ATTRACTION
Our vision is to attract the best and brightest individuals to join Proxima from all backgrounds and cultures. Proxima is a place where we want everyone to feel welcomed and that they belong, from their first glance at our website to becoming a seasoned Proximite.
We want to ensure that all potential Proximites are encouraged and enthused when reading our job roles. To achieve this, all our adverts are reviewed by a Gender Decoder and Language Checklist to assess, and if needed correct, any unintended bias towards a certain gender, ethnicity, race, age, social mobility, religion, disability, and those with caring responsibilities.
Social media is a fantastic way for Proximites to engage with future talent, share viewpoints, and highlight the inclusive culture of our business. Social Media Guidance on how best to engage with platforms such as LinkedIn is shared frequently by the Marketing team to all employees to help drive engagement and showcase ongoing initiatives.
Our website is subject to regular review to ensure it is engaging, current and readily accessible to all audiences. Our Life at Proxima pages are refreshed frequently – showcasing our culture and posting relevant blogs – with the ambition to attract future Proximites, encourage a diverse range of applicants to join and feel welcomed in our business, and drive engagement with external partnerships.
At Proxima, we recognize that it is vital we continually review our processes to ensure we are not conforming to bias during our recruitment processes, and that we make every effort to attract and shortlist a diverse interview candidate pool for all hires, regardless of level. We have been collecting baseline diversity data over the last couple of years and as we move into 2024, we are upgrading our recruitment platform to a new Applicant Tracking System which will enable us to more easily track diversity data to better understand the makeup of our talent pipeline.
Recently, we have conducted all of our interviews through an online platform. This helps drive consistency during the process, ensuring all candidates have a level playing field and better enables us to accommodate those who may be less able to travel into the office due to current work or personal commitments.
We receive many applications for our graduate roles, and want to ensure we are advertising and making accessible our roles to students from all backgrounds and promoting the importance of inclusion. We attend traditional careers fairs, as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion-focused fairs across several universities.
We have built excellent connections with several universities through the MCA (UK Management Consultancy Association) and with HBCUs (US Historically Black Colleges and Universities) and have been invited to speak at university events aimed at attracting students to apply for a career in consulting/ procurement.
When partaking in such events, we aim to send a diverse representation of Proximites to help champion diversity and encourage students from diverse backgrounds to feel comfortable asking questions about a career in consulting. Moving into 2024, we seek to widen our network through building new relationships with universities and HBCUs, as well as leveraging Bain’s connections.
Each year at Proxima, a group of our consultants volunteer their time to hold a range of Mock Interviews with university students. This is an excellent way for students, many of whom had not have interview experience before, to practice their interview skills and gain feedback on their applications before they start searching for graduate roles.
At Proxima, we hold assessment centers for our Graduate role applicants due to the vast quantity of applications we receive and, to ensure there is no bias during the selection process, we aim to ensure gender parity and ethnic diversity of applicants attending our assessment centers.
We have built connections at UK and US universities, and specifically, contacts linked to various diversity, equity, and inclusion-focused societies. This enables us to promote our graduate roles directly to society members and encourage applications from these student pools.
In addition, we work directly with university societies to arrange workplace events for the students to showcase what a career at Proxima is like. For example, recently we hosted a group of students from the Hispanic and Latinx society at Michigan State University at our Chicago office for a group discussion and Q&A.
Proximites have a very wide range of connections and networks, and we are often invited to share our expertise and be invited to speak at a conference, as part of a panel, or at a networking event.
Where possible, we aim to have diverse representation from Proxima speaking at these events to help showcase Proxima to a broader network.
All of our employees have their own broad network, and this can often be tapped into to encourage candidate referrals into Proxima. This scheme can be very useful for recruiting top talent; however, we are aware bias towards referrals can lead to a lack of diversity in hiring decisions. Therefore we ensure candidates referred through the referral scheme are shortlisted for roles alongside a diverse talent pool and do not receive preferential treatment throughout the hiring process.
We have a 3-stage experienced hire interview process: initial call, technical interview, and general interview; allowing candidates the opportunity to engage with a variety of Proximites. Where possible, we utilize a diverse mix of interviewers so the candidate can gain a range of perspectives and understand more about our culture.
In addition, our interviewers are kept up-to-date with the various Proxima initiatives so that they can share insights into our culture.
