Our goal is to match our market leadership with a best-in-class recruitment policy. We hire people from a variety of backgrounds and take active steps to fight all forms of discrimination.
Strength in diversity
Diversity is a way of life for a global, multidisciplinary organisation like Thales. We actively promote interaction between staff members with different backgrounds, cultures and experiences — not just to boost our image as a multicultural company, but because diversity and cohesion translate into better performance.
Recruiting local staff in all our countries of operation helps us to understand our customers better. And having four or five nationalities working together in the same team generates a range of different points of view that can inspire new ideas.
Fighting discrimination
Thales has long been engaged in the fight against all forms of discrimination based on age, disability, gender or prejudice. Our employees share this commitment. When they join Thales, all our staff receive equality and diversity training as part of the induction process, and this training is refreshed throughout their careers.
Thales upholds the principle of “equality of treatment, which means avoiding any discrimination on the grounds of origins, sex, sexual orientation, age, political or religious opinions, union membership or personal disabilities.”
Gender diversity in practice
Did you know that 22% of our employees around the world are women? One of the aims of our recruitment policy is to raise that proportion — 27.5% of new hires worldwide last year were women — and to provide more opportunities for women to drive the company's future success.
Almost all the women who work for Thales are skilled staff with long-term contracts. We have a strict equal pay policy, and a proactive approach to career development for women ensures that male and female employees have equal opportunities for advancement.
We recruit a significant proportion of our workforce from engineering schools, but the number of women attending these schools is falling. Thales is trying to address this problem through initiatives aimed at attracting young women to scientific and technical careers, such as the Women’s Forum and the Elles Bougent association.
Overcoming disability
Thales offers employment opportunities for disabled people, even in countries where this is not required by law. A dedicated integration unit, known as Thales Mission Insertion, has been set up in France, supported by Disability Employment Committees in all Thales entities with more than 250 employees.
The central integration unit works with these local committees, taking concrete steps to overcome disability in the workplace:
- training and awareness sessions for employees
- support for disabled high-school and university students wishing to find out about work opportunities
- development of a new standard for “disabled-friendly” companies (in partnership with the French standards association AFNOR).
Bringing the generations together
Thales makes sure that every age demographic is represented in its workforce. The Generation Contract signed in 2013, with unanimous support from trade union organisations, is a binding commitment on the part of Thales to promote the transfer of knowledge and skills between young people and the over-50s.
Active partnerships with universities, business schools and engineering schools form the bedrock of a long-term policy aimed at attracting and retaining young graduates.
Age is never a factor in Thales's recruitment decisions. In fact, all references to age and date of birth have been removed from the databases used by our HR departments.