The day after VSNW held it’s unconscious bias in recruitment training day the website Charity Job published the results of a survey which looked at recruitment in general. With a sample of well over 300 it has value, despite the limitations observed by the CEO of the company. A link to the survey can be found here.

How UK Charities Recruit - CharityJob Recruiter Blog

 One third of charity respondents to the survey said they engaged managers in equality, diversity and inclusion efforts when it came to recruiting and just over 32% arranged for an employee to undertake diversity or bias training.  Some 37% of respondents said that their recruitment processes had been audited since the start of 2020. The report suggests: “At just more than one in three, this seems low given the importance of recruitment and of diversity, fairness, and effectiveness, and how much the world has changed since the start of 2020. However, it could reflect other priorities and the need to concentrate limited resources elsewhere”

 Before finalising a job advert, 9% of those surveyed had an equality, diversity and inclusion expert assess it. To make judging candidates fairer, 59% of respondents had an interview panel with a diverse member of the panel present.  Notably, just under 3% of the respondents admitted to positive discrimination by recruiting someone because they had a protected characteristic, such as being part of an ethnic minority, a woman, someone who is LGBTQ+ or someone with a disability.

The report reads: “Some argue that treating all candidates equally, removing identifying information to focus just on skills, is fair. Others argue that focusing on skills without considering the context in which those skills were developed is unfair. For many jobs, making a hiring decision irrespective of gender is fair, but for some jobs it is necessary that someone with certain protected characteristics is appointed”.

CharityJob concludes “there is no single step that will ensure fairness in recruitment” but many things that could be done to increase it. One of these is advertising a job publicly so it has a wider reach and can be seen by all rather than only accessed by a select few.  Anonymous recruitment may also be effective in making charity recruitment fairer, the report said. This is where CV and cover letters have the candidate’s personal details removed so no conscious or unconscious bias can affect a judging panels decision.

VSNW would be interested to hear of your recent experiences, and processes, of recruitment.