Traditionally, there has been a difficulty in attracting women in the IT industry. Fortunately, the development is going in the right direction and at Biner we are experiencing an increased interest from women. In the last two years, 10 out of 15 new recruits at Biner have been women, which has increased the proportion of women in the company by 250%. Today, the distribution between men and women is 59% -41%. What have we done to succeed?
"We try to clearly show what exactly we can offer"
Henrik Attefors, founder of Biner, explains that it is important to reach out with the message of what it means to work in IT. As society's digital development progresses at a furious pace, the interface between IT and business is increasingly blurred. New jobs are emerging and at the same time current professional roles are constantly being developed.
The reason why Biner has succeeded in recruiting so many women, Henrik believes, is that we have succeeded in showing what we can do so that employees can advance in their careers, and that they can find career paths based on their own needs and to provide the opportunity for development.
- We are happy that we have managed to employ so many women at Biner, he says. We have not developed a specific strategy on how we want to hire more women, but I think it is partly that we have managed to reach the right forums and channels, and partly that we have satisfied employees who have recommended and recruited each other. There are many job offers out there so we try to clearly show what exactly we can offer.
Women and men express themselves differently
It is important to have a good balance between different people in a company and the better the balance between the sexes, the better the company feels, this also applies in a recruitment process.
At Biner, we want as broad candidate base as possible in the recruitment process - both in terms of competence, age and gender. Technical understanding and knowledge is important among the candidates, but far from everything. Personality and social skills are at least as important. We are also careful to pay attention to how different candidates express themselves in recruitment.
- Women and men often express themselves differently during the interview, says Henrik. Overall, men are often better at marketing themselves while women instead tone down their skills. But we have worked for a long time in the industry and can now see through it. All our candidates are treated in the same way and have to go through the same interview process where, among other things, a personal assessment is included. With us, competence is always at the center.
Lars Lundgren, also the founder of Biner, fills in:
- We want to be a good employer for all our employees, both women and men. Of course, we are also careful to deliver expertise to our customers. From our customer's perspective it is also important that more women enter the IT industry because they of course strive for a good balance in their companies as well.
- We hope that we will be able to inspire both women and men to make careers in IT with roles such as project manager, enterprise architect or business analyst, he says.