Beyond Quotas: Achieving Authentic Diversity and Inclusion

In today’s rapidly evolving workplace landscape, diversity and inclusion have become more than just buzzwords; they’re integral components of successful business models. However, achieving genuine diversity and inclusion goes far beyond simply meeting quotas. It requires a nuanced approach that values individuals’ unique contributions and fosters inclusive cultures where everyone feels respected and empowered.

Traditionally, quotas have been employed to increase diversity, setting specific targets for recruiting or promoting individuals from underrepresented groups. While quotas may boost diversity statistically, they often fall short in addressing underlying biases and systemic issues. This can lead to tokenism and resentment among employees, undermining the very essence of diversity and inclusion.

To truly embrace diversity and inclusion, organisations must move beyond quotas and adopt thoughtful hiring practices. This approach prioritises quality over quantity, focusing on recruiting high-quality, diverse candidates based on their skills and competencies.

Thoughtful hiring practices involve:

Building a Diverse Talent Pipeline: Actively seeking out talented individuals from diverse backgrounds through partnerships, internships, and mentorship programs.
Aligning Hiring Practices with Organisational Values: Ensuring fairness and inclusivity throughout the recruitment process by mitigating unconscious biases and fostering transparency.
Implementing Blind Auditions and Structured Interviews: Removing identifying information from job applications and using structured interview techniques to reduce bias and ensure fairness.
Developing a Culture of Inclusion: Providing training and education for hiring teams, fostering leadership commitment to diversity, and establishing employee resource groups and mentorship programs.

Continuous monitoring and evaluation are essential for measuring the success of diversity and inclusion efforts. Key performance indicators, regular audits, and transparent communication help organisations stay accountable and identify areas for improvement.

Despite the challenges, embracing authentic diversity and inclusion is essential for creating workplaces where all individuals feel valued, empowered, and able to contribute fully. By going beyond quotas and embracing thoughtful hiring practices, organisations can unlock the numerous benefits that diversity and inclusion bring to the workplace and society at large.

Photo by Walls.io : https://www.pexels.com/photo/whiteboard-with-hashtag-company-values-of-walls-io-website-15543047/

Candidate Engagement in Fintech Recruitment

I read recently that in the next four years, The Global Fintech Market is expected to grow at a rate of 23.58%. With news emerging that the Scottish Government has appointed an adviser to assist tech, with £7m earmarked for the project, Scottish Fintech has a great opportunity on its hands to grow.

But this growth will need great talent to sustain it. Talent that will sustain growth and drive innovation – not an easy feat considering the current shortages of candidates across all tech markets.

This shortage isn’t due to slow in the next few years either. In a recent study, The World Economic Forum pointed out that the global talent shortage in technology, media, and telecommunications alone is due to reach 4.3million workers by 2030.

What Does This Mean for Fintech Recruitment?

It means that it’s becoming more difficult to hire top talent and will continue to become harder. We already know that top tech talent hold most of the cards, shortages meaning they have their choice of employers and can command top salaries.

Businesses that want to continue to innovate and stay at the top of their game need the right people to do so. Which means being able to attract and engage the best candidates. But with many businesses in Scotland at the startup or ramping stage, recruitment often doesn’t come top of their list.

Getting the right people in place is a combination of being able to access alternative talent pools, and engaging them and your traditional pools.

How to Improve Candidate Engagement?

The type of people you’re looking for aren’t usually out of a job. Right now, it’s not just candidates who need to impress employers, employers need to impress candidates too. And that means working on your candidate engagement:

Working on Your Candidate Value Proposition

Salary and standard benefits are no longer enough to engage with top talent in the tech space. You need to do more. That means improving your candidate value proposition. What do you offer over and above the competition?

The easiest way to improve your candidate value proposition is to improve your employee value proposition. Use internal surveys to ask your current team what they like about working for you and what you could be doing better. The happier people are at work, the more likely they are to spread good word of mouth among friends and peers.

Changes could be more flexible hours, the ability to permanently work from home, better choice of benefits, company shares (particularly for start-ups), or better work culture. Many people are also looking for more social responsibility from their employers, both with charitable efforts or sustainability.

When you have identified what areas are important to your current team, ensure these are clear on your careers site, on your social media, and in any candidate collateral, you issue.

Put More Effort into Diversity and Inclusion

Currently, just 24% of people working in fintech in Scotland are women. Considering women makeup 51.5% of the population, that figure looks low. Just 1.4% of fintech workers are black and 6.2% Asian. (Solutions Driven 2021)

All of these are untapped, diverse markets that businesses should be engaging with to diversify their talent pools and find candidates their competitors can’t. But do you improve candidate engagement in these areas?

Talk to the diverse people in your current teams – what could you be doing better to make them feel included? Is there anything you’re doing wrong?
Set up diversity groups – is there scope for a women’s panel in the business? Could you set up a diversity workforce?
Embed diversity into your KPIs – set targets for diversity and make them part of your recruitment team’s KPIs.
Improve diversity branding – make diverse figures visible on your website, your social media, and your candidate content.
Improve your language – masculine language using words like “ninja” and “rockstar” turn women off applying for roles. Look at making your language more inclusive.

Spend More Time Engaging Candidates

Candidates like to feel sold to. They want to feel as though joining your business will benefit them and you, and that they’d be a valuable member of the team.

If “candidate engagement” consists of sending a couple of messages or emails, that’s not going to cut it. Much like a sales process, great talent needs multiple touchpoints from your company to attract the candidate. After all, a 2019 survey by Indeed showed that 13% of job seekers have ghosted a business because there wasn’t enough engagement with the hiring manager or recruiter.

If your own team doesn’t have the time to carry out a longer process like this, you need to ensure your recruitment partner does. They must be well-versed in the complexities of tech talent and spend the time and energy showing them why your business is the right one for them.

At Solutions Driven, our candidate engagement works alongside our 6F Methodology, where we ensure someone is right for a role and a company by looking at their compatibility in Fit, Freedom, Family, Fulfilment, Fortune and Future. If someone matches with your business in these areas, they’re more likely to feel an affinity with the business, feel fulfilled, and become long-term employees.

Great candidate engagement has a multitude of benefits for your business. Not only are you more likely to find and attract the talent you need right now, you also build a pipeline of connected talent for the future. If people have a great experience, even if they don’t get the role, they’re more likely to re-apply or be open to an approach further down the line. Word of mouth is vital in smaller sectors and by ensuring your employees, prospects, and potential prospects all have a positive view of your business, you’re setting yourself up for future hiring success, as well as current.

To find out more about how to connect with alternative talent pools, engage candidates, and power your growth, get in touch with Nicki Paterson at Solutions Driven today on npaterson@solutionsdriven.com.

Diversity and Inclusion in Tech: It’s Time to Focus on More than the Optics

We’ve just completed some (admittedly superficial) digging into a few of the top tech companies’ adverts. They’re pretty diverse. Over the last couple of years, Apple’s feature 64% BAME actors, by rough calculations. Amazon’s have 78%. And Lenovo’s had a 50/50 split between the sexes.

By contrast, of Apple’s 11 board members, all are white and one is a woman. Last year, Amazon appointed the first person of colour to its 10-strong board. And Lenovo, well one of their board of 10 is female…

While big tech spends big money producing high-budget adverts with diverse optics, behind the scenes things are very different. A recent Girls Who Code report pointed out 50% of women leave tech by the age of 35. And the proportion of women working in tech is now smaller, at 32%, than it was in 1984, at 35%.

Tech companies are some of the most competitive and forward-thinking businesses out there. And various studies have shown that companies with above-average diversity perform better than their competitors. What’s the use in being so cutting edge if tech can’t capitalise on these gains?

So rather than focus on how diversity in tech looks to the public, how can we make diversity in tech a real tangible thing that can help businesses grow and thrive?

Get Better at Attracting Diversity

There are probably a hundred companies paying a similar salary to you. It’s your Value Proposition that sets your business apart from the crowd, particularly in tech.

With many tech positions in high demand, companies compete through their added benefits: good work culture, progression or mobility opportunities, the ability to learn new skills, and work/life balance.

But for many, it’s how inclusive and diverse their workplace is. Not something that can be bluffed with a couple of pictures of BAME people on an advert and some nice words. Companies need to BE inclusive to attract inclusive and diverse candidates. As employees talk (and write things online), you need to put measures in place like:

a clearly-laid out inclusion plan,

a spirit of inclusivity from senior management to the most junior employee,
Inclusivity committees/groups

Get Better at Hiring Diversely

Unconscious bias naturally creeps into the recruitment process. A Yale University study found scientists of both sexes, “trained to be objective, were more likely to hire men, and consider them more competent than women, and pay them $4,000 more per year than women.”

A recent piece we wrote on Talent Maturity discussed the importance of a well-developed team. And if that’s beyond a company’s reach, how valuable an external recruiter who can help them reach a mature level can be.

And combating unconscious bias is one of the things an outside recruiter can help with, using various measures:

Clearly Laid Out Requirements

We call this Scoping at Solutions Driven. Sitting down with the hiring manager, figuring out their requirements and what success looks like. Employees are less likely to be hired on “gut feel” (another form of unconscious bias) and the brief is followed by both sides throughout.

It provides the basis of the candidate scorecard where we set down what’s important and rank each section. Perhaps a degree is desirable but experience is more important? That’s taken into account.

Blind Shortlisting

It’s difficult to hire blindly when you’re hiring for yourself. Recruitment companies regularly present candidates blindly, allowing businesses to judge them on their skills and experience, rather than their name or where they’re from.

Companies then get the best talent presented to them to final interview, without any outside factors influencing the decision.

Psychometric Testing

One of psychometric testing’s main aims is eliminating unconscious bias. Teams can focus on a candidates’ personality, attributes, and skills, rather than looking for similarities to themselves.

It can also be used on the existing workforce to determine what skills and attributes are needed on teams and help identify the right fit for each role. By saying “we need an analytical thinker” recruiters can add this into their requirements, and hone in on the “perfect match”.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/gregpsavage_filling-a-job-does-not-start-with-finding-activity-6744007540033642496-J2L-

Hiring the Right Candidates

All we’ve spoken about until now is getting the right people for your company. But what about if your company is right for the employee?

As part of our Recruitment Process Intelligence (RPI) at Solutions Driven, we employ the 6F methodology.

We look at fit, freedom, family, fulfilment, fortune, and family to determine whether an employee and a company will work well together and if reasonable adjustments can be made to get the perfect candidate onboard.

It’s an important part of the hiring process, because unhappy employees don’t stick around. And in tech, where the job market is competitive, you don’t want to waste time hiring someone who’s just going to leave.

To find out more about how your business could improve on its diversity and inclusion initiatives, and how to hire right, first time, get in touch with Nicki Paterson from Solutions Driven at npaterson@solutionsdriven.com.

Photo by Tim Mossholder from Pexels

Fintech Recruitment: Top Tips From the Professionals

It’s no secret that great fintech candidates are rare. It’s a growing industry that’s becoming cooler all the time. Face to face and phone interactions are decreasing (let’s not lie, we’re all experts at talking to chatbots now!), so the highly skilled roles needed to facilitate these changes are becoming pretty in-demand.

Add an increase in the need for cyber security and financial insurance and you’ve got a talent gap. But, if you’re reading this, you probably already know that…

In Scotland, we boast some of the best fintech businesses in the world; as the BBC reported in January 2020, the number of Scottish fintech firms grew 60% in 2019. That’s obviously slowed in 2020, but the outlook remains strong.

So, in this competitive market, how can your fintech recruitment strategy make your business survive and thrive? I’ve put together the top tips I’ve learnt working in tech and fintech recruitment that should help.

Refine your EVP

Highly skilled people in fintech can command high salaries. So, you need to differentiate your business to make it stand out. You need to give people a reason, more than money, to work for you.

And no, we’re not talking pool tables and free coffee.

The pandemic has increased the demand for flexibility and that means working from home, moveable hours, and part time working.

People also want to know that they’ll be looked after as your employee. Do you provide private healthcare? Counselling? Gym memberships? Clearly communicate what you do to improve quality of life in your careers page, your marketing, and any external sites.

Then think about your company culture, particularly important when most of us are working from home. Show how you’re inclusive, how you welcome new employees, and show this to potential candidates.

If you don’t provide the things above, why not? They’re what will make you stand out from the competition.

Widen your talent pool

Fintech in Scotland is still a relatively small industry. If you really want to discover great talent you might want to look outside either the fintech pool or your locality.

Thankfully, with great advancements in tech (especially recently) it’s much easier to work remotely and most are finding it a positive experience.

By widening your search, you get a bigger talent pool and more diverse candidates. A May 2020 McKinsey report said that “companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 25 percent more likely to have above-average profitability than companies in the fourth quartile.”

How candidates view their careers is changing too. We used to work in the same role for most of our lives, but now, people are continually changing roles, reskilling, and upskilling. Now, this ethos means it’s easier to hire people who can be trained to do specific roles, rather than only looking for those already in them.

Someone who works in customer service might be a great fit for sales, and we’ve seen designers move to development roles easily.

Get methodical about hiring

In a market with talent gaps, it’s easy to make the wrong hire. In the long-term, this can cost you a lot ”“ both financially and in your company culture. If you have a robust hiring method though, you won’t make these mistakes.

At Solutions Driven, my team and I use RPI ”“ Recruitment Process Intelligence ”“ to make the right hire, first time, every time. We use RPI with everyone from big banks hiring CEOs and startups hiring sales execs. And it always works.

Through RPI, we use various methods to find and secure the best talent. The two fundamental ones are the 6s and the 6F processes.

The 6S process is how we find and secure candidates:

We hold an initial Scoping meeting to identify the hiring needs

We create a Scorecard that matches the businesses’ criteria

We source candidates via the latest technology and human intelligence,

We Select them against the scorecard, interviews and psychometric testing

We Secure them via our 6F Process (more on that in a sec)

We Satisfy both the candidate and our clients by measuring the results and regular check-ins.

For the 6F process, we ensure that candidates and companies are matched on six key areas ”“ Fit, Freedom, Family, Fulfilment, Fortune, and Future ”“ so that your potential hire becomes a long-term, happy employee who helps propel your business forward.

Exciting passive talent

Your ideal hires are probably already in roles. Thanks, talent gap! So, when talking to fintech companies, we’ve found a big problem they have is activating passive talent who are already happy in their roles.

Many don’t even want to entertain an initial conversation.

The first thing you can do is one we’ve already discussed – improve your EVP and how you market it. In this industry, top talent wants to work with companies that are going somewhere or doing something exciting. It’s important that your brand is known for being forward-thinking and allowing people to work on great projects and progress.

It can be hard to activate passive talent by yourself. It takes indepth technology, experience, and a lot of time. So sometimes, it’s best to get the professionals in.

If you’re really serious about getting the best people to join your company, a good recruitment company, who knows your industry and knows how to attract great people will be far more cost effective in the long-run than doing it yourself.

Blog written by Nicki Paterson. Nicki is Global Head of Business Growth at Solutions Driven, a Glasgow company that has specialised in business-critical recruitment for over 20 years. Working on a flat-fee basis and 12 month guarantees, Solutions Driven’s focus is getting the right people for the right roles, first time, every time.

If you’d like to find out more about how you can recruit effectively in the fintech market, get in touch with Nicki at npaterson@solutionsdriven.com.