Jobs – Co-op Digital Blog

Karen Lindop: we’re hiring! Plus news from our latest All Team

June 29, 2018Co-op

(Transcript) Karen Lindop: Hello, and welcome to our update on what’s happening in the Digital team. Busy week this week.

On Wednesday all the team got together to share their work. It was great to have lots of the team members on their feet and talking about the work their doing. We heard all about digital coupons; our Design system; service design with our Food business; how we’re using our data ethics canvas; plans for one web and celebrating award success. Thanks to everyone who presented.

We’re looking for some new people to join us right now. We’re expanding the work on Funeralcare Guardian, and because of this we’re looking for product owner, delivery manager, BA, software engineer, platform engineer, QA, user researcher and interaction designer. If you, or you know anyone who might be interested then please get in touch.

You can also find out more about the Guardian roll-out and lessons learned on our Digital blog.

Also this week, some of our interaction designers have been involved in OH’s Catalyst programme – a 10-day alternative education programme for people looking to get their foot in the door of the creative and digital industry. Katherine Wastell and Jack Fletcher took part in a panel discussion about their design career paths. Then together with Nate Langley they all led a session called ‘Everyone is a designer’, which focussed on turning research findings into product opportunities.

That’s it for this week. Don’t forget to subscribe for all our updates on our blog and follow us on Twitter. See you soon.

Karen Lindop
Head of Digital Operations

What it’s like working in Digital Engineering

June 1, 2017Co-op1 Comment

Gemma Cameron, our Principal Software Engineer speaks about what it’s like to work in Co-op Digital and Digital Engineering.

(Transcript) Gemma: I love the variety of projects that we have going on and all the people that are working on them. So we’ve got not just amazing engineers, we’ve also have got some really great product owners, delivery managers, really amazing BAs and the designers are just incredible and we’ve got all the user experience team.

We’ve got some great people working on really innovative cool projects and, you know, what comes out of it is actually doing something good.

I’m supported in all the community stuff that I do outside of work. So I get to you know, Co-op are helping out with Hack Manchester so we support and sponsor Hack Manchester, I also get to run events here, we are sponsoring the Liverpool Girl Geeks Academy, so it’s great getting girls who are like 12-14 to get to some experience programming.

We sponsor events, we attend events, so we were at the Manchester Digital Skills Festival not so long ago and that’s great meeting some of the new graduates and people are looking for work and getting to tell them about the story of what we do here, that we’re bringing brilliant people in who are really good at collaboration, who really care about software quality and you know we’re doing all the good things like test-driven development.

We’re building these great teams but we don’t expect everybody to know all the tools that we’re using or the languages that we’re using. So we have got some people who showing all these great people and behavioural qualities, but they’re not so good on Java and we’re giving them time and space and we’re coming up with a syllabus to give them that training.

The same with test-driven development and looking at all that quality. We have community of practice and we get together as a group of engineers and work out what our, sort of, level of quality should be. I also want to try and see if I can get involved in some of the projects from inception so actually working together with people and talking to them about what their needs are, going to have discovery phase and creating like little alphas that would be awesome because I’ve worked in a start ups before and I enjoyed doing that experience and it would be nice to do it for a more worthwhile cause.

Gemma Cameron
Principal Software Engineer

We’re looking for software engineers right now. Join us.

We’re Hiring Again.

March 24, 2016Cat Storey

Dave and Polly recently talked about our how we’re looking for lots of talented digital people to join us @CoopDigital.

We’re now looking for some more people to join Dave’s digital engineering team:

Service Manager
Service Analyst
Principal Engineer
Principal Developer
Principal Architect

Follow the links to find out more and apply. If you have any questions about any of the roles you can either comment on the blog or find us @CoopDigital.

Gender bias in job adverts.

March 14, 2016March 24, 2016Cat Storey13 Comments

We’re looking for lots of digital people to come and join us @CoopDigital and I’m helping to find them. I was interested to see if there was any link between the gender of the writer of a job advert to that of the applicants. Here’s what I’ve found out so far:

Content Designer

Advert written solely by a female
Total applications received: 25
Female applicants: 13
Male applicants: 12
This means 52% of applications are from women

Digital Delivery Manager

Advert written collaboratively between female and male colleagues
Total applications received: 17
Female: 3
Male: 14
Only 18% of applications are from women.

Product Manager

Advert written solely by male colleague
Total applications received: 40
Female: 5
Male: 35
Only 12.5% of applications are from females.

Looking at the stats above there appears to be a link between the gender of the writer and the diversity of the applicants.

So how to tackle this?

There is some great research surrounding gender bias within job adverts. The Women’s College Coalition found that men apply for jobs when they meet 60% of the criteria, while women wait until they feel they meet 100%. We should definitely consider this when writing future adverts. Do we really need all 10 bullet points highlighting role accountabilities? Could we scale down to just 5 and open ourselves up to more relevant and diverse applications?

What about the look of the advert? The colour, format and font used? All things to consider and I’m to go away and do more research on this.

I am going to use this gender decoder to check all new job adverts. The study that it was based on found that masculine-coded language puts women off more and that the effect on feminine-coded language on male applicants is only slight. Here are some blog posts on the subject that inspired the tool:

http://www.eremedia.com/ere/you-dont-know-it-but-women-see-gender-bias-in-your-job-postings/
http://madebymany.com/blog/can-a-few-well-chosen-words-improve-inclusivity

I’d be interested to hear any experiences or findings anyone else may have on this subject.

Polly Haslam

Our latest vacancies
Product Managers (applications now closed)
Delivery Managers (applications now closed)
Content Designers (applications now closed)
Head of Engineering (applications now closed)

Digital Designer wanted

October 30, 2015October 30, 2015benrieveley

Hello, me again.

I mentioned that there’d be more jobs coming soon, well here’s another great opportunity to join our growing band of digital co-operators.

Our ambition is bold: to re-create the Co-operative for a digital era, and demonstrate a different way of doing business for an increasingly connected community. To achieve this we need to ensure the visual impact of our digital services communicates our brand whilst meeting our users’ needs.

We need you to produce, creative, coherent and consistent design across all digital channels for our family of businesses. You’d be joining our Manchester based design studio and support the Digital team by providing the visual design that helps us communicate our message and deliver a truly user-centric service to our customers online.

If you are a naturally creative person with a keen sense of business context this could be the job for you. You’ll need to be passionate but not precious, a collaborator with the confidence to present and explain ideas to both the digital team and colleagues throughout the business.

If you’re interested then take a closer look on our jobs board and submit your CV.

Have a great weekend!

Ben

Find me on twitter @barthelmess

We’re hiring!

October 29, 2015October 29, 2015benrieveley

Hi, I’m Ben 2 (there’s 3 of us), I work in the Co-op Digital Team and have done since it was a team of one.

I have a huge passion for the Co-op and have always believed that it has immense potential in the new digital world we can be as pioneering as we were back in 1844 (I joined a couple of years later).

With our new digital leadership team we have just turned a massive corner and are about take big steps towards realising our potential. There’s much to do and to do it we need talent. We have talent but we need more. So we are immediately looking for a User Researcher to join us.

We need someone to help build a clear picture of our users and generate new and useful user insights that will allow us to iteratively improve the service for our users.

Are you experienced in using a variety of user testing methodologies to reveal actionable customer insights? Do you have excellent analytical and problem solving skills with the ability to quickly develop recommendations based on quantitative and qualitative evidence? Are you confident in explaining user needs to colleagues outside of the digital team, and can act as a persuasive advocate for those needs across the whole business?

Do you want to be part of transforming this iconic organisation, working in this awesome building in Manchester?

Then take a look at our jobs board and submit your CV today.

Good luck!

Ben

p.s. If this isn’t the job for you, keep your eye on this blog as there’s more to come…

Find me on twitter @barthelmess