Celebrating diversity on International Women’s Day

This International Women’s Day, we took a moment to reflect on the great women working at Sievo, as well as how we’re doing in the areas of diversity and inclusion.  

We’ve made some progress towards greater gender balance in the last year: 

• 33% of our Engineering function is now women  
• We’ve promoted and hired more women to management, software engineer and product manager positions  
• The percentage of women grew (from 35% to 37%)  

We created this video to showcase some of the women working here at Sievo but also to broaden perceptions about the types of people in technical roles working in IT.  

A special thank you to the team behind this video -  Huyen, Maria, Hanna-Leena, Monica, Janina and Lari.

We’ve also made progress in other types of diversity and inclusion in recent years:  

• Sievonians represent 24 different nationalities (we have more Nguyens than Koskinens) 
• Developing better company-wide practices for remote work, allowing for more flexible work arrangements 
• Company-wide discussions about the importance of diversity 
• Emotions training for all managers

We wanted to share what’s worked for promoting inclusion & diversity at Sievo to promote transparency and discussion around these important themes:  

Putting talent first with blind hiring  

We have a small coding exercise as part of our developer hiring process. Before those assignments are passed along to our evaluation team, we remove all identifying details so that the evaluators will focus only on the quality of the code, eliminating the risk of unconscious bias towards applicants. 

Walking the talk when it comes to family-friendly  

Caring is one of Sievo’s three core values. We put a lot of thought into making sure our actions really reflect care for our employees. Our top management has been leading the way in this, taking up to 6 months off for paternity leave and talking openly about the importance of work-life balance.  

We celebrate maternity leaves with Sievo onesies and we recognize that returning to work can be a challenge. We check in moms while they’re on leave, and we’ve provided flexible and part-time arrangements for parents returning to work. We offer childcare for sick children to support working parents.  

Requiring only English skills  

We’re a Finnish company and most of our staff is located at our Helsinki headquarters, but we don’t require Finnish language skills. Our working language is English and for the majority of our positions (excluding some customer roles focused on specific language markets), English is the only language we require. While this may seem like an obvious practice, you’d be surprised how often even global companies require local language skills. 

Focusing on potential, not CVs  

While we do require a CV as part of the application process, we don’t filter candidates for X years or certain types of corporate experience, or specific schools or programs.  

We’re looking for people who can help take Sievo to the next level. The hiring processes focus on your talent, your motivation and what you can bring to the role. We often use assignments in recruiting, giving candidates an opportunity to show their skills in action. To support employees’ development in reaching their potential, we offer all employees 1 day a month for training & development which they can freely choose.  

Admitting there is still a lot to learn 

Another of our company values is honesty. This means (among other things) communicating openly and proactively, and being honest about our current limits. We’re only human and we may at times be blind to our privileges and biases.   

We know that diversity is more than gender, age or nationality. While we don’t track statistics on LGBTQ+, race, religion or ethnicity, we recognize that they impact how people experience work life.  

We value diversity and inclusion, but we know there is still a long way to go until we reach equality and full inclusion in the IT industry or at Sievo. We’re open to feedback, having (possibly difficult) discussions and taking more action to be inclusive.