Nadia Edwards-Dashti has spent close to twenty years putting people into fintech jobs, and the Drofa Comms team is delighted to announce her as the guest on the newest Women Leading the Way episode! Nadia is a Co-Founder and Chief Customer Officer at Harrington Starr, the financial services and fintech recruitment firm she helped build from the ground up.
As a matter of fact, Nadia didn’t even plan to get into finance. She studied history, then international relations, at UCL, aiming for the foreign office. Occasionally, a recruiter from financial services pulled her into an interview with ten minutes’ warning. There was no explanation of what the job actually was. Although she didn’t get it, she decided to stay in the industry.
What kept her there was a problem that recruitment didn’t run on trust and many treated candidates as an afterthought. In 2010, that observation gave birth to Harrington Starr.
In the episode, talking with host Maria Tunikova, Nadia gets specific about who gets left out of fintech hiring and why. She has little patience for CV-led screening or interviews built to trip candidates, and she rejects the excuse that diverse talent “just isn’t out there.” Women are already 40% of financial services and 28% of fintech. These are numbers, she says, that come down to what companies want to see and what they allow themselves to see.
It’s the same argument she has made in over 600 episodes of FinTech’s DEI Discussions. She also made it in her book, Fintech Women Walk the Talk, drawn from the podcast’s first 100 conversations.
The conversation also turns to AI’s growing role in hiring. Nadia argues that automation still needs experienced people to check its work. She warns that today’s wave of lean hiring, where one role engulfs several ones, is unnoticeably depleting the pipeline.
“It really is what you want to see and what you allow yourself to see.” — Nadia Edwards-Dashti.
Catch the full conversation on diversity in fintech on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.
