Improving diversity in the workplace

With the diversity of their workforce more important to employers than ever before, tackling the under-representation of certain groups - including by gender, ethnicity and social background - is likely to be a major focus throughout 2018

Diversity targets vary for each organisation, although a large focus is typically placed on gender. In 2017, 83% of employers that responded to the ISE Annual Survey said that gender was their top priority, ahead of ethnicity (74%) and social mobility (67%).

What is the issue?

In 2017, 75% of employers sought to improve the diversity of their graduate hires using specific actions.1 These included:

• ensuring they had diverse campus representatives (42%)
• running outreach events for final year students (33%)
• offering financial support for candidates to attend selection events (26%)
• using name or university blind recruitment (18%).

Some organisations also altered their application processes to create a more equal assessment. CVs and psychometric tests were removed and situational judgement test results were used to select candidates during the initial recruitment stage.

How much progress has been made?

Employers that provided year-on-year gender data to the ISE increased their average share of graduate female hires by 4.6% in three years.

Those that provided year-on-year data for ethnicity increased their average share of BAME hires by 2.3% in three years.

Sectors making the most progress with gender diversity were banking and financial services (nine percentage point increase), the engineering or industrial sectors (seven percentage point increase), and construction (seven percentage point increase).

Which groups are under-represented?

An 11.5 percentage point gap exists between the percentage of female students and female graduate hires. They are also better represented on internship programmes (43.6%) than graduate ones (42.9%).

Those with a disability are another under-represented group in the workplace, with a seven percentage point gap between the percentage of disabled graduates and hires.

More action could be taken to measure social mobility. Last year, only 29% of employers measured socio-economic status and 42% tracked how many hires were first-generation graduates.

What barriers do employers face?

It appears that employers continue to face challenges regarding workplace diversity. The LinkedIn Global Recruiting Trends 2018 report found that organisations struggle with:

• finding diverse candidates to interview (38%)
• retaining diverse employees (27%)
• getting diverse candidates past interviewing stage (14%)
• getting diverse candidates to accept offers (8%).

As highlighted in the report, employee inclusion and belonging are as important as diversity. Employees who do not feel supported and accepted within a company's culture will be more likely to move on or reject an offer. Although there is evidence that organisations are taking measures to overcome these issues which include:

• fostering an environment that respects differing opinions (67%)
• using diverse employees in web print and materials (52%)
• having leaders that acknowledge the importance of diversity (47%)
• embedding diversity in the company’s mission and values (45%)
• presenting diverse interview panels (35%).

It is encouraging that employers are aware of the need to improve diversity in their workforces. However, as highlighted by the LinkedIn report, more than just an acknowledgement of the issue is needed to overcome the problems that creating a diverse environment presents. Being creative and critical with hiring procedures could help employers to reach their diversity targets.

Notes

1. ISE Annual Report 2017.

Written by

Laura Greaves

Information analyst

Prospects