Complementor
Our Code First Girls / Vodafone Winning Hackathon Project: Complementor
Almost every company struggles to meet diversity goals, due to outdated recruitment efforts
Corporate diversity programmes are generally unsuccessful:
- Diversity in organisations has been consistently proven to have a positive impact on innovation and success. Diverse teams outperform individual and non-diverse teams, making better business decisions every time. A study found that companies with diverse management teams make 19% more revenue.
- The positive effects of diversity training are designed for short-term results., and a number of studies suggest that mandatory diversity training can activate bias, or even spark a backlash.
- Studies shown that performance ratings don’t boost diversity. Managers tend to switch quickly into solution mode without checking whether they really understand the problem.
For individuals, the general problem is that people can find their gender and socioeconomic status (education, income, occupation, place of residence, heritage, religion) can be an obstacle when choosing or during building their career path.
How might we help empower people to achieve their personal and career goals within industry, whilst aiding companies to solve their diverse recruitment issues?
Mentoring programs have the best track record at making diversity a reality
Opportunities afforded by mentoring schemes:
- 94% of employees said they would stay at a company longer if they were offered opportunities to learn and grow
- 67% of businesses reported an increase in productivity due to mentoring
- Organizations with above-average gender diversity and levels of employee engagement outperform companies with below-average diversity and engagement by 46% to 58%.
- Higher representation of women in C-suite level positions results in 34% greater returns to shareholders.
- Companies with higher-than-average diversity had 19% higher innovation revenues.
Introducing our Hackathon solution: Complementor
As out entry for the Code First Girls / Vodafone Diversity Hackathon, my team decided to build a website to facilitate mentorship - Complementor (complementary + mentor).
Our solution is a complete mentoring service, matching and facilitating the mentoring relationship. Complementor uses an algorithm to match complementary pairs, using personality types, skills and goals. We built the responsive website using JavaScript, CSS, HTML & Python.
How innovative is this solution or its execution?
Many mentoring schemes match based on shared characteristics. By focusing on matching different people we offer a unique experience. Combining personality testing, skills, goals and industry experience we are able to match mentors and mentees.
How inclusive is this project? Who can it help or benefit?
Our project benefits mentors, mentees and companies. By hosting mentoring online we make it accessible to a wider range of participants. We plan to partner with companies, universities and outreach programs to build our network.
A huge thank you to Code First Girls and Vodafone for making this challenge possible, to my team for all their hard work, and to everyone working to build better solutions for diversity and inclusion.