Many high technology sectors are experiencing difficulty in recruiting the right skills at the right time. Photonics is no different and must recruit the very best talent in the fastest possible time to continue to expand. In a rapidly growing industry, the faster a new position can be filled and the more suitable candidates apply the faster the business can expand.
One of the keys to achieving these goals is to write job adverts and specifications to appeal to the maximum range of people. It is widely recognised that increase team diversity increases performance, but as we write job specifications and adverts based on our perceptions we can end up with candidates with very similar to the existing team. Not only can this limit diversity, but also reduce the pool of applications potentially slowing down recruitment.
To this end European project Phablabs 4.0 has published gender action guidelines developed for photonics workshops and projects to increase expand their appeal. These same guidelines can be applied to the promotion of many jobs and positions in photonics expanding their appeal beyond traditional, often male, engineers and physicists
