Need for a System To Support DEI Hiring
In the race to connect high-speed fibre to 8 million homes in more than 285 cities, towns, and villages, CityFibre has been on a rapid growth curve. The company knew that its aggressive headcount goals combined with an executiveled initiative to promote equal opportunities could open it up to more high-quality talent. However, CityFigure 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 Richard Hutchinson, Head of Resourcing at CityFibre. 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.
CityFibre’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 CityFibre 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,” Hutchinson said.
About CityFibre
- Industry: Telecommunications
- Region: UK
- Employees: 1,450
- Headquarters: London, UK
- Hiring Model: Centralized
CityFibre is the UK’s largest independent Full Fibre 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.
Head of Resourcing
SmartRecruiters Empowers Conversations for Continuous DEI Improvement
CityFibre brought on SmartRecruiters as its new ATS to bring consistency to its hiring processes and gain visibility into DEI performance. SmartRecruiters’ 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 recruitment process.
Informed Stakeholder Conversations
Hutchinson 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,” Richard said. With the new intelligence, CityFibre 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, CityFibre can use that information to develop recruitment marketing strategies for each group or take steps to mitigate hiring biases.
Scorecards Level the Playing Field
SmartRecruiters’ 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 Hutchinson. 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.
Head of Resourcing
Key Outcomes
In less than a year of tracking diversity metrics with SmartRecruiters, CityFibre 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
Award-Winning Workplace for Women Becomes More Diverse
Before bringing on SmartRecruiters, CityFibre 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, CityFibre 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. At CityFibre, that journey is informed by actionable reporting from SmartRecruiters and filled with ongoing strategic conversations. Hutchinson 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.”
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