Three women at Belvo share the stories of how they’ve grown in the company since they joined and how they’ve experienced the sometimes ‘scary’ but always rewarding learning journey in a fast-growing environment.
Table of Contents
- How do we achieve this?
- From intern to Associate: “It’s like both I and the company are evolving so much in a very short time”
- Building a team from scratch: “The impostor syndrome can strike hard when you so grow fast”
- Becoming a manager in a growing business: “Being in a position of constant growth was always my goal”
Statistics can be hard to beat. But at Belvo we’re committed to building a culture that is firmly rooted in diversity, inclusion, and equity. There’s a reason why one of our values is “diversity matters”: we care deeply about building a place where everyone is welcomed.
And we think that in order to build a diverse culture it is essential to start from the ground, applying diversity policies from the very beginning: our hiring process. With small things, we can create a big impact. That’s why we ensure all our job postings are gender-neutral, we always include a female in at least one step of our hiring processes and we partner with diversity organizations to promote jobs and build a diverse pipeline for our hiring processes.
But these efforts are just the beginning and they continue once women join our workforce: we have inclusion and equity policies in place at all stages of our journey at Belvo. This is key to ensuring we have a diverse team, regardless of your area or level at Belvo. We are proud of now having 30% of women in leadership positions in the company, above the most common figures in tech companies, which is usually around 20%.
How do we achieve this?
Being an ‘equal opportunity employer’, which means that as a Belvoer, you feel respected, trusted, and treated fairly to ensure everyone has an equal chance of progressing in their career. But how do we ensure that? We have several initiatives on that matter, such as:
A defined career path
We have a career path, in which we define the specific scope and skills in terms of communication, delivery, principles, and collaboration for each level. That creates an internal progression framework, and we strictly use this framework for hiring and promoting, avoiding any type of bias in that process.
Equal pay
We also use the framework defined in the career path for compensating, which helps us to ensure that everyone on the same level of responsibility is paid equally, independently of reasons like gender, age or race.
Support everyone’s growth and development
Supporting our employees in progressing in their careers is really important for us. Because of that, we have in place a quarterly assessment and annual performance appraisal process, that helps us to align expectations and support our employee’s progress in career plans, analyze growth areas and give and receive feedback.
Once we do that, of course, it is equally important to create our future work success with learning and action plans that help us achieve our goals. We provide helpful assistance and guidance to understand Belvoer’s own aspirations, objectives, and desires and to see how to apply them to shape our careers. We launched several initiatives, like coaching sessions to improve soft skills, such as communication, time management or feedback, and workshops for women regarding how to deal better with impostor syndrome.
Efforts, attitudes, and results should be recognized, that’s why is also important to promote people when they deserve it. At Belvo, we use the performance review cycles to set up promotions if someone is ready to move to the next level, and of course, we celebrate it as a team!
These are the stories of some of the amazing women that have grown their careers while at Belvo. Want to hear it from them?
From intern to Associate: “It’s like both I and the company are evolving so much in a very short time”
María joined Belvo as a Data Analyst Intern in July 2020. “I was still in college and worked and studied at the same time for one year. When I started the team I work in now didn’t even exist. I entered into a big squad of backend engineers that were at least 10 years older than me, it felt super scary,” she acknowledges.
One year later, she started working as a Data Science Associate. Since then, both she and the company have grown exponentially: “Everything is new for you and for the company. This has given me the chance to see, learn and use so many different tools that I wouldn’t have had the chance otherwise. It’s fast and intense, but it’s also super fulfilling and exciting. You rarely see a company grow as much at the same time you start working,” she adds.
On this journey, María appreciates how Belvo has “taken care” of her. But on top of that, she values “having a team (and even people outside of it) that supports me and helps with anything I need, even if that is to have some fun to disconnect. The first thing I was told was that here ‘there are no stupid questions’ and it is something that hit me in the best possible way.”
Building a team from scratch: “The impostor syndrome can strike hard when you so grow fast”
When Isa joined Belvo in August 2020 as a Growth Lead she was the first member of the newly-born Marketing team, which she has since then grown into a full 10-people team that she leads as Head of Marketing. “Going from a team of one person to having a large team distributed in different countries has been a challenging process. During this time I have been assaulted by many doubts: am I doing it right, am I a good reference for my team, am I helping them in their professional development?,” she explains.
Isa admits that the “impostor syndrome can strike hard” when you experience such fast professional growth, but believes that the support from her managers and the People team –and most of all, the trust from her team –, has been key to surpassing these fears.
“I have had recurrent coaching sessions to improve my communication skills, as well as mentoring from other women in leadership positions. The truth is that it has been incredible. Belvo offered me the best professional opportunity I have had to date. In this position, I believe I am able to bring out my best, and that is something I could not have achieved without Belvo’s support.”
Becoming a manager in a growing business: “Being in a position of constant growth was always my goal”
Vicky started as a Finance Associate at Belvo in 2020, seven months later, she became a Finance Lead and after another four months, she recently assumed the role of Finance Manager. “I like to say that when I joined Belvo, the finance team started with me, at the right moment, when the company started monetizing and expanding –as if we were starting something together,” she explains.
From her first role where she reported directly to one of the company founders, and the startup had only 24 employees, she’s grown alongside Belvo – as its financial needs became more complex and demanding, across countries and markets. Now she leads a team of three finance executives, together with external accounting firms and support from a VP of Finance.
Joining the company at such an early stage felt like the perfect timing for Vicky, who had a first-row seat to watch the business grow and be involved in it from the very beginning. “My professional development has been pretty much aligned with the company. It was the job and the timing that I was looking for and being in a position of constant and fast growth, was always my goal.”
During this time, Vicky particularly values the support she’s had to guide her growth. “From my individual perspective, I’d highlight the opportunity of being mentored by Uri (at the beginning) and nowadays by Leandro Piano (VP of Finance) and to work with the dream team of finance executives.”
