Whether it’s fishing in untapped talent pools to combat skills shortages, or simply to recognise the benefits of variety of thought that comes from having a diverse workforce, diversity is a hot topic on the agenda around many a board room. Everyone’s talking about it, but there seems to be very few people who have managed to address it.

Hays Talent Solutions are working with multiple clients to break the mould, and help them achieve where the majority fail.

Using female talent to address the IT Skills Shortage

As part of an internal IT delivery transformation project our client was seeking to increase the headcount in their internal tech hub, bringing development back in house and moving away from their off-shore model. However, deadlines were tight, and supply of technical project managers and software engineers were in short supply. As a company openly committed to increasing gender parity in the workplace it was clear attracting female tech talent would be key to addressing the problem.

Working closely with the internal hiring team and HR department Hays undertook research into the most appropriate advertising and recruitment channels, mapping the market both internally and externally.

The result was all of the roles were filled, through the use of an integrated campaign to raise awareness and generate candidates, including:

• Use of the Hays, client and job board candidate databases
• X-Ray searching on developer communities such as StackOverFlow, GitHub, and LinkedIn
• External advertising on local, generalist and specialist job boards as well as social media
• A virtual recruitment fair and an open day event
• Referral bonus scheme
• Internal promotion from onsite adverts to team e-mails
• LinkedIn updates both to the client’s networks and in relevant groups, such as Women in Technologies
• Entry of client staff into relevant awards, such as the everywoman in Technology Awards
   

The result

Whilst the advertising didn’t yield the direct placement results we anticipated, the roles were filled and importantly for the client, nearly 40% of these hires were female. By taking an integrated approach, not only did we support them to diversify their workforce, but we raised awareness of their brand as someone at the forefront of tackling the shortage of women in tech, to ensure a future pipeline of tech talent.

Contact us to discuss developing your diverse workforce