Speaker presentation: Suzi Edwards-Alexander

About Suzi

I’m a deeply nerdy people person who regrets only ever learning to code on a ZX Spectrum. The best thing anyone ever said about me was that I ask great questions, and really care about the answers. I have almost 30 years in tech, including 15 years with Thoughtworks. I helped build an incredible team of technologists and built recruiting operations in at least eight countries, before moving into product and digital marketing for the Tech Radar after my maternity leave. Now I'm a fractional People Person and career coach, helping companies build culture and incredible teams, and individuals do the best work of their lives. I’m obsessed with belonging, levelling the playing field for under-represented people in tech (especially women, neurodiverse and LGBTQI+ folx) and toppling the patriarchy.

Get to know Suzi even more on her LinkedIn page.

The talk: From Friction to Flow; Putting Humanity at the Heart of Your Hiring

Hiring should be about building amazing teams, company and culture. But most people would rather have a root canal than an interview. Why is recruitment in 2025 like this, and how do we change it? From job descriptions that read like a wish list for a mythical unicorn to interview processes that test how well someone interviews rather than how well they work, many hiring practices create unnecessary friction, arbitrary filters, and inefficiencies. In this talk, we’ll take a candid look at the common hiring pitfalls that frustrate interviewees and hurt businesses. We’ll explore why some of these practices persist, how they impact your ability to hire and what you can do to create a more equitable, more effective hiring process. This talk will offer practical ways to put humanity back into hiring, and make it a better experience for everyone.

Why I look forward to this talk

At factor10 we are aiming to continuously improve our team of coding architect consultants. We’ve taken ‘hire a woman’ out of the backlog a while back. Unfortunately, we haven’t succeeded yet. I spoke about it with an old friend and he said “that is a solved problem, just call Suzi”.

Suzi was running the recruitment strategy for Thoughtworks in the early 2000s, during a period of massive, global growth. Her job was to build a recruiting function that could hire 1000 technologists a year, and improve the number of technical women at every level. If you think back to 2010, our industry looked different. Thoughtworks were successfully changing their number of women, and starting to think more about inclusivity, or what is now called Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI.)

I have “known” Suzi for two months now, but we’ve both worked in similar situations (XP-influenced contexts) for 20+ years. So it’s like hanging out with an old friend!

Suzi founded Appartenir in 2018. The word is French and means to belong. We’ve been asked since the very start of factor10 to suggest improvement possibilities in very many different organizations. The most common suggestion of all has been to improve “togetherness”, I think that’s the same as “to belong”. When that is lacking, success won’t happen. And Suzi being Suzi, she’ll show you Maslow’s hierarchy of needs model to prove the point ;-)

In our collaboration with Suzi, we’ve just started and have scraped the surface. There is a lot more for us to learn. But we don’t want to keep it to ourselves, we’d like to share and therefore we are super happy to have Suzi on board for a presentation this year. Expect to learn about how you can improve both yourself and your organization!

/Jimmy