Patient-Centric Healthcare Innovator Leading the Charge on Equity in the Tech Sector - 10 November 2021

As a business on a mission to create a more equitable healthcare system for all; fairness, representation and inclusion are in the DNA of Cemplicity’s business model. Designed to empower people who are under-served by their health systems, Cemplicity and its clients share the same motivation to level the playing field when it comes to patient experiences and outcomes.

However the values-driven leadership team weren’t content to stop there. Purely championing equity for its customers wasn’t considered good enough – it was just as important that they championed it within their own team.

Founder Mary Vance explains: “Women in particular are enormously under-represented in New Zealand’s technology sector making up just 23% of the total workers. We wanted to stand up and let people know that that’s not okay.”

So began an active hiring strategy designed to ensure a more diverse and representational business and after a round of new hires in October 2021, they achieved their vision of a 50/50 gender split in the workforce. Not just that, the gender split was spread across all departments, including R&D, ensuring a diversity of perspective at all levels of the business.

Mary Vance: “My experience is that people tend to recruit into their comfort zones however for Cemplicity, keeping an open mind and deliberately seeking diversity, is a winning recruitment strategy. In our field it’s critical we reach people from every walk of life, so it’s a great strength that every person in our team thinks differently from each of their colleagues.

Mary believes this active approach to hiring for diversity has strengthened the culture at the business: “Cemplicity values diversity and this has brought us to a great place as a team. How any company could not want to be like this, is beyond me. It’s interesting, fun and endlessly surprising.”

It’s not just about gender diversity though. The hiring strategy has also put the emphasis on ensuring wider cultural and social representation, and despite being a relatively small team numbering just 25, eight nationalities are now represented.

CTO Grant Stone, believes this wider range of perspectives leads to more valuable internal discussions and better product and engineering decisions:

“Software development is usually seen as a very technical process. But lines of code are just detail. Creating software is an intensely human activity. The discussions we have as a team, the bonds we form, the perspectives we bring, are all far more important to the result than which programming language we choose.”