Openreach looks for 140 recruits and wants more women
TELECOMS infrastructure giant Openreach said it is seeing more female recruits joining the company.
The business said more females were joining across the East Midlands region after it adapted its recruitment practices to make them appealing to more people.
Openreach – the UK’s largest broadband network working with hundreds of companies including BT, Sky, Plusnet, TalkTalk and Zen – has been working with “linguistic landscapes” and gender bias expert Dr Chris Begeny from Exeter University, who said there was still a feeling among many women that jobs within the group were aimed at men.
An Openreach spokeswoman said: “Since then, significant changes have been made throughout Openreach to the way jobs are advertised, helping to drive big improvements in the number of women coming into new roles in 2021. The company is recruiting some 140 people into roles across the East Midlands in the current financial year and, to date, 19 per cent of the intake is female – a statistic that in previous years stood in single digits.”
Most of the new recruits will support the roll-out of Ultrafast Full Fibre, which has so far reached more than 300,000 homes and businesses across the region.
East Midlands partnership director Kasam Hussain said: “Research into the language barriers that impact female job applicants has shown that it plays a fundamental role in the recruitment process.
“We’d like to see more women choose careers in engineering, particularly here at Openreach, so we’re trying to address that.
“We’ve been amazed to see just how much of a difference subtle changes in language can make.
“Despite four in five women admitting they wouldn’t consider working in engineering, more than half were interested in an entry-level engineering role once it had been rewritten in a consciously-unbiased way. This is just one way we’re making changes to put our values at the heart of what we do.
“While we’re tackling the challenge on a number of fronts, we’ve been encouraged to see a significantly higher percentage of women joining our East Midlands workforce this year. We made a decision to be transparent about where we are and what we want to achieve.
“We’re passionate about change and hope the work we’re doing will be of interest to other businesses – and that we can learn from each other collectively.”
Openreach recently published a 2025 target for 20 per cent of trainee engineer recruits and 50 per cent of external hires into management to be women. The company is also setting targets based on regional variations in ethnicity which reflect the local population.