22m 45s

Hold The Door Open: Rethinking Talent Retention and Inclusion

How do we build a creative industry that not only finds talent -but actually holds onto it?

In this episode, Tacita Small and Keith Arrowsmith sit down with Mel Rodrigues, Chief Executive at Creative Access and Vice Chair at Women in Film and TV, to explore how we create space for people to thrive.From supporting mid-career professionals to sharing how meaningful inclusion, mentorship, and better leadership can shape a stronger, more sustainable industry for everyone.The WorkWise for Screen podcast is supported by the BFI, awarding National Lottery Funding.

This episode covers:

The power of mentorship
Avoiding box-ticking exercises and hiring authentically instead
How to retain talent
Hiring people with potential, over perfection
Advice for leaders who want to do better

Episode Topics

Introductions into Mel Rodrigues, passion leading you to unexpected careers, skills helping in other fields, family and how leadership means embracing uncertainty. (00:00 -05:05)

Valuing potential over perfection when hiring, especially for emerging talent, discovering the importance of seeking diverse perspectives and understanding how tokenism demotivates and wastes valuable talent. (05:05 -09:15)

Starting with focused and meaningful actions as a small business, the big difference that salary transparency can make, the importance of checking pay equity. (09:15 -12:25)

Connecting with Creative Access, why mid-career pros leave and valuing inclusion. (12:25 -18:15)

Everyone’s career is different, how clear communication is key and investing in mentorship (18:15 -to end)

Episode Highlights

“So the South Asian community -you know, my dad's side of the family are engineers, lawyers, pharmacists, and doctors. So...without going into all of the history of it, this is a kind of a colonial legacy of what are the professions that South Asians take up in order to earn good money, gain status and have stability. So, there was a lot of fear in my family about what my career would be because all they knew were pharmacy, law, medicine, and those typesof traditional professions. So there wasn't knowledge about the creative sector. And I think these are some of the barriers that different communities face when there isn't that knowledge base within your immediate circle. Um, so the biggest barrier I hadwas probably explaining that I was going to be okay, and that even if I didn't have all the answers, now I could see a pathway because actually my legal training was gonna help me become a brilliant journalist.” (02:40) -Mel Rodrigues

“Always, always look for potential over perfection. So, potential is just seeing that spark. This person's interesting. They're thoughtful, they've done their homework, they're excited. They're raw material. You know, if you're an emerging talent in thecreative space, of course you're not gonna have the technical, the editorial skill yet, but you've got that potential.” (05:15) -Mel Rodrigues

“The screen sector in particular has been brilliant at entry level work, so we've got to a point where we've had some really well-established mentoring schemes, programs open the doors wide, taking the doors off the hinges. Knocking down the wall, you know, we've done this really good bit of entry-level work. And then what you've got, um, if you look atthe diamond data, which is the reporting tool for TV, which is in its seventh or eighth year now. And what we see is really good representation, in terms of ethnicity, gender, and crucially disability, which was really poor for so long. We are almost in double digits for disability, which I didn't think we were gonna see. But I think what has happened is what we didn't do was look ahead and look further up the pipeline at how to remove some of those blockers to the next steps.” (13:25) -Mel Rodrigues