Throughout March, we celebrated Women’s History by recognising the invaluable strides made by women both at work and in society. These accomplishments have challenged the status quo, expanded societal awareness, and set forth a new and powerful path for women.
Through continued vocalisation and sharing stories of women-led successes, the importance of fostering an environment of access and growth is apparent. Novices turned leaders now have a social responsibility to invest in and encourage women to rise and make a space for themselves in the world.
A long-time technology customer of ours is making strides to close the gender gap in their organisation by committing to reformation that starts with leveraging their internal and external support. We partnered with our customer’s Global Diversity and Inclusion Lead to fully understand the corporate strategy and pinpoint where change was needed and how to best implement improvements. Our team examined their strategic pipelines to identify which can be targeted to exceed the 25% shortlist of required female candidates and pulled weekly AI analysis reports to show how many women were in processing. By 2023, our customer is aiming to have a 60/40 split of male to female employees.
Pontoon partnered with Vercida to expand their Diversity & Inclusion efforts and utilise their site as a hiring channel to reach their intended candidate audience. Market intel allowed our customer to see how they stacked up against their competitors and from there they were able to design social media campaigns that included videos highlighting a day in the life of a woman at their company and why they’re an excellent choice for the woman-forward workforce. To increase visibility, we implemented a video application tool that produced video-based job descriptions to highlight female leader and send communications to active applicants detailing what they can expect throughout the candidate experience.
We also invested in a recruitment tool that specialised in text analysis, to optimise their job postings to include verbiage that appeals to women. Text analysis was highly useful when targeting applicants through job descriptions as it identified the tone and customised language for the intended audience. This technology also eliminated words and phrases that skewed job descriptions to read either more feminine or more masculine.
Through our analysis, we identified an area of opportunity to develop our customer’s Employee Value Proposition to better attract the female workforce. Our Adecco Group sister brand, Penna, supported employer branding efforts by restructuring job descriptions to eliminate unconscious bias and ultimately attract more female applicants. Penna also incorporated key benefits that were especially geared toward women to elevate the appeal of a particular role.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion play a substantial role throughout our organisation, we also work in partnership with our customers and industry partners to make progressive change in the professional world. As core social issues continue to be addressed, companies are evolving their policies to enhance inclusivity and build on the diversity of their workforce. At Pontoon, we are proud to commit to actions that close the gaps of inequality and partner with other like-minded entities setting out to do the same.