Even though the benefits of building diverse and inclusive workplaces are quite clear to us, doing so in practice is sometimes easier said than done, especially within IT. With this in mind, IPEX North America has decided to focus on increasing our brand awareness in areas like IT to attract a wider range of top talent and bring more diversity to our team.
One of the ways we have been doing this is by participating in various online recruitment events geared towards diversity and inclusion. In January, IPEX took part in WomenHack, a recruitment event for the Montreal, Canada area (where most of our IT team is based) focused on connecting with top female engineers, designers and product managers. And most recently, I had the opportunity to be a part of the team representing IPEX at HackerX, a virtual event targeting people of colour and LGBTQIA+ tech professionals.
HackerX took the form of a virtual expo where professionals could network and learn more about our company. Coming off the success we had at WomenHack and having promoted our participation in HackerX on LinkedIn leading up to the event, we had high hopes of inspiring this pool of 100+ prospects.
After introducing our company to the HackerX community and spending about 90 minutes in the virtual IPEX booth engaging with event participants, I conducted a dozen rapid ‘speed-dating’ interviews. Five-minute speed dates go by very quickly, so I had to make the most of my time to introduce myself, invite candidates to share their profiles and discuss their professional interests with me, and see if we could find a match. Of the 12 people I talked to, I identified five potential candidates for current and future openings.
The HackerX event was just three hours long, but I felt we accomplished a lot in that short amount of time. We completed our mission of spreading the word about IPEX by Aliaxis and how it’s a great place to work, and invited over 100 people to learn more about who we are as a company and how they can potentially contribute to crafting our digital IT transformation journey. I think events of this type are important and have no doubt that the talent we attract through them will be of value to the company and the people on our teams.
By Anju Bissessur
Vice President IT, North America
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