We believe that the best ideas come from diverse perspectives and we care deeply about building a workplace that reflects the world we live in. From defaulting to transparency to fostering a culture of support and collaboration both internally & externally, we’re working hard to make sure Monzo is a place where everyone can belong.
In this post you’ll hear from Harriet, Eleni and Luke about how we’re constantly iterating on our hiring processes and our work environment to make sure they’re inclusive and open to everyone.
Inclusive Hiring: Our commitment to transparency
Harriet, Senior Technical Recruiter for Engineering
Defaulting to Transparency is one of my favourite values at Monzo, and it's particularly important in the way we hire into our engineering teams. We strive to be an open book. Whilst we know we're not perfect, we believe in giving you all the information you need to decide if Monzo is the right place for you.
This starts with our job adverts. We include the key details that matter most to candidates, like salary ranges and whether the role is remote or hybrid. We get that job titles can mean different things at different companies, so we link our job adverts and salary ranges to our public Engineering Progression frameworks. This way, you can clearly see what we’re looking for at each level. This extends once you join Monzo where we have clearly communicated pay bandings, internal level transparency, and clear principles around how we run pay reviews.
You’ll also find links to our interview process blogs, Gender Pay Gap Reports and relevant Engineering Blogs. These give you a peek into how Monzo works and what we’re focused on in the future.
Every candidate has a dedicated recruiter and a coordinator who will work hard to make the whole interview process smooth for you. These two points of contact will stay with you until your very first day at Monzo (and beyond!). Throughout our process, we work around your schedule, deadlines and any personal requirements you might have.
One example of this is where you can choose between a pair programming session or a take home task on the technical round — allowing you to choose the one that matches your strengths or time constraints, but still gives us the technical signal we’re looking for.
On top of the usual recruiter introduction call, every candidate who reaches the final stage for a permanent role is offered a preparation call. This call covers three main areas:
what to expect in your final interviews
feedback on your progress so far, and
a quick check on logistics discussed in the recruiter call.
Our aim here is to set you up for success. We know interviews can be nerve-wracking, so we want to prepare you as much as possible to showcase your strengths and get the offer you deserve!
Make a difference
Eleni, Senior Technical Recruiter for Engineering Leaders
Our value of making a difference focuses on solving real problems and working on things that have the biggest impact – to Monzonauts, our customers, and in this case, the wider community outside of Monzo. We want to impact real world change.
One of the things I love about working at Monzo is that we focus on providing benefits that are genuinely useful and make a difference to a Monzonaut’s life. People love free pizza and bean bags in offices, but providing real benefits that can enhance Monzonaut lives inside and outside of work is what matters to us most.
We were the first bank in the UK to introduce dedicated policies of additional paid leave for colleagues who suffer from pregnancy loss or who are undergoing fertility treatments. Recently, we were featured in an article for the top 10 UK companies with the best maternity leave benefits.
We’re aware that as we continue to grow, Monzonaut’s needs will evolve so we regularly review our benefits to make sure we’re providing things that genuinely make a difference. As of this year, we increased our employer pension contributions from matching your contributions at 4% to 6%, and increased paid holiday leave by 2 days. Both of these changes were driven by feedback from our Monzonauts to the People team. You can see some of our other benefits listed here.
We also care about making a difference to Monzonauts’ careers and encouraging internal mobility. This year, we’re running our 4th Engineering Sponsorship Programme. This is an internal programme we run with Monzonauts in our Customer Operations teams who want to make a career switch into Engineering. We partner with Makers Academy to support them in their transition, and provide them with the mentoring and support they need to make this career change. Since the programme started, we have folks who have progressed into being full-time software engineers and have been promoted into more senior roles.
Lastly, we care about making a difference to the external engineering community outside of Monzo. In the wider tech industry, we know there’s so much more to do to support folks from underrepresented communities to start their engineering careers.
We’ve partnered with Moonwalkers to support school-age children to learn what it means to be a Software Engineer, and get them engaged and excited about all the opportunities in the field. We also run mentorship programmes with Coding Black Females to support current and aspiring black women engineers. We care about making a difference that will impact future generations of the workforce.
Help everyone belong
Luke, Engineering Director
Our mission to make money work for everyone is core to everything we do. A key way we achieve this mission is by building a diverse team who have different experiences; and then use those experiences to build a bank that genuinely works for everyone.
My favourite value that we hold strong at Monzo is to ‘help everyone belong’. We work as one team with clear accountabilities. There’s no point in hiring a diverse team to ship amazing products for our customers if we’re not able to be our true selves at work, and really impact the products we’re building.
To help people land a role with us, we don’t require you to specifically have a computer science degree (I don’t!), or have super specific industry experience (I’d never worked in fintech before joining Monzo). We give you the time and support you need to be successful in your role during your onboarding – whether that’s getting to grips with writing Go or learning about the products you’ll be shipping to our customers.
Once you’re in, we then run a few different things across engineering to help you belong:
Regular listening sessions with folks from underrepresented groups, such as our Women in Tech group. This is an informal but confidential discussion where we discuss themes such as progression, recognition, and support – and use the output to drive improvements across our teams
An anonymous quarterly employee survey to get feedback on how we can help everyone belong. We ask specific questions around diversity and inclusion, and we hold our engineering leaders accountable to make improvements based on this feedback and track progress over time
We offer flexible working with no company mandate on how often our engineers need to come into the office. Our offices are awesome(!) but we trust you to work in a way that will help you and your team be at your best.
Having read this blog you’ve now got a better idea about how we’re aiming to make Monzo engineering an inclusive, supportive place where you can do your best work.
You’ve also seen how we’re striving to make our hiring processes as accessible and supportive as possible, giving you the best shot of showcasing your strengths and landing a job with us in engineering.
So…what’s stopping you from applying to join us today? View our open roles in engineering!