Why we are dedicated to being a Disability Confident employer

Written by Catriona Tong, Human Resources

There are around 13.3 million disabled people in the UK.
In 2017, 376,000 people with disabilities of working age were unemployed.
Over half of UK employers are potentially missing out on hiring the best person for the job because they are unintentionally excluding disabled talent.

At Bluefruit we actively work to ensure we encourage engineering talent from all backgrounds to join our growing company. This year we have made an additional commitment to work with charities and government schemes to ensure our roles appeal to and are accessible to all work seekers. Recently, we signed up to the Government’s Disability Confident scheme, this has been designed to help businesses recruit and retain employees with disabilities and/or with health conditions, hence utilising their skills and talent.

With the current global shortage of talented software engineers, recruiting and retaining outstanding people is one of Bluefruit’s key business objectives. We continually work to improve our recruitment process to ensure inclusivity from the moment someone fills in an application form to the day they commence work at Bluefruit’s fully accessible Cornwall office. Once a new employee joins our team, we work very hard to prevent or counter issues that might block their continued employment with us, whilst also making sure they are happy and feel well supported in their role.

Some of the particular ways we currently follow to ensure a Disability Confident workplace:

We are CV blind at point of application

We look at talent before experience. Everyone who applies for a technical role at Bluefruit is automatically sent a relevant technical exercise (a cyber-dojo for developers and testing exercise for testers) to complete. Only after we have assessed someone’s technical ability and invited those who reach our standard for an interview, do we look at CV’s.

We all work flexitime

Are you an early bird? That’s great. Need to start late? Not a problem. Although our normal full-time working week is 37.5 hours, our core hours are 10 am – 3 pm. All Bluefruit team members take advantage of flexitime and no one is singled out for not working the “normal” 9 -5. We understand that everyone has a life outside of Bluefruit and would never want the constriction of rigid hours to stop us finding brilliant talent to join our team.

We also have a growing number of part-time staff. Although most of our roles are advertised as full time, we are always ready to discuss part-time hours if we can accommodate it within our business needs.

We all create our own workspaces

A new employee recently asked how much he could spend on his keyboard and mouse. Our question was “which one do you need to do your job?” Everyone is different, so we don’t enforce our people to have the same chairs, desks, and computers. We have people who sit on yoga balls, some that stand, some that have two monitors and some that don’t. Our flexible approach to workspaces means our whole team can work in a relaxed and comfortable atmosphere.

We offer step-free access to all areas of our offices

Bluefruit is in a modern office building with lift access on every floor. While we are split over two floors of the Gateway Centre, we have step-free access to all areas. There is also a disabled toilet and kitchen on both floors. The Café and Gym on the ground floor can also be accessed step free.

Free onsite parking

We have free parking for all staff and visitors, including disabled spaces.

Interested to see which roles we are currently recruiting for? Pop over to our Careers page to find out more. We look forward to receiving your application soon!