Part 5: Building a diverse workforce

Building a diverse workforce

Respondents felt that overall, their organization had the right strategies in place for recruiting the next generation of technology talent, with 76% agreeing. It’s clear that as businesses seek to establish and maintain their competitive advantage, building a diverse team of talented employees is a key enabler of growth.

76% of respondents confirmed that they have a diversity and inclusion strategy in place when it comes to hiring technology talent into the business.

While it’s reassuring that organizations recognize the importance of DEI, building a diverse organization was still seen as a challenge, with 38% of companies admitting that they were falling behind as a whole in terms of diversity. The US was the most concerned about this issue with 48% agreeing.
This mirrored the boardroom’s feelings towards diversity within their tech team specifically, which also had 38% say they were falling behind. However, this means the majority (62%) don’t feel they are behind in this area - an indication that much work has been done to focus on improved diversity in tech, regardless of whether it has yet translated to a more diverse workforce. When asked if there was a particular priority when implementing DEI strategies in the recruitment process, the general consensus was that there was no single biggest priority as organizations look to broaden their talent pools. Once again, CEOs were the most critical of their organization, with 52% feeling their organization was falling behind when it came to diversity. Interestingly, only 37% of chief people and chief HR officers felt the same; potentially a case of the operational leads involved with the work to improve this area viewing things more positively than CEOs who see it from the perspective of current outcomes. Pulling out the overall sentiment within our focus group, the general feeling was that diversity initiatives are ‘getting there’ but there’s still more to be done on the journey to increase diversity as it remains a focus across all organizations.

What we're hearing…

“A lot of diversity initiatives and reporting focus on the pipeline of talent, and they don’t focus beyond this on areas like retention of diverse talent. The initiatives are wasted if they don’t make our talent feel they belong and are heard and seen.”

Georgina Owens, CTO, William Hill

“Our technology talent needs are expanding in the field of genomic surveillance. Globally, we can’t train people fast enough to meet these needs, so we’re automating and standardizing tasks to free up skills and allow people to use their skills to focus on the future.”

John Sillitoe, Director of the Genomic Surveillance Unit, Wellcome Sanger Institute

“The findings of the survey also address the challenges of diversity in tech recruitment. Despite successes in strategy implementation for tech talent recruitment, there remains a notable percentage of executives who believe their companies are falling behind in fostering a diverse workforce. This disconnect points to the complexities of implementing effective diversity and inclusion policies and the need for more focused efforts in this area.”