‘Sometimes I felt a fraud’: Salesforce UK&I CEO on lending her voice to diversity

When she became CEO of Sales­force UK and Ire­land in March 2021, Zahra Bahrololou­mi set a clear mark­er for suc­cess. She want­ed more women on her lead­er­ship team and greater rep­re­sen­ta­tion and inclu­sion across the board.

Bahrololou­mi described this diver­si­ty dri­ve in inter­views at the time as non-nego­tiable, adding: “It is our biggest focus. If I don’t do it, I’ll be real­ly, real­ly angry.”

The region­al CEO moved quick­ly to increase the num­ber of women in her exec­u­tive team, tak­ing the total to five out of eight peo­ple. Two are also from an eth­nic minor­i­ty. Reflect­ing on the changes in her first year, Bahrololou­mi says: “We’ve now got a bril­liant spread with­in my imme­di­ate lead­er­ship team.”

More than half of the extend­ed lead­er­ship team are also women, accord­ing to Bahrololou­mi. “We’re bring­ing that diver­si­ty to the top table because peo­ple can’t be what they can’t see, so we need to set that tone,” she adds.

Look­ing at the wider com­pa­ny, when Bahrololou­mi joined from Accen­ture around 30% of Sales­force UK&I’s sales hires were women. In the first quar­ter of 2022, that fig­ure has risen to 54%. She says these changes are a result of “excel­lent part­ner­ship with our recruit­ment teams and our busi­ness lead­ers” and demon­strate that the com­pa­ny has “real­ly turned the dial” in terms of bring­ing more women into the busi­ness. But she adds: “We are by no means done. We still have so much to do.”

In the most recent gen­der pay gap report, which pro­vides a snap­shot of the company’s pay data from 5 April 2021, women at Sales­force UK&I were paid 30p less than men (com­par­ing medi­an hourly pay). Although there has been an improve­ment in the dif­fer­ence between men’s and women’s mean hourly pay (21.8% in favour of men in 2020/21 reduced to 10.3% in 2021/22), only 25% of the high­est paid roles at the organ­i­sa­tion were occu­pied by women.

Bahrololou­mi claims that many of the changes at the top of the com­pa­ny have come into place since this report was filed. She expects there to be a much greater improve­ment in this area in the next iter­a­tion of its gen­der pay gap data because of the increased num­ber of women now in senior posi­tions.

Ethnic diversity at Salesforce

Sales­force has built up a rep­u­ta­tion as a good employ­er and was list­ed as one of the best places to work in Glassdoor’s annu­al top 10 rank­ings in the US, Cana­da, UK, France and Ger­many. But a recent motion at the cloud soft­ware company’s annu­al gen­er­al meet­ing raised con­cerns about how the busi­ness has approached diver­si­ty.

Invest­ment firm Tulip­share put for­ward a pro­pos­al call­ing for an inde­pen­dent racial equal­i­ty audit, ref­er­enc­ing the res­ig­na­tions of two black women. Both ques­tioned whether the company’s pub­lic stance on equal­i­ty and diver­si­ty was matched inter­nal­ly, with one resignee Cyn­thia Per­ry stat­ing in an open let­ter that Sales­force is “not a place of Equal­i­ty for All”. The pro­pos­al was reject­ed by Sales­force. 

A spokesper­son for the com­pa­ny says: “Equal­i­ty is a long-stand­ing core val­ue at Sales­force, and we are con­tin­u­ous­ly eval­u­at­ing ways to improve and accel­er­ate progress against our equal­i­ty goals. Trans­paren­cy and account­abil­i­ty are crit­i­cal in our path for­ward, and we will con­tin­ue to work with lead­ing third par­ties to inform our strat­e­gy and pro­grams, as well as report on our progress through our quar­ter­ly and annu­al updates.”

Despite ques­tions over the suc­cess in this area in the wider busi­ness, Bahrololou­mi believes the UK arm of the com­pa­ny is mak­ing pos­i­tive strides for­ward. It has also adapt­ed its recruit­ment process to increase the num­ber of women and eth­nic minori­ties it hires. After review­ing its hir­ing prac­tices, the com­pa­ny found that many were drop­ping out of the process at the inter­view pan­el, Salesforce’s final recruit­ment stage.

“We learned that women and eth­nic minori­ties with a dif­fer­ent cul­tur­al upbring­ing were either declin­ing offers or drop­ping out at that point, so we had to be more thought­ful about that pan­el set­up,” Bahrololou­mi says. “What we thought was a fair and won­der­ful­ly robust process had to be tweaked.”

A decline coun­cil was set up to dis­cov­er why peo­ple were reject­ed or declined at the inter­view stage; this revealed that the inter­view pan­el was not con­ducive to diverse recruit­ment as it favoured can­di­dates who were con­fi­dent in shout­ing about their achieve­ments. Con­se­quent­ly, this ele­ment of the hir­ing process has been adapt­ed to sup­port peo­ple with alter­na­tive skill sets.

Breaking glass ceilings

Bahrololou­mi has long been an advo­cate for diver­si­ty and inclu­sion and is a mem­ber of the Tech­nol­o­gy Lead­er­ship Group for the Prince’s Trust. But it has not always been a top­ic that she has been com­fort­able tak­ing the lead on. “When I have lent my voice to diver­si­ty, I some­times felt a fraud because I haven’t hit lots of ceil­ings or had to break through a sense of adver­si­ty,” she says. 

In her 22 years at Accen­ture, Bahrololou­mi worked her way up to become the pro­fes­sion­al ser­vices company’s tech­nol­o­gy lead and was head­hunt­ed for the top posi­tion at Sales­force UK&I. But when she start­ed her tech­nol­o­gy career, she says she was typ­i­cal­ly the only woman in the room. “I’m also a brown woman and was raised to believe that you have to work hard­er and be more pro­duc­tive than any­body else,” she adds. “I think that’s a voice in my ear and I’m sure it is in the ear of many peo­ple like me.”

Since going through this jour­ney, Bahrololou­mi says: “I can help peo­ple and I am legit­i­mate in that even though I per­haps haven’t faced some of the strug­gles or the closed doors as some peo­ple.”

With Sales­force look­ing to cre­ate 271,000 jobs in the UK and Ire­land by 2026, Bahrololou­mi hopes that the changes she is mak­ing will mean these hires will be from a much broad­er diver­si­ty of back­grounds.