Employee Diversity in Recruitment for Siemens | Arctic Shores

Their Challenges

Diversity

In 2018, Siemens suffered from one of the sector’s most common problems: sameness. Only a fifth of its workforce were female. 

Although it was attracting female applicants, they were getting lost in a sifting process that wasn’t designed for them. So Siemens wanted a solution that broadened how it defined ‘job fit’, using more predictive data to make better hiring decisions. This way, it could reap the benefits of a more diverse team.

Candidate experience

They also wanted to give candidates a new experience, which embodied their ‘Ingenuity for Life’ mantra and distinguished them from competitors. This meant creating a process that was equal parts engaging and rewarding. There were two aspects to this:

• Making sure any assessment set candidates at ease and reduced anxiety
• Supporting every candidate with timely, specific and valuable feedback

It was a tricky challenge: identify and progress more high-calibre female candidates, with a process that would be memorable for the right reasons.

The Solution

Bespoke onboarding

To get to the bottom of what “good” really looked like for the organisation, we began a three-step onboarding process:

• Initial research – we scoured the company’s online footprint for an initial sketch of its talent challenges.
• Stakeholder workshop – alongside Siemens’ visionaries, we dug deep into their ideal talent journey. This helped us and map out ideal behaviours and capabilities.
• Employee completion – we asked existing Siemens employees to take our assessment to develop the picture of what “good” looks like.

These steps painted a clear picture of how Siemens employees reach success, which was summarised by our psychologists into a bespoke Fit Profile. This let the team measure every candidate, regardless of gender, against a fair, consistent framework for excellence.

Diverse, comprehensive data

Our psychometric assessment let Siemens’ candidates show their cognitive ability and personality in action, removing gender from the equation. With objective behavioural data, the team could more accurately predict which candidates would take to its roles like a duck to water.

This boosted assessment centre pass rates by 65%, and doubled the number of women progressed to the final stages of their process.

An experience to remember

Rather than completing a traditional, stressful questionnaire, Siemens’ candidates were asked to respond to the interactive, mobile-friendly tasks in our assessment. With no questions and an engaging format, candidates can enter cognitive flow and – effectively – forget they’re being assessed. 

This led to a completely digitalised experience that went down well with 85% of Siemens’ candidates. And, crucially, it embodied the innovation and ingenuity at the heart of their brand.