Linda Hargreaves

Diversity and Inclusion GR Summit 2019

Be Comfortable Talking About The Uncomfortable Last Wednesday I was sat on the 'Recruiters View' panel at the Global Recruiter Summit in London with four other experienced recruiters sharing our collective insight on diversity and inclusion, we talked openly about what we’re doing in our own businesses to promote an inclusive culture and what support and advice we’re offering to our clients around the subject of Diversity. There were lots of 'takeaways', which is a pretentious way of saying 'I learned a lot'. Here are my 3 big 'takeaways' and something to consider. Diverse companies are more profitable There's loads of research to back this up, one of these studies in 2017 by Boston Consulting Group (BGC) looked at 17,000 companies across 8 countries and found a significantly strong correlation between diversity of management teams and overall innovation. These companies reported revenue 19% higher than that of companies with below-average leadership diversity. Be conscious of 'Unconscious Bias' Jon Dweck CEO of independent recruiter Pod Talent said we should all be prepared to get comfortable about feeling 'uncomfortable'. Unconscious Bias training can help your teams to think differently and create more diverse shortlists for clients. Take the Harvard Implicit test yourself and you might be surprised by the results. https://implicit.harvard.edu. It's easier than you think to recruit disabled people There are nearly 12 million disabled people in the UK. But 79 per cent do not have a job and there is a disability employment gap of around 30 per cent. That’s just over two million people! Jane Hatton founder of Disabled only job board Evenbreak educated us on why we should all be more disability confident. Jane herself is one of the 83% of disabled people who have become disabled within their life and is incredibly passionate about educating organisations on how straightforward it can be to recruit people that might be less able than us. Access to Work is a publicly funded employment support programme that aims to help more disabled people start or stay in work. For employers, there is useful advice and for some cases, financial support is offered when employing disabled people. To find out more, please go to the Direct Gov website - Access to Work - Factsheet Finally, something to consider. One of the pictures shows the second panel (the view from "The Client"). On this panel were four UK based companies (EY, JLL, Fujitsu and Capgemini) that collectively employ almost 700,000 people around the world! They included two recruitment directors and two heads of diversity and ALL four were in agreement that Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) was a genuine "business case" (dead important) for their respective businesses and that if you (us agencies) are not on board and delivering genuine change (doing loads of good stuff around "D&I" and finding people from diverse backgrounds) then we'd be left behind (won't deal with us). If you're a business owner or agency and think that Diversity and Inclusion isn't relevant to you then, think again!

Linda Hargreaves

Contractor Care Manager

Group Insights & Media