Raisin's Girls' Day Experience (and why you should sign up too!)????
Matt Marmoy-Savage
Head of Talent Acquisition @ Raisin. Building and strengthening teams through strategic talent acquisition. Predicting performance with fair and scalable hiring practices. Fintech.
Since moving from London to Berlin in 2019, I’ve always been impressed by how deeply embedded early-career opportunities are across workplaces in Germany. The structure of the university system, alongside the instrument of working student contracts, creates a valuable resource for both companies and students alike. After seeing how well this works, it's surprising that there isn't broader adoption across Europe and beyond!
Targeting talent early allows companies to optimise for predictors of job performance beyond just experience. Raisin is a fintech company. Finance and tech currently lend themselves to a more male-dominated talent pool - especially when experience is used as a primary hiring filter. But for early-career talent to thrive, awareness is fundamental. Quite frankly, many young people may not even know that our field (and therefore our company) exists. If companies rely solely on networks (or parents’ networks) to attract talent, how can we expect to address demographic imbalances?
This is why, for us, Girls’ Day is an investment in the future talent pool that Raisin will be drawing from – one that will carry forward our mission and contribute to building a successful, long-standing, and generational company.
What is Girls’ Day?
People who have grown up in Germany or lived here a while will be very familiar with the concept. For the rest, according to ChatGPT; Girls’ Day is a nationwide initiative that gives young women the opportunity to explore careers in STEM, finance, and other industries where female representation is still low. Companies open their doors to students, offering hands-on experiences, insights into daily operations, and the chance to engage with professionals.
In this matter, ChatGPT was spot on. Last April, Raisin and Raisin Bank AG had the privilege of participating in Girls’ Day and welcomed 35 girls to our Berlin and Frankfurt offices. I’ll admit that conceptualising, organising and facilitating such an event was quite daunting – what do girls aged 10 - 16 care about in the context of their future career options? How will we engage them? Despite the early anxieties of myself and co-organiser Ya?mur Tiftik?i Hermes, the day has had far reaching positive impact and was a very rewarding experience! So much so we are doing it all over again this year.
So I thought I would reflect on some lessons we learned last year and that we are taking into this year's Girls’ Day on April 3rd, in the hope that a few other companies are moved to take the leap and get involved!
?? PS there is still time to sign up to this great initiative in 2025 (info here)
Before diving into specifics, here are our 5 top tips ??
Insights you can expect from here on out ??
Signing Up and Offer Publication ??
You are going to need to create an account at www.girls-day.de - the platform is pretty intuitive, just keep in mind its built as a not-for-profit (do not come with the kind of exceptions you might have for raisin.com ;) )
Once you've signed up, you'll need to publish an offer. The parameters you set a very customisable. Including:
We hosted girls onsite, 20 in Berlin and 15 in Frankfurt. Our main consideration was space, we had a good idea of capacity as we are regularly inviting university students to our offices. We also opted to a broad age range and made our offering open to girls from ages 10 - 16.
In terms of offer content, be creative! Check out our 2025 offer for inspiration ??
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Interacting with Parents and Girls before the day ??
Once your offer is live, you'll see girls start to register pretty quickly. You'll be notified for every sign up.
You'll need to draft a confirmation email, which will automatically be sent upon registration. The platform will also tell you (every-single-time-you-log-in) that you need to collect photo consent.
?? My pro tip here would be the send this to all parents about 2 - 3 weeks before and also ask for another confirmation they will indeed attend. This gives you plenty of time for girls on your waitlist (or late comers) to still secure a place! What is also nice is that you do not need to leave the platform for all interactions here.
Girls will also proactively ask you on the day for the certificate of attendance. They need this to prove to their school that they did actually attend! (I'll admit I thought getting this certificate was a bigger deal so printed them on very nice card and kind of presented them - I got a few strange looks ?? - so no-one is putting these on the wall at home (standard A4 paper is fine).
Agenda Setting & Sourcing Volunteers
Less is more. One pleasant surprise was how many questions the girls had. Our agenda for Berlin is below and included food, workshops and career journeys. By far the most engaging was the career journey. The girls were fortunate enough to hear from Richa Dhandhania on how she has moved into our Product leadership team at Raisin ??
Honestly, we packed in a bit too much. We rushed a little bit and would have benefited from a little more down time - the girls are networking too!
In terms of sourcing volunteers, it was very easy for us! We simply set up a google form and shared in our general Slack Channel and asked people to define there availability to support and in which capacity:
Of course it goes without saying, representation matters. With the exception of myself signing the girls in, they met with and heard from exclusively female Raisineers.
Girls'Day ??
As the girls are arriving, we showed them to a seat and offered them to take a snack from the buffet. The girls are also in an unfamiliar environment, my strong recommendation would be to do the ice breaker games as soon possible. This year, before we expect any networking organically, we will do exactly this in order to ease them into the day.
Merch ??. We created a logo especially for Girls'Day and gave each of the girls a bag - we were already popular from the first moment!
Don't be too strict on the agenda, the girls had a lot of questions and some sessions naturally went on a bit longer. Try not to clock watch!
The day is really driven by the passion of the volunteers, feedback such as the above would be in no way possible without everyone who spent time preparing workshops and engaging with the girls – thank you!
Junior Talent Acquisition Manager at Raisin
2 周Interesting article Matt Marmoy-Savage ??
Talent Acquisition
2 周Great read Matt Marmoy-Savage!!!
Senior HR Project Manager, Strategy & Execution at Mews - transforming the art of hospitality
2 周Great article Matt! Thank you for all your hard work in organizing these early career events. My daughter attended last year, and I was truly impressed by how much she learned about working in finance despite her young age. She has been highly motivated to put extra effort into improving her math skills at school. ps. I recognize her artwork in the article ??
Chief Client Officer & Member of the Management Board at Raisin, Non Executive Director VEF
2 周Indeed I can only recommend to participate. It is such a great opportunity to connect with the next generation