Wise: Creating a diverse marketing team

Opportunity

A diverse and inclusive marketing team is a better-equipped team to represent our customers — existing and prospective. That becomes particularly evident when our audience is made up of millions of international people and families, living across 80 countries; and a brand that celebrates living borderless lives.

Having initially spotted a skew towards male leadership, the team created a Marketing Diversity initiative to first focus on increasing gender diversity in our organisation. With data and more understanding of the make-up of our team, it quickly became evident the need to set out ethnic diversity, too. Not just to create relevant marketing and content for these people we aimed to serve, but to build a safe and diverse environment where everyone can prosper, share ideas and perspectives, too.

Appreciating this required an informed approach, they turned to the BRiM framework to help define their strategy and create a plan for meaningful change.

Initiative

Wise started by setting out recruitment and hiring objectives and key results for diversity across the hiring funnel — from proactively sourcing candidates from minority backgrounds, to re-writing all job specs, to publishing salary bands for all roles, through to ensuring all interviewees spoke to a diverse interview panel. They specifically set targets for ethnic diversity for the overall team, including senior leadership team and now are using the BRiM framework to hold their creative, partners and casting to account too.

Impact

Wise were able to improve the diversity in their hiring pipeline in Q2 and look to further improve this in Q3. On top of that, there’s a clarity in process — from hiring end-to-end, interviewing and reporting to keep us in check with progress. They actively referenced and used the BRiM framework in their Marketing Diversity program to set goals, targets and provide the teams with the resources, and guidelines they need.

“BRiM has been a real beacon and support for my teams to help promote Black talent both within Wise and in our Marketing activity”

Cian Weeresinghe, CMO

Return to the BRiM homepage here