​The Swiss market’s trademark resilience is being tested by the accelerating rate of digital transformation, spotlighting the importance of organisational agility like never before.

Ranking number one on the Global Talent Competitiveness Index for the 10th year in a row, the Alpine nation appears to be in a healthy position to capitalise on the skills of an evolving global workforce.

That said, competition for essential talent remains fierce, a challenge that threatens to stifle industry progression. This is plain to see in high-growth areas like Green FinTech and Personalised Medicine, where skill shortages are proving difficult to navigate. In the latter half of 2023, the talent issue intensified, impeding the strength of foreign trade (which accounts for 40% of the country’s GDP).

Diversity

Here at Trinnovo Group, we deploy a community-led, diversity-focused recruitment methodology to help our clients overcome talent gaps. We believe that a lack of diverse workforce representation (and the resulting lack of inclusive environments) prevents innovation and meaningful progress.

Switzerland fell eight places on the World Economic Forum’s 2023 Gender Equality Index. According to the gender gap indicators, the country ranked 63rd in terms of labour force participation, and 103rd in wage parity.

Without the diversity of thought required to solve modern challenges, building an agile, sustainable, and marketable business becomes incredibly difficult. In the areas we service (Technology and Business Enablement), it’s plain to see the opportunities on offer to those who would explore a broader and more diverse talent pool.

Diversity is, and always will be, a foundational aspect of both our business and our value system. We’ve seen first-hand the positive, lasting impact of diverse teams over the years, and we know how potent their transformational effect can be on industry progress.

Ever since we won the APSCo Diversity and Inclusion Award back in 2018, followed by the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award at the Tiara Recruitment Awards in 2022, we’ve been searching for new ways to extend the impact of our community-led service. The Swiss market is in a prime position to improve diverse workforce representation, and we have the means to help leaders do it.

‘Judges praised Trinnovo Group for setting ambitious DE&I targets, being so open about their impact metrics, and developing a new advisory solution to support clients with diversity and inclusion.’ – TALiNT Partners, Tiara Recruitment Awards

For example, sectors like DevOps and Software Engineering represent incredible avenues for innovation, enablers of digital excellence in an era of hyper-fast microservices and increasing containerisation, edge computing, and machine learning. These spaces (and engineering in general) are home to some of the worst gender representation rates. According to LinkedIn data, only 14% of the Swiss DevOps and engineering population are women, and talent is very hard to hire.

This gender gap appears to correlate with Switzerland’s descending educational attainment ranking (102nd on the Gender Equality Index), which again, points to the importance of seeking talent through non-traditional search methodologies.

As ESG (Environmental, social, governance) concerns gain traction around the world, businesses are increasingly being held accountable for their talent acquisition practices. The question is, how do hiring managers access a more diverse talent pool in the first place?

Community-led Recruitment

After identifying a distinct lack of support systems for women in the US tech space back in 2017, we founded Women in DevOps, a community platform for engineers to share knowledge, connect with industry leaders, amplify their voices, and ultimately, uncover meaningful career opportunities. What started as a small offline community has since grown into an international movement of over 14,000 members.

By collaborating with our recruitment brands (Trust in SODA, DeepRec.ai, and Broadgate), we can ensure our community-led approach reaches maximum search coverage across our core interlocking specialisms: Digital Tech, Financial, Commercial, Professional, and Deep Tech.

Here at Trinnovo Group, international expansion is a strategic imperative. As we seek to align ourselves with leaders who share our values of a more equitable working future, Switzerland’s evolving landscape represents the perfect location to make an impact. Incoming regulatory changes, inclusion-focused policies, and future-facing leaders all contribute towards creating incredible opportunities for meaningful growth and expansion in the coming years.

Creating Inclusive Environments

It’s not enough to hire diverse talent, businesses must ensure they create inclusive environments that cater for unique needs. This begins long before the start of the search process, often with your employer branding. It's important to recognise which value propositions currently resonate the most with job seekers (and this has changed significantly in recent years). As per LinkedIn data, the top priorities are currently compensation and flexible working. See the breakdown below:

Building an inclusive, wide-reaching recruitment process demands a close inspection of your output, right down to the wording. For example, we use a bias decoding tool to write inclusive job adverts, which we’ve built into our website platform. Our consultants are therefore able to run job descriptions through the bias analyser and immediately identify and remove exclusionary language. Early tests on the product show that applications increased by 28% as a result.

Moreover, we track the characteristics of those who apply for roles on our site via a pop-up questionnaire. The questionnaire is voluntary, and we ask participants to provide this information confidentially. We are then able to track how we are performing against our diversity goals by using the data to identify representation gaps and implement targeted solutions.

It's impossible to progress without developing metrics to measure yourself against. For example, we’ve inputted our goals for internal talent attraction around gender, ethnicity, and  LGBTQIA+ and veteran status (demographics that our particular ecosystem is best equipped to support).

If you’re interested in developing an inclusive talent lifecycle designed for diverse excellence, contact me to find out more about how Trinnovo Group can support your unique business needs: ashley@trinnovo.com

​

​