“If you’re going through a recruitment process, instead of that idea of ‘how will this person fit into the company?’, it’s the question of ‘what will this person bring?’ How could they add into the culture of Innocent and into the way we do things?”
In this episode I am joined by Marta Pajón-Fustes, Head of Technical and Inclusion & Diversity at innocent drinks, to discuss Marta’s personal experience as a Spanish native living in the UK, and innocent’s innovative approach to Inclusion & Diversity.
We open the conversation by discussing Marta’s journey growing up in a small village in northern Spain, to moving to the UK and becoming a major change leader at innocent drinks. Marta shares the personal importance of her work at innocent and how human rights is at the centre of it, with innocent ensuring that even their suppliers have the same ethical values that it expects internally.
Marta shares a formative moment when two employees who job-shared applied for a promotion and how it raised questions on how Marta and her team should redesign the hiring process to accommodate for this. We have an insightful discussion about inclusive job design and the merits of job sharing in general.
We also discuss how we have personally experienced micro-aggressions and subtle acts of exclusion in our lives. Marta shares how the people who work at innocent are the backbone of their ‘people culture’ and the importance of managing a flexible, agile and reactive company culture. We then discuss Covid-19’s effect on this culture and how innocent maintained a “Whatever you need, just say. There is nothing out of the option here” approach to help the employees navigate the unique and challenging situation.
The conversation then turns to best practice in inclusive recruitment and how companies should focus on the idea of ‘culture add’ - what a candidate would bring to the role and company - rather than the idea of ‘culture fit’ - trying to squeeze a candidate into a particular gap.
We close the conversation by discussing innocent’s innovative process for measuring Inclusion & Diversity within the company.
Links
For more from Marta Pajón-Fustes, find her on LinkedIn here.
A few related articles:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/national-inclusion-week-marta-pajon/
For more from innocent drinks, you can visit their website here: https://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk/
To hear Why Care? episodes first, sign up to our newsletter here, and you can find more from us at Avenir via our LinkTree here.
