Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in PCR's Recruitment
Although we are a small company, we strive to ensure diversity in recruitment at PCR Digital. To facilitate inclusive hiring, this page details our efforts towards diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) in our tech and digital recruitment.
A diverse talent pool:
Our aim as a small company is to reach and include a broad and diverse audience of candidates for our clients. We train and discuss unconscious bias on a regular basis with our team to ensure that we reach a wide range of applicants, and we are members of the TRN Diversity and Inclusion Champion Community, and APSCo Embrace: APSCo’s Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Hub for members.
We feel that our role is to reach a diverse audience for our clients and then our job is to find the best matching skills and present these to our clients.
For this reason, we partner with Le Wagon, the world’s best coding bootcamp helping young students and professional start their coding careers. This facilitates building diverse networks for us to source candidates.
Our diversity, equity and inclusion statement:
This DE&I statement is included in our job ads to encourage applicants from all background to apply for roles. Although we frequently discuss and train against gender bias in our job descriptions, this statement helps to ensure inclusive hiring and acts as a welcome safeguard against exclusion.
Women In Tech:
In 2022, we sponsored Showcode’s Athena, a virtual hackathon dedicated to women and non-binary people in tech, and we are always keeping an eye out for new opportunities to support initiatives like these.
We have been women-owned since 2017, when Jane Abbott became Managing Director at PCR. As of 30th January 2023, we have been officially certified by WEConnect International as a women-owned business.
WEConnect International has built a network of companies, all women-owned, helping them to connect with each other and opening up new business and networking opportunities with local and multinational member buyers. As a result of this certification, we hope to be able to help organisations meet their DE&I strategies and that this certification will make it easier for interested parties to assess us as a potential supplier.
Accessible Hiring:
In 2015, Jane Abbott founded Accessibility London. This is now the largest accessibility community of its kind in the UK, with over 3000 members consisting of people with lived experience of disability and professionals working within the accessibility space.
We also had our website rebuilt in 2022 with accessibility in mind. You can use overlays for this which work on some levels, but we wanted to build a fully accessible recruitment website from the ground up. We invested heavily in this as it opens up our reach to a further 15% of the population and makes our hiring inclusive to more professionals.
Headed up by our senior technical and accessibility consultant Joe James, one of our specialisms is digital accessibility recruitment. Investing in an accessible website ensures that all relevant talent can access the digital accessibility jobs that they are interested in when we advertise them.
Corporate Responsibility:
At PCR Digital, we have supported the House of St Barnabas, which helps homeless people to get back into work. Jane has been a member of the HoSB for over 5 years.
As a business, we also encourage using Ecosia as a search engine within our team. Ecosia supports charities around the world to plant trees to help against climate change, among other initiatives.
Our recruitment team and culture:
In terms of our own team and culture, we are a small group who come from different backgrounds and have different ages, genders and sexual orientations. We are people who work well together and have a shared passion for being authentic and caring about our clients, candidates and how we work with them.