Appealing to people who have a richness and diversity of background and thinking

I have been Chief People Officer at Capita for nearly 12 months, and it’s truly been the best time of my career. Our colleagues are the most talented and inspiring people I’ve ever had the privilege of working with. They are all amazing people, whose great ideas to help us do better, challenge us to be better, and as a result we are creating better outcomes every day.

That’s why we’ve created our #BeBrilliantBeYou campaign - because we believe that people are not just their work experience or CV buzzwords. There is so much more to them, to us, and to the people whose lives we touch on behalf of our customers every single day. We connect with millions of people for our customers, and they’re all different, so why wouldn’t we want our colleagues to be?

We don’t want anyone to rule themselves out of working here because they’re loud or quiet or like to have a laugh. We’ll encourage you to be yourself all day, every day, so that you can be brilliant. The work we do is important, it’s varied too, crossing a huge variety of sectors, and our customers are, quite rightly, demanding – one size fits all just doesn’t cut it here.

#BeBriliantBeYou isn’t just a fancy campaign that pays lip service to people being able to be themselves. It’s not about box ticking. It’s about really valuing what makes us different, celebrating the variety of humankind as well as our shared traits and feelings. We work hard here to create a culture of openness where every voice can be heard. It’s part of our Employee Value Proposition and it’s explicit in our values.

Last year we launched our employee leadership council to build on the significant programme of transformation that the business has been going through to break down barriers and extend opportunities to all colleagues. This includes the launch of employee network groups, a mutual mentoring programme, mandatory anti-racism training, Real Living Wage accreditation and our employee director Janine Goodchild, on the Board.

In addition to these initiatives, we’ve created CHOIR, our Diversity & Inclusion hub to bring together voices from across Capita to create real change, addressing the issues of underrepresented groups and giving more people a platform to share their views.

Unlike many other businesses, we’re continuing the flexible working approach we adopted in consultation across Capita. Colleagues are given as much freedom as their job role will allow to choose when and how often they come into an office. This has enabled many colleagues to develop and grow in ways that they may not have been able to before.

What is so important to me is that we listen. In direct response to feedback from colleagues, we’re in the process of rolling out our Career Path Framework, to make it easy for everyone to see the huge breadth of roles we have here and to support them in developing careers in ways that are individual to them.

These initiatives are having a real impact. Encouraging us to be more open and inclusive.

That’s why we’ve changed our approach to attracting people to come and work here. We know that if we want to appeal to people who have a richness and diversity of background and thinking, we need to do something different, something to attract the curious, the seekers, the dreamers, the endless, incredible variety of people in the world.

How better to do that then showcasing the people that already work here. Our newly launched #BeBrilliantBeYou campaign does just that.

Everyone featured in the #BeBrilliantBeYou campaign is a Capita colleague. We didn’t want to use stock images or models. We wanted to show you who we really are, doing what we love, at work, at play, all being ourselves and all being totally brilliant.

I absolutely love this campaign and am so proud of our people for creating and taking part in it. If you’d like to work alongside them have a look at our jobs page add link to discover what opportunities, we have available to help get you where you want to be.