Two training sessions and immediate results: how Onfido managed to recruit more women
💖 The purpose of The Allyance is to help both companies and candidates: companies wanting to reach excellence in hiring and candidates wanting to find the perfect companies.
➡️ Sami Touil studied in Compiègne and is an engineer by training. He started working in this industry about 17 years ago and is now VP Engineering at Onfido. As a versatile musician and an engineer, Sami has a particular inclination for diversity, precision and efficiency.
In 2020, he asked The Allyance to deliver two training sessions on diversity sourcing to his team.
__ __ __🔗 DIVERSITY IN ACTION N°11 - Sami Touil
__ __ __Sami Touil, can you tell us more about your background?
💻I began my career as a development engineer at SAP. About eight years later, I joined Criteo, where I had a management position for the first time. My four years with this company certainly are among my best professional memories. This is where I met Caroline and many other people who helped me grow. I then joined Agorize as a CTO. At Agorize, Caroline and I set up an engineering team. She helped me tremendously on the recruitment front. After Agorize, I worked at Spendesk. And then, I joined Onfido last year as VP Engineering.
👀 I am based in Paris and I oversee the Customer and Fraud group. This group is made up of about 40 people divided into 7 teams. We deal with two main things.
1️⃣ Firstly, our technology enables our clients to verify a person’s identity. Our customers must be able to onboard our technology into their own systems. My job is to ensure that they are able to do it in the simplest and most efficient manner, mostly through an API and an SDK.
2️⃣ Secondly, we deal with fraud detection. I have two teams working on this issue. The first one uses digital signals, like IP addresses, and device fingerprinting. The second one, uses sound signals and turns a device into kind of a sonar in order to check whether a human is behind it or not. We do all this with machine learning!
🎹 I must tell you something and it is going to get personal. I am in love with engineering, optimization and music! I play about ten different instruments. I started with the piano. It is my primary instrument. Then I started learning to play the flute four years ago and the violin six months ago! This is what I do.
Can you tell us more about your collaboration with Caroline?
Of course! I met Caroline at Criteo, where she helped me with recruitment. In fact, I did the most incredible recruitment of my entire career at this time thanks to her. And I am extremely grateful. We were getting along marvelously well and so I contacted her when I needed help finding a VPA at Agorize. There, again, we really worked well together. And we never lost touch after that.
The 10 Surprising Things My CTO And I Learned While Offering Free Coaching Sessions, an article wirrten by Sami and Caroline back in 2020
Caroline delivered two training sessions on diversity sourcing at Onfido at your request/ Why did you feel the need for such a training?
The reason is very simple. We were not very efficient in terms of gender diverse recruitment and also of retention for employees from under-represented groups. Even if all the teams are doing their best, I felt we needed help on this. Our results on diversity were not good but our top management wanted to improve them.
🤝 Caroline knows these topics thoroughly and even built part of her career on fostering diversity. So it appeared clearly to me that working with her would help us improve our results. Getting outside help was necessary for us to identify what we were doing wrong and what we could improve.
What did you want to achieve?
⚧ Very concretely, for the Engineering, Product and Design side of the business, our goal was to improve our gender diversity during the hiring process and also in terms of talent retention. I mention gender diversity in particular because we were already doing quite good on other diversity metrics. For instance, 40 nationalities are present among Onfido staff. The other reason why we focus on the gender aspect of diversity is because of legal restrictions regarding other criteria like ethnicity or sexual orientation in France, in the UK where we are based, but also in countries like Portugal, where we do a lot of recruitment.
What happened after Caroline delivered her training to your team?
📈Well, we had incredible results during the last quarter and her training sessions tremendously helped us getting there. During the last 3 months, we recruited about 30 to 40 persons in the Engineering, Product and Design division. 42% of the engineers we recruited come from underrepresented groups and 55% of the hires for the product and design teams. I am so happy about this. Previously, underrepresented groups were somewhere between 5 and 10%...
👂These results did not happen on their own. We used the tips and methodology that Caroline had given us in order to enhance gender diversity. We really followed her advice to a T. We conducted sourcing sessions as per her instructions and with the people she recommended. We included the leads in the sourcing sessions and did not leave the talent acquisition teams on their own. Getting the engineering teams and the talent acquisition teams to join their forces was key. And it worked! I am really impressed by our TA teams and Engineering teams and by how they have been able to pick up those new tool to reach even higher levels of efficiency.
✅ Many engineering leads attended the workshop. They were curious and eager to find out more. They were aware that they needed to have more diverse teams, but they did not know the topic and did not know how to address it. Once we did the workshop with Caroline, the main realization for us was that recruiting more diverse candidates was not difficult… or at least not as difficult as we had previously thought. In our industry, we tend to think that recruiting female engineers is hard but we realized that you can do it with the proper methodology and state of mind.
What are going to be your next steps?
👣 I am very proud of the success we had in the last quarters. But we need to consolidate this trend now. We have to integrate diversity and pro-diversity methods into our culture and our processes. We need to normalize them so that our results are always that good and that we reach a 50/50 gender ratio in the entire R&D department.
➕ I think we should absolutely have more of Caroline’s training sessions for our new leads, once the pool of new arrivals is big enough.
Would you recommend The Allyance?
💎 Yes and with closed eyes!! It’s a trust issue. I trust Caroline and The Allyance to find the right person for the right place. I know Caroline’s ability to find gems. She always keeps an open eye and uses her entire network. Working with her will get you results.
She is not only very professional but also very friendly.
👍If Onfido had to work with an outside company again, The Allyance would be the first one I would think about. And I would particularly like to recommend the diversity sourcing training we received to each and every company that thinks diversity and inclusion matter. For us, it simply has worked.
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CONCLUSION
A few words from Caroline, The Allyance CEO:
“The first time I met Sami, I was amazed by his kindess and listening skills. Even if we have worked together in the past, when Sami contacted me to organize a Diversity Sourcing training for his team, I wanted to do something hands-on, catchy and solution-oriented to make sure the engineers would use the techniques I introduced. There is nothing more rewerding than reading the amazing results they got!
✔️ Want more?
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