Breaking Down Our D&I Strategy: Gender
We recently spoke about what Diversity and Inclusion means to us, and a big part of our ongoing journey is sharing the initiatives and changes that we are making internally as well as externally for our candidates and clients.
Diversity and Inclusion is incredibly multifaceted, so it was important for us to take “baby steps” and address areas in our business that needed immediate change.
The first thing we looked at was gender diversity and how we can improve this. The recruitment sector is known for being male-dominated, and an article published by APSCo in 2020 highlighted just how much work needs to be done.
The piece detailed that “almost a third (30%) of recruitment firms have less than 5% female leaders at board level and another third (32%), only have between 21-50%.
Furthermore, two-fifths of recruitment firms have an overall attrition rate of between 21% and 100%. However, when focussing on female attrition, a third of those (33%) are women within sales functions, while only 16% are females within support functions.”
Our internal D&I group at Orbis spent the first few months of 2021 focussing on gender equality and inclusion within the workplace. This included analysing and re-working our hiring processes, our benefits, our staff occasions, the language we use, as well as our unconscious bias.
Currently, we have 30% women and 70% men at Orbis, and we are currently researching ways to source, represent and store information regarding nonbinary and genderqueer individuals.
Our main goal this year was to increase female representation from 20% to 30%, which we are proud to say we have achieved already. We'll continue extending this goal to close the gap between female and male representation in the business.
We believe we have achieved this because our hiring processes have changed. Altering job advertisements and adapting skills requirements has contributed to this, too.
However, there is absolutely more we can do. We are currently reviewing how we can improve these statistics, as well as continuing to cultivate a culture that will attract women, nonbinary, and genderqueer folks.
Career paths and benefits
We have also implemented tailored career paths, suited to each individual. This ensures their progression and day to day tasks are something they genuinely enjoy and everyone in our team can celebrate their unique skills and passions.
We also ensure any additional company incentives are versatile and inclusive. For instance, we're continuing with our quarterly lunch clubs for high achievers, but if these aren't suitable for anyone, they can choose to have a 5* grade restaurant box delivered to their address for them to enjoy when they choose.
A lot of our direction to achieve a closing gender gap has been led from the very start of our team's journey and interaction with our brand. Editing our internal communications, so it is gender-neutral has also been a big change, and we have seen a shift in how meetings are conducted and how people interact with one another.
We provide consistent feedback, compliment the unconsciously competent and ensure any leaderboards feature a diverse range of job titles and genders.
What we do for our community
One of the first things we did when looking at gender diversity externally, was asking ourselves how we can uplift and showcase fantastic women in tech, which is why we launched our women in tech series on our blog.
This was ongoing throughout the whole of March, and enabled us to act and incite change, which you can read more of here.
Some of our favourite pieces are:
Alongside running campaigns and celebrating notable days, we also focus on supporting clients with specific searches, so they can achieve their gender diversity goals sustainably whilst still attracting the best talent.
