No surprise to anyone who knows her, one-half of our Canadian LiveHire sister duo Tzvia, is a keen climber and an absolute lover of the outdoors.

“While I always want to be outside, it’s a good balance. LiveHire during the week and the Grampians over the weekend. I’ve thought about changing careers and doing something outside, but I really like what I do! When I think about not doing it anymore, it makes me sad.” 

Tzvia likes to put her all into her work, needing to “understand why it matters” and why it’s important so that she can do it for “the right reason”.

A huge advocate for the WIT movement, Tzvia explains that “in terms of the sport [AFL & climbing] I play and coming into work, women aren’t equally represented in everything I do… And I think the movement is important because it helps to bring women together. It’s good seeing women supporting each other, it’s really important.”Summing up an encounter she had whilst climbing, Tzvia reflects on a reoccurring conversation she’s had in both the tech and sporting organisations, “someone said ‘well, she didn’t put her hand up for it’, and I had the same answer that I have every time I hear this, ‘You need to build an environment where women feel comfortable putting their hand up!'”.

Tzvia believes instilling the option of a career in tech for women when they are young is incredibly important, stating “I tutored for a long time in high school and uni, and it’s crazy how many girls you hear saying ‘I’m not good at math’. No girl should be saying they aren’t good at it, but we let people say it and we accept it.” From her own experience within the industry, Tzvia wants women to understand that “it’s okay to be young. It’s easy to underestimate how much expertise you may have, but we’ve moved away from a world where being older means you know more. You can be a 19-year old expert as long as you speak with confidence!”Fed up with the misconceptions about the tech industry and in particular people’s perception of her own role, Tzvia wishes she could change people’s minds about the “the perceived lack of creativity. They think tech and math are so straightforward, that there’s always a right answer that you can get to. The work I like doing at LiveHire is exploring data and looking for trends… you get to dig into it and be creative! People think I do calculus all day! I don’t do calculus all day!” Facebook Messenger is Tzvia’s top tech pick explaining, “I use it to communicate with everyone from home in Canada, I think it’s a bit of an expat thing. Technology makes people distant from one another, but Facebook makes it easier to connect with someone that you may not even know that well. Also, it’s great for travel friends, six years later you’ll be in the same country and you can meet up!”And when it comes to advice, Tzvia thinks it’s vitally important for women in the industry to “know your value, and if you know everything that’s on the list of what they want for the job, that means you have everything and more and you’re overqualified. I know a lot of women want to have all of the skills that are listed on the job ad, but once I got the idea in my head that if I had everything I was too much, I realised what I could do.”

Learn more about LiveHire’s gender diversity results here.