Need for a System To Support DEI Hiring
In the race to connect high-speed fiber to 8 million homes in more than 285 cities, towns, and villages, the customer has been on a rapid growth curve. The customer knew that its aggressive headcount goals combined with an executive-led initiative to promote equal opportunities could open it up to more high-quality talent. However, the customer lacked technology and hiring processes that could support hiring for diversity.
“We had massive challenges around diversity in the organization from a gender and ethnicity perspective,” said the Head of Resourcing in the customer company. It was partly an industry problem and partly due to the company’s rapid growth. “In the early stages, we were simply focused on getting people into the organization,” he added.
The customer’s current ATS could not track sensitive information in a GDPR-compliant way, and it was unable to separate that information from specific candidates so that the customer could explore it in aggregate. “We couldn’t see how far candidates were getting in our process or determine how we were doing from a hiring target perspective, “the Head of Resourcing said.
Simplifyhire Empowers Conversations for Continuous DEI Improvement
The customer brought on Simplifyhire as its new ATS to bring consistency to its hiring processes and gain visibility into DEI performance. Simplifyhire’s Report Builder function enables recruiters to separate demographic data from individual applications and build custom reports that provide a bird’s eye view of the entire hiring process.
Informed Stakeholder Conversations
The Head of Resourcing takes the reports into meetings with different divisional representatives, extending all the way up to senior leaders eager for information about the company’s performance in diverse hiring. “All the different reporting views enable me to tell different stories to different audiences, “the Head of Resourcing said. With the new intelligence, the customer can get the answers to questions like: Is the company getting enough applications from diverse groups? Are those applicants making it through the initial evaluation stages to reach the shortlist stage? Which teams could have a more diverse mix of candidates? Then, the customer can use that information to develop hiring marketing strategies for each group or take steps to mitigate hiring biases.
About the Customer
- Industry: Telecommunications
- Region: North America
- Employees: 1,450
- Headquarters: Dallas, TX
- Hiring Model: Centralized
The customer is North America’s largest independent Full Fiber infrastructure platform. The company provides digital infrastructure that enables its wholesale customers to provide ultra-fast, reliable and futureproof broadband, ethernet and 5G services to homes and businesses and other sites such as schools and hospitals.
We used Simplifyhire’s Report Builder to create a DEI-focused report which helps us develop our attraction strategy, drive recruiter and hiring manager action, report on performance, and engage with our business stakeholders to present accurate and real-time insight into our DEI challenges and results.
Scorecards Level the Playing Field
Simplifyhire’s approach to collaborative hiring using scorecards became a powerful asset in preventing unconscious bias. “An important part of a successful DEI solution is making sure that we’re focused on the quality of the assessment,” said the Head of Resourcing. Individual interviewers fill out scorecards that assess each candidate in a consistent, quantitative way. Because the cards are filled out in isolation and then compared afterward, they assist hiring teams in filtering out discrepancies in individual approaches to assessment.
Key Outcomes
In less than a year of tracking diversity metrics with Simplifyhire, the customer achieved:
- 34% of hires are female, up from 28% the previous year
- 21% of hires are from ethnically underrepresented groups, up from 14% the previous year
- 50% of quality assurance engineering hires are female
- Received the Times Top 50 Employer for Women award for the second year in a row
Interested in compliant, actionable diversity hiring metrics? Get in touch and request a first demo.
Simplifyhire’s Report Builder enables us to build the right reports to inform our thinking and confirm that we are doing the right thing. The reports have been invaluable in helping us meet DEI hiring targets.
- Head of Resourcing
Award-Winning Workplace for Women Becomes More Diverse
Before bringing on Simplifyhire, the customer had already won the Times Top 50 Employer for Women. The company knew they could do better, and they did: after less than a year of tracking results in the system, the customer saw the percentage of female hires increase from 28% to 34%. Half of its quality assurance engineering hires are now female. And the percentage of ethnically underrepresented hires increased from 14% to 21%. To top it off, they won the Times Top 50 Employer for Women for the second year in a row.
The road to greater diversity is a continuous journey. For the customer, that journey is informed by actionable reporting from Simplifyhire and filled with ongoing strategic conversations. therefore, of Resourcing said, “Because we’ve been able to have these focused conversations, the data is having an impact on how our business thinks and operates and therefore has given us that opportunity to succeed.”
Simplifyhire is a leading direct sourcing talent acquisition platform that helps businesses of all sizes find, engage, and hire the right talent quickly and cost-effectively. With its powerful AI-driven technology, Simplifyhire enables recruiters to source more than 100 million passive candidates from over 200 countries and territories. Simplifyhire also provides automated candidate engagement and comprehensive reporting to help its users make informed decisions. With features like multi-language search, auto-follow-up, and candidate outreach, Simplifyhire is helping companies save up to 60% of their time in the hiring process and reduce their cost-per-hire by up to 70%. More than 5,000 businesses around the world, including the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM, are leveraging Simplifyhire to optimize their hiring efforts and build top-performing teams.