Episode
1-Year AnniversaryYour Origin Story Is the Job Skill
Nobody's Hiring For
with T. Tara Turk-Haynes
This one's special — it's Talentless's 1-Year Anniversary Episode. Thank you for listening, sharing, and showing up for us this year.
Des and Ashley sit down with T. Tara Turk-Haynes — founder of Equity Activations, creator of The Origin Arc framework, first-generation college grad and first-generation corporate worker, and 15+ years deep in talent acquisition and people operations. She's been featured in Lars Schmidt's Redefining HR, profiled by Business Insider, and spoken at RecFest, Culture Amp, and Living Corporate.
This conversation went deeper than we expected — and harder. Tara doesn't dance around the DEI rollback. She tells us why it failed (spoiler: we put icing over a crumbling cake), what The Origin Arc actually unlocks for hiring managers and recruiters, why feedback is the talent acquisition crisis nobody is naming, and why she will not spend her therapy sessions trying to convert the immovable middle of corporate America.
If you've ever sat in an intake meeting that lasted 12 minutes, ghosted a candidate after seven rounds, or wondered why your DEI work didn't stick — this episode is your wake-up call.
About T. Tara Turk-Haynes
Tara is the founder of Equity Activations and creator of The Origin Arc framework — a methodology that unlocks the hidden value of lived experience in hiring and leadership. A first-generation college grad and first-generation corporate worker with 15+ years in talent acquisition and people operations, she has been featured in Lars Schmidt's Redefining HR, profiled by Business Insider, and spoken at RecFest, Culture Amp, and Living Corporate.
Listen to the episode
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Episode Transcript
Full conversation — searchable and screen-reader friendly
Desiree: Today we are joined by Tara Turk-Haynes. Tara is the founder of Equity Activations, a people and talent practice built on 15+ years in talent acquisition and people operations. She's a first-generation college grad and first-generation corporate worker. She's been recognized by the LA Business Journal, featured in Lars Schmidt's Redefining HR, profiled by Business Insider, spoken at RecFest, Culture Amp, Living Corporate. And she's the creator of the Origin Arc — a framework about how your story shapes everything about how you work.
Desiree: Corporate America spent the last five years saying "values, authenticity, bring your whole self to work." And then 2023 happened and now it's not really true. What do you think was the spark of the change?
Tara Turk-Haynes: Diversity, equity, and inclusion and belonging have been around much longer than people realize. When I got my in-house DEI job in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, I had mentors who had been doing it for 20 years. It's not a brand new thing. What happened is we were expected to fix decades — almost 100 years of inequitable systems — in about two years. We had a finish line when we should have never had a finish line. And we never shared definitions about what this work actually meant. People thought if you brought someone in to speak about their lived experience, you'd done your job. But we were supposed to be fixing pay audits. Performance review biases. Microaggressions in talent acquisition. Systemic barriers. We put icing over a cake that was crumbling and called it done.
Tara Turk-Haynes: God bless our business leaders, but they have the attention span of goldfish. Inclusion, belonging, AI, technology — they just move off something. We didn't set up a solid foundation and we really need to embed the work into operations for it to have sustaining impact. That's essentially what my business is all about.