How to Consciously Attract More Female Talent | Best Practice by SIX
Diversity strengthens our innovative capacity and directly contributes to our business success, resulting in transforming the financial markets. SIX has a highly diverse workforce in terms of languages and cultural backgrounds. However, women are underrepresented at almost every level at SIX – especially the senior level. Therefore, we are striving to grow the percentage of women at each middle and top management level to a minimum of 25% by 2023. To reach this target, we had to reconsider our talent acquisition process.
This best practice was first published in the Gender Intelligence Report 2020.
First of all, we had to create awareness among our managers of the pure fact that we need to have a more gender-balanced workforce at almost every level. In the last six months, we have rolled out a new female-friendly talent acquisition process to support this internal awareness. We did so by recognizing the added value of diverse teams proven by an endless number of studies, and motivating intrinsically, and not so much through KPIs on hiring women.
Head Talent Acquisition at SIX
At the end of last year, SIX decided to create a Talent Acquisition team that includes not only Recruiting but also Employer Branding, as both topics mutually influence each other. With this move, we completely changed our end-to-end talent acquisition process: integrating new steps to change the mind-set of recruiters and hiring managers, gathering buy-in from management, and offering training sessions to hiring managers on how they can move the needle to attract more women.
Recruiters are now using a gender diversity checklist to cover all aspects during the recruiting process where female friendliness matters. This includes part-time and job-sharing positions, learning how to write female-friendly job ads by using different wording and content, and also the goal of interviewing at least one female candidate for every vacancy and involving at least one woman as an interview partner during the hiring process.
Gender equality impact story postcard from the CEO in cooperation with Advance, personally sent to all female
employees across the organization on IWD 2020
Gender diversity guide used by Recruiters at SIX
Example of employer branding campaign at SIX targeting women
If female candidates cannot be considered for a given open position, we consider them for other vacancies, add them to the talent pools and maintain continuous contact. Moreover, we monitor our internal female talents and promote our referral program actively. As a result, hiring managers and teammates are activating their networks and referring great candidates. Last, but not least, we are also thinking of our young professionals succession pipeline. So, this year we held our first SIX ‘Girls 4 IT’ day. The ‘Girls 4 IT’ day playfully introduces schoolgirls to information technology, takes a look behind the façade of bits and bytes, and emphasizes that IT is not just mathematics, but also a lot of teamwork and fun.
We discovered that women are just not aware of how attractive SIX is as an employer. Typically for a Swiss company, we were too cautious in communicating and promoting the generous assets we offer, namely our SIX spirit – including our collaborative, agile working style, the freedom of taking ownership while receiving a lot of trust. So, in parallel, we have invested in employer branding campaigns especially targeting women.
We have started to build collaborations with female tech communities, participate in various female-driven events and launched social media campaigns. By becoming a Gold Member of Advance, we have found the right partner who, through the many events and workshops as well as the cross-company mentoring program, will help us progress one step faster toward our goals.
We are role-modeling female leaders through testimonials, events etc. to unleash the development possibilities. For example, we are highlighting the fact that we offer internal mentoring specifically for female talents and fill at least 30% of the seats in leadership programs with women. We have also implemented a peer coaching program for working parents.
It is equally important that women are encouraged to increasingly step into the spotlight and share and pass on their experiences to encourage other women to follow their path. So, within SIX we also have a Gender Diversity Network, which organizes educational events to learn from each other and promote networking. We also publish a regular newsletter to promote all these activities.
To reflect the fact that the growth in the percentage of women at the executive level is being taken seriously, we have had a woman on the extended Executive Board since 2019, and a woman on the Executive Board since 2020. At middle and top management, we have introduced a reporting process for the Executive Board to review our progress.
To get a perspective on where we stand in the market, and to determine if our activities are becoming fruitful, we are participating in the Advance and HSG (University of St. Gallen) Gender Intelligence Report.
We believe that with all these changes and measures we can become an employer of choice for female talents.
This Best Practice was first published in the Gender Intelligence Report 2020.
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