocate for inclusion, a leadership coach, a keynote speaker, and the author of three books: "Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking" (with Poornima Vijayashanker), "Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces," and "The Better Allies™ Approach to Hiring."
The Better Allies Approach to Hiring
Are you struggling to diversify your workforce? Is your company consistently missing its diversity goals? You may hear colleagues saying, “We’d hire more women or people of color if we could find them,” but the pipeline isn’t truly to blame. There are proven approaches for connecting with qualified candidates from underrepresented demographics. And when you know how to design a hiring process that will set them up for success, they’ll be eager to accept your offer.
Building on the momentum of her book, "Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces," Karen Catlin has created this helpful hiring guide filled with best practices to recruit and hire people from underrepresented ethnicities and genders, with non-traditional educational backgrounds, with gaps on their resumes, or from older generations. With examples, stories, checklists, rubrics, and guidelines galore, this unique tool will help you transform your hiring process to attract and retain diverse applicants.
Read this guidebook for actionable steps you can take to fill your pipeline with candidates from underrepresented groups and ensure you have an inclusive interview process that paves the way to a more diverse workforce.
Better Allies
Are you looking to build a workplace culture with a certain buzz about it? Where employees are thriving and engagement survey scores are through the roof. Where people from different backgrounds, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, ages, and abilities are hired and set up for success--and they all want their friends to work there too, because it's so awesome.
One secret to creating this kind of workplace is allyship. And it's something anyone can do.
In Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces, you'll learn to spot situations where you can create a more inclusive culture, along with straightforward steps to take. Leadership coach Karen Catlin will walk you through how to be a better ally, including:
• Hiring and retaining a diverse workforce
• Amplifying and advocating for others
• Giving effective and equitable performance feedback
• Using more inclusive language
Read this book to level-up your ally skills using the Better Allies™ approach and create a culture where everyone, including you, can do their best work and thrive.
Present! A Techie’s Guide To Public Speaking
The ultimate interactive public speaking guide from tech speakers Poornima Vijayashanker and Karen Catlin that prepares and encourages techies to discover their expertise, confidently share it, and successfully level up in their careers. Techies around the world can now jump start and grow their speaking careers with the book,
Present! A Techie’s Guide to Public Speaking, written by tech leaders, Poornima Vijayashanker and Karen Catlin. The book serves as a resource for technology professionals who want or need to develop the skills to communicate their expertise effectively, whether in a meeting at work or delivering an engaging talk at a conference. Poornima, who is the founder of Femgineer and the founding engineer of Mint.com, collaborated with former Adobe vice president and founder of Karen Catlin Consulting, Karen Catlin, to compile and share their lessons, tips, and techniques learned from their own experiences as professional tech speakers. “Karen and I wanted to write this book so that our fellow techies would have a comprehensive resource to help them with their own public speaking endeavors. So many folks in the tech industry have amazing ideas and experience, but they often feel stuck on how to present them effectively.
Also, our hope is that more women will be inspired by our stories and encouraged to get out there and share their own valuable expertise through public speaking in order to boost representation of women tech speakers,” Poornima said.Present! covers public speaking from A to Z. Through stories, examples, and interactive exercises, Poornima and Karen dive into topics including, overcoming stage fright, exploring personal speaking style, creating the right talk for the right audience, polishing presence and delivery, and nailing any type of talk, whether it’s a lightning or long-form talk or being part of a panel. Karen said, “Even though Poornima and I are professional speakers, we felt it was important to share our own feelings of nerves and uncertainty, and bumps we’ve had along the way - and sometimes continue to experience. It was important for us to communicate that no one is perfect and it really is okay when talks don’t always go according to plan. Our hope is that by being open, we’ll be able to give others the confidence and the techniques to handle situations when they arise, deliver an amazing presentation, and most importantly, have FUN”!
Karen Catlin
Contact Karen:
Karen Catlin (she/her)
Coach | Speaker | Author | Advocate for Inclusive Workplaces
