Develop Diverse is a technology-based company with the goal of making diversity and inclusion the new norm.
Globally, companies in the tech, media and telecommunications industries are already short more than 1.1M skilled workers. By 2030, a massive shortage of around 4.3M workers is expected, which is forecast to stifle growth for tech-related organizations and forcing them to forego €450Bn in unrealized revenues. Unfortunately, women and minorities are discouraged from applying to many tech-related organizations due to the lack of diversity they see on companies’ corporate communication, such as websites, social media, and job ads, and as well the lack of inclusive culture and feeling of belonging resulting from the internal corporate communication in the form of emails and chats.
Today, organizations have no way of preventing these unconscious biases in a cost-effective manner. The main method used is unconscious bias trainings, which has no effect on the external corporate communication and very little on the internal communication. They are time consuming and only given to managers and thus not scalable and, as a consequence, they are not effective. The standard way of creating content and communicating internally presents 3 major issues: 1) organizations that lack gender and ethnic diversity are 67% more likely to underperform financially compared to their industry peers; 2) massive €1M extra hiring costs annually for large tech-related organizations, as compared to other industries, and; 3) a huge impact on employee retention. Women and other under-represented groups have up to 3.5x higher turnover than represented groups.
To attract and retain the best tech talent, organizations are desperate to create a more inclusive and innovative culture, and leaders, recruiters and communication managers are keener than ever to adopt solutions that expand their pool of skilled applicants. Indeed, more organizations are implementing Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) policies and pressure is mounting as countries like Germany, France, Iceland, Norway and Denmark enforce regulations requiring gender equality and diversity within companies. The need has been present for the past 5 years.
The main objective of the DD-SCAN project is to launch the full-feature DD-SCAN product on the European market by Q1 2023. In order to do this, we need to perform a multi-country pilot to validate the value proposition of our innovation across a large number of users, industry sectors and cultures. Thus, the conclusion of our Phase 1 Feasibility Study is to continue the DD-SCAN project.
