Finding Diverse Talent

Simon Dear, chief executive, Tangent International tell us how he finds diverse talent in his company.

The “fourth industrial revolution” has driven up the demand for tech talent. How is your business delivering?

We’ve always specialised in supplying talent for the communications and IT sectors. As the two have come together with the Internet of Things, it’s been a natural evolution for us to focus on that. We’re good at finding hard to find skills – partly through our extensive, global search capability, but also because we have high staff retention. Once we’ve found someone good, we don’t want to let them go.

You also focus on diversity to give you access to wider talent pools…

By the nature of what we do, we’ve never really had an issue with ethnic diversity – we work all over the world. 70% of our own workforce is female. And we’ve thought quite hard about the company we want to be – putting purpose before profit, and making sure nobody gets left behind.

We want to drive that diversity into the industry. It’s the right thing to do – and it’s good for business, as customers are looking at this too. Although tech is traditionally seen as male-dominated, 44% of the candidates we put forward are female and our placement numbers are similar.

The important point is we measure it – and we encourage it. It doesn’t happen by luck.

We’re also a Disability Confident employer, working with local charities to offer workshops for CV writing and interview prep for those with Asperger’s or high-functioning autism, who can be extremely successful in working in tech.

This article was posted on June's edition of Recruiter Magazine.