Hiring at Valtech

Global Director of Diversity & Inclusion

Valtech

May 12, 2022

Diversity and inclusion are key priorities for us at Valtech. As a business in over 19 countries and 50 cities, it is key we represent the societies and people we serve.

We are doing a lot of work on this across our five-pillar strategy, encompassing Accountability, Inclusivity, Education, Community and Hiring. Through these five pillars, we’ve developed our 2021-2023 strategy to enable us to make a notable difference across representation and inclusion of all Valtechies.

We’re focusing on inclusion internally, alongside increasing diversity within our talent pipeline. To do this, we’ve made changes across our hiring processes.

Consistency is key!

As one of our key pillars in our strategy, we wanted to share our new changes in hiring with you—for accountability and to be transparent with potential future Valtechies on our interview process.

Education

Embedding training across all interviewers and hiring managers is incredibly important to ensure that each of us is aware of the biases that we have and how to disrupt and challenge them. To take all interviewers and hiring managers on this journey, we have mandated “Interviewing for everyone at Valtech”, which provides education on:

How exclusion and bias has historically shaped hiring and recruitment processes
The key role of intersectionality in bias and exclusion
The top six biases within the hiring and recruitment process
Do’s and don’ts at each stage of the hiring process

Through this training, our goal is providing a consistent and succinct understanding of creating an inclusive interviewing and hiring experience for everyone.

Now, education is one thing, but measuring if training has been successful is another thing. And that’s where our hiring data comes into play.

Data

Data is key in our work on inclusion at Valtech because it enables us to monitor and measure our journey towards our goals. In terms of hiring, data is crucial.

Different regions and localities have different laws and regulations on asking for applicants or employees to share their sensitive characteristic data (such as their gender, ethnicity and so on) with us, so we’ve taken a local and regional approach to ensure these laws are respected and adhered to.

Where we can (country and region specific), we are asking for applicants to share their characteristic data with us through an optional and anonymised form when they apply for a career. This data is stored separately from any application and is only viewed on aggregate. With this data, we can see what percentages of people from different backgrounds are coming into our pipeline and check this percentage against the groups of people joining us. With this insight, we can see if our focused efforts on diversity and inclusion in hiring are having the desired impact. If they are not, we are able to revisit, intervene and pivot as needed.

Hiring Matrix

Consistent and structured ratings for all applicants is core to inclusion. We must put in place different measures and initiatives to ensure we’re not rating people differently due to our own bias. This would typically take the form of recency bias (where we can remember a more recent candidate better than one we interviewed a longer time ago), affinity bias (which leads us to favor people who we feel we have a connection or similarity to) or gender bias (which means we’re biased against or for a specific gender). To aid a more diverse and inclusive process, we are using a hiring matrix to help create a more transparent approach to hiring, whilst enabling us to capture data to analyse and challenge bias in our process.

This matrix aligns to our values of Share, Dare and Care. These values are core to everything we do at Valtech, enabling us to operate as one connected team. Through each value, we are focusing on the following skills and behaviours.

Share	Teamwork, ability and collaboration, sharing and seeking knowledge, forming best practices with all of our teammates and colleagues across Valtech
Dare	Problem solving and taking initiative to reach our and our clients’ goals
Care	Building others around them, diversity and inclusion awareness/interest, understanding perspectives alongside their own and actively sponsoring others

We hosted roundtables with talent acquisition leads across Valtech, alongside several workshops with leaders involved in hiring to really define how we would measure these skills with questions.

Here’s what we came up with:

Problem solving/taking initiative, sharing knowledge
Core questions: Can you tell me about a recent challenge (in work) you have encountered? Or for more specific, if needed – “Tell me about a time when you identified a problem and describe your role in the situation and solution?” Share with us when you have successfully shared knowledge and/or received new insights from others? Can you walk me through a really challenging time at work - for example, a project was failing and client relations were not positive. Walk me through how you approached dealing with it – Both any elements of failure and success that you feel are relevant.	Additional questions Share an example of how you have reacted to being left to your own devices, where you’ve had autonomy to get things done? How have you unearthed your own growth areas and how have you ensured you developed these skills? Tell me about a time that you’ve had to change your planned course of action at the last minute? “Tell us about some feedback you have received during your career you felt was defining” or “Talk us through a time you have received feedback that was difficult for you.”
Teamwork ability and collaboration
Core questions How have you built rapport with colleagues of all different backgrounds to you? How have you built rapport with an array of stakeholders e.g. clients etc? How do you work with other people, and those in different teams/with different communication styles? Have you worked in cross-functional teams before? If so, share how you have made this a successful environment for delivery? Give us an example of where you have made a mistake / you got something wrong and how you dealt with it.	Additional questions Give us an example of a time when you’ve worked on a team that is based in different regions with different cultural influences What do you believe the challenges of working on large projects with multiple teams might be? Can you share your experiences with this in the past? How have you overcome the challenges of working with remote teams? What do you believe those challenges are?
Leadership capabilities, leading by example, courage to make right decisions This category will be most relevant for those in/moving into middle management or leadership
Core questions What's the best way to continually enhance and evolve leadership qualities? How do you do it for different people around you? How have you managed/inspired a team when tight deadlines have been required? How have you/how do you aid the success of others? What does "success" mean to you? For a leadership role specifically - why you?	Additional questions Give us an example when you have had to make a difficult decision? Give us an example where you have had to influence and lead people that you didn’t directly manage? What have you learnt from the people you’ve worked for/with? What experience do you have in growing others around you?
Diversity & inclusion awareness, building others around them, sponsoring others
Core questions What does diversity and inclusion mean to you? How have you brought this to life in your teams/environments? What actionable things have you done to create an environment of inclusion for all teammates around you (not just those you directly relate to)? Give us an example of when you’ve managed conflict and brought about a resolution?	Additional questions How can we/how have you encourage less represented groups of people to join our industry / your discipline? Talk us through when you’ve supported an individual’s development and growth? How did you define success? Talk us through when you’ve supported an individual dealing with a personal/family health crisis?

These questions are here to provide consistency across our interviews, regardless of what Valtechie you’re talking to. This means that you have a consistent experience with us and we’re able to trust that we’re able to score people fairly across these behaviours. We’re sharing this with you for transparency so you’ll know what to expect if you decide you want to join our team and can prepare in the best way for you.

Partnerships

Regionally, we’ve been partnering with many different organisations dedicated to supporting underrepresented talent, such as My G Work, We Are Tech Women, Baddies In Tech and more. We’ve also been running internships in many of our regions, such as Brazil, U.K., North America, North Macedonia, Ukraine, Denmark, to help reach the next generation of talent, with a specific focus on those from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

Ensuring our opportunities reach everyone is key for us—for our business and growth. We recognise that embracing diversity and fostering environments of inclusion is key. Hiring plays a big role in reaching our goals. So, if you’re interested in joining the team, check out all of our open roles on our Careers page.