<aside> 🌿 At Rasa, we believe that diversity, equity and inclusion matter in the world and within our team. Everyone should have equal opportunities and the chance to live & work in an environment that respects and values their unique individuality. DEI is a priority at Rasa in every aspect of how we work.

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Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) has been an integral part of Rasa from the beginning. It’s part of our values and closely related to our company vision and mission.

Our company vision to ‘transform how people interact with organisations through AI’ has a global ambition, including people and organisations in many different countries with different cultures and languages. To help our global customers and community transform how they interact with theirs, we also need to have team members that speak their language. Spoken language is of course just one dimension of diversity. To truly serve the largest brands with their global customer base, we need to build a team that is diverse in all sorts of dimensions - from race, gender, age, education, parental status and many more.

Our goal is to grow a company where everyone who shares our values - regardless of their gender, race, ethnicity, age etc - can do their best work. With this in mind, we've made sure to include DEI projects as a responsibility of not just the people & talent team, but rather across the entire company including the strategy team.

<aside> 💡 Get to know the Rasa team here.

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📚 Current DEI efforts at Rasa

We’ve been working on DEI projects since the early days when Rasa was founded. Through that, we gained valuable insight on how diverse and inclusive Rasa is in terms of several dimensions such as: gender, nationality, race, ethnicity, age, health conditions, family conditions, educational background and work background. We also got to know which groups (if any) feel marginalised and because of what.

Every aspect of who we are as a company has a DEI lens on it, but we realise that we still have a lot more to do. We are proud to say though that our team has made tremendous progress in terms of acting on DEI, and we will continue to do the work. In fact, it’s never done.

In 2023, we’re focussed to continue our work on inclusion which we believe is an important prerequisite for diversity and equity. We have formed a cross-functional working group and narrowed our focus even more to these three areas:

1. Internal education
2. Internal processes
3. Talent pipeline (We don’t have hiring quotas!)

As part of our efforts, we’re also running regular inclusion surveys to identify any gaps.

🤝 DEI in Recruitment

To be clear, we don’t have hiring quotes for folks coming from specific backgrounds. Instead, we believe that we need to create a balanced talent pipeline with folks from all different backgrounds. To make our pipeline more balanced, we analyse our application and hiring data. Based on this, we understand in what dimensions of diversity we’re lacking applications and start initiatives to fill those gaps.

For example, in May 2020 we decided to focus on improving our top of funnel talent pipeline by two dimensions: gender and race/ethnicity. ****We are aware that diversity has uncountable dimensions but felt that focussing on a few dimensions would bring the bigger impact.

By September 2021, our data looked very different. ****Rasa had 50% women and non-binary people on the team and 42% of the technical roles were held by women and non-binary folks. The industry benchmark is 28% and 21%.

Moving forward, we will definitely add and focus on various other dimensions. You can read more about our DEI efforts in hiring in this blog post.