“Changing the recruitment standard” to achieve parity in tech

“We’re making great progress, but we’re not there yet.” How many times have you heard some such phrase spoken about achieving Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in fintech?

At Qonto, we’re impatient to “get there” as quickly as possible, even if - for now - we’re still on that journey: when it comes to gender equality, for example, a 44% female workforce overall - up from 40% at the start of 2022 - suggests we’re on the right track. However, with women making up just 16% of Qonto’s software engineering team, we still have some way to go.

So what’s holding us back?

To examine the barriers to genuine DEI, as well as how we’ll overcome them, Qonto hosted a live conference on March 21: How to improve parity within your Tech team. While the main focus was on just one of the many aspects of DEI, gender parity, the principles discussed apply to so many others, including sexual orientation, ethnicity, disability and social background. The panel brought together a wealth of practical experience in DEI in fintech recruitment:

• Marjorie Boruel, Talent Acquisition Director @Qonto
• Emmanuelle Larroque, Founder and CEO @Social Builder
• Chloé Hermary, Founder and CEO @Ada Tech School
• Karim Ogbi, Managing Director @Cloudity
• Sabrina Gooriah, Front-End Engineer Apprentice @Qonto and Ada alumnus
• Djamel Bendaoud, Senior Lead Front-End Engineer @Qonto

Below is a summary of an evening full of valuable insights.

The lack of women in tech is not a result of recruiters’ reluctance to employ female developers. Nor is it a shortage of capable female candidates. The issue lies within a wider societal context.

Tech is still perceived as a man’s world. For Emmanuelle Larroque, who founded the not-for-profit initiative Social Builder specifically to promote gender diversity in tech, this is the first obstacle women come across.

“Society has been deconstructing the link between women and tech for so long that women feel they can’t be part of it. There are high walls between them and what is seen as a ‘male industry’. The way we work is to target marketing towards women that will help them feel like they belong and to get them excited about tech. We work on inspiring women, we help them meet other women who already transitioned into tech, and we provide coding workshops so that they know that coding is accessible.”

Reforming a public education system takes time, sometimes decades. Meanwhile, the world of private enterprise continues, full steam ahead. A modern workplace requires modern skills that, according to Chloé Hermary, today’s schools simply do not provide. The Ada Tech School that Chloé created in 2019 seeks to bridge the gap with 21-month programs that combine 9 months learning on campus and 12 months putting that learning into practice through an apprenticeship. It’s not women-only, but it is woman-friendly.

“The education system in France is very outdated,” says Chloé. “The way people consume knowledge today and the way they consider their career has changed. The skills taught in schools are very far behind the skills needed by companies: that’s coding skills and other hard skills but also soft skills like developing critical thinking and the ability to ‘learn how to learn’ and to collaborate. One of the convictions of Ada is that when you’re trying to deconstruct the problems of discrimination, stereotypes, cliches, harassment - for women but for all social groups - you’re faced with the same kind of mechanisms. Ada is trying to challenge these mechanisms, not just for women but for inclusion in general.”

While society as a whole must evolve to meet the needs of the modern workplace, recruiters remain a key link in the DEI chain. And it starts at the top: company leaders need to understand why parity is a goal worth chasing.

Once managers are personally invested in achieving genuine diversity, they must adapt their hiring process accordingly. For Chloé Hermary, that means changing aptitude tests and interview questions to identify different skills, including soft skills. After all, why recruit a good coder when you can recruit someone who, with a little training, can become an awesome coder?

“Recruiters need to change what is ‘normal’ when it comes to hiring,” says Chloé. “It’s not about lowering the standard, it’s about changing the standard: how can you identify the rough diamond who has high potential for your team? Best practice we have seen for that includes changing technical tests so that candidates can choose their coding language, rather than coding games that only show if the candidate can get the solution, not how they arrived at the solution.”

Marjorie is a firm believer that if a company hires well, it will end up with parity organically. It’s a conviction she has carried into her role as Qonto’s Director of Talent Acquisition:

“We strive to be inclusive by design. It starts with inclusive job ads and job descriptions. We need to think about what kind of perks will appeal to a diverse cross-section of the population. For example, we have Qontoers who’ve told us ‘I chose Qonto because of the parenthood policy’.

“When we hire a software engineer, we focus on hard skills. But with more senior positions, we focus more on soft skills because it’s not just about coding: you have to build a team and that team will need different assets and abilities.”

As Chloé points out, it’s one thing getting more women into tech but it’s another thing to make them want to stay there:

“In the 90s the number of women in computer science majors was at almost 40% but it has fallen to 10% now. Another telling fact is that around 1 woman in 2 is leaving the tech industry in the first 10 years of her career because of the glass ceiling and the company culture. So, there is a problem of supply but there’s also the issue of how we welcome this supply. To address that, we need recruiters to change the way they recruit and we need them to build internal training programs and tools with mentoring and proper coaching. We need the company culture to evolve.”

Aligning company culture with the benefits of true parity is a main focus of Social Builder. The platform produces a MOOC that gives recruiters and managers the resources they need to allow diversity to permeate across all echelons of a business.

Cloudity is one company that is reaping the rewards of Social Builder’s MOOC, according to General Manager Karim Ogbi:

”We use the MOOC on a daily basis by making it part of the onboarding process so that every single new employee is given access to it from the start. We’re now looking to change our recruitment process so that managers are more aware of the situation and become champions of diversity. The MOOC made the switch in their minds, it’s a great foundation to build on; if we want to scale, we need these champions to put the ideas and principles into action rather than just having them as words written down somewhere in a document few people might read.”

Djamel Bendaoud, Senior Lead of Qonto’s Front-End engineering team, shared his view on why inclusion makes sense not just from a social responsibility perspective but from a business one too:

“We want a product that’s inclusive, that anyone can use. So, it makes sense to have an inclusive team making that product. For example, we only recently learned that our app wasn’t readable for people who are color-blind, so we’ve been able to respond to that. You don’t need a Talent Acquisition army to clear your job description of gender bias; a hiring manager can use AI to find out quickly if there’s gender bias in a job ad. Then, once you’ve hired the candidate, you need to help them with an onboarding buddy so there’s always support, with regular milestones to measure success. In software engineering the most important is to learn how to learn, not to already know one [coding] language by heart.”

As mentioned above, Qonto is still on its journey to true parity, even if we’re proud of the great strides we’ve already made. Do you want to join us and help us “get there” faster?

We take seriously our investment in HR policies that reflect people of all backgrounds, which is why we provide Qontoers with access to everything from extended paid leave for parents to childcare benefits.

If you want to be part of this journey, then we would love to hear from you. The place to start is right here.