Attracting the next generation of engineers for Danfoss
A DEI and recruitment study for Danfoss Region Canada
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Map of Canadian universities identified for the recruitment partnership: Victoria, Calgary, Alberta, Windsor, Concordia, Dalhousie and Memorial University of Newfoundland
- Client
- Danfoss, Region Canada
- Context
- Consulting Practices, DTU, with Johns Hopkins University
- Year
- 2023
- Role
- Interviews and results analysis
- Team size
- 8
- Tools
- Semi-structured interviews · Survey design · Focus groups · Benchmarking · Literature review
- Contribution
- Team of 8, led the interviews and co-wrote results and literature
A consulting study for Danfoss Region Canada on the problem statement of how they can best attract and retain the next generation of talent, carried out with a joint DTU and Johns Hopkins team of eight, and delivered as a set of recommendations covering employee resource groups, university partnerships and a regional approach to diversity, equity and inclusion.
The question we were given
Danfoss is already well established as a leader in sustainability, and the question the project started from was whether the same could be true of equity in the workplace, since research indicates that organisations placing a strong emphasis on diversity show a 19% higher capacity for innovation. This meant the brief was not really a diversity brief on its own, and it was a recruitment brief as well, especially since Danfoss has a small office and a low presence in Canada, and the two problems turned out to be connected.
What I did
I ran the majority of the interviews, at 55%, and I co-wrote the literature review and the results chapter, each at a third, while also contributing to the survey and handling the check in and check out of the group's work. This is the part of a consulting project I find most useful, since the interviews are where the assumptions in the brief either hold up or fall apart, and in this case they mostly fell apart.
What the interviews actually showed
The assumption going in was that retention and satisfaction would be where the problems were, however the interviews pointed the other way, as employees gave Danfoss a lot of praise for work life balance, approachable managers and flexibility, none of them had any criticism when asked directly, and none of them had plans to leave within five years, with one saying she intended to stay until she retired. One interviewee described Danfoss as a retirement company, in the sense that people stay for thirty five and forty five years. Diversity of nationality was not the problem either, since one interviewee described a team of five made up of a Dane, a German, a Pole and herself from India, and a similar picture came up in all three interviews with Canadian employees. Gender diversity was a different matter, and a mechanical engineer described his team as entirely male, which he thought was unfortunate, however only 13.6% of mechanical engineers in the US are women, so a significant part of that ratio is decided long before anyone applies to Danfoss.
The finding that mattered
The most useful result was one we were not looking for, since none of the interviewees had used an employee resource group and two of them did not know the groups existed at all. This means Danfoss was already running something that addresses exactly the needs the survey work identified, and the employees it was built for could not name it. Here the problem is not the initiative and it is the visibility of the initiative, which is a much cheaper thing to fix. The second finding was awareness, since one interviewee estimated that around 50% of the people she knows are familiar with Danfoss, and the team's own view was that the real number is likely lower. This is due to the small Canadian office, and it feeds directly back into recruitment, since a company that graduating engineers have not heard of does not get applications from them in the first place.
What we recommended
The recommendations covered general DEI practice, employee resource groups, university partnership opportunities and a regional rather than global approach. The partnership work was targeted at a specific candidate profile, being engineers born in 1997 or later with zero to three years of experience in mechanical, electrical and software disciplines, and it made use of the fact that Canada has 279 accredited engineering programmes across 44 institutions, which is a far more manageable database to work from than the equivalent in the United States, and the accreditation itself acts as a first screening step.
What I would do differently
It is important to note that only three of the interviewees were based in Canada and two worked remotely from elsewhere, which is a small sample to draw regional conclusions from, and the interviewees were also supplied through the company rather than found independently, so the absence of criticism should potentially be read with that in mind. Here I would push earlier for access to people who had already left, since the employees who stay are not the ones who can tell you why others go.