What it takes to win a gold award in Diversity, Equality & Inclusion, from the winner’s perspective…
Tribepad continued it’s commitment to EDI last year, sponsoring the award for Diversity, Equality & Inclusion Strategy at the In-house Recruitment Awards 2023. We were lucky enough to speak to several of the nominated teams in a fiercely contested category!
In the first instalment of our EDI spotlight mini-series, our CCO, Neil Armstrong, speaks with Laura Adams, whose team took the prestigious Gold Award on the night and a richly deserved recognition. Here’s how it went… (or you can watch the whole interview in the video above)
In a nutshell, who are NETSCC?
“We’re part of the Coordinating Center, which is the National Institute for Health and Care Research. my role within CC is as a Resourcing Manager. Part of the work of the NIHR is around improving the health of the nation, and that’s for everyone. So as a workforce we want to reflect the society that we live in, so DE&I becomes really important in that.”
So your recruitment and your workforce is really linked to the fundamentals of what the organisation does?
“Yes, we want to ensure that we’ve got a really diverse perspective of people that can represent all of those different sectors of society. It’s really important to us that we’re recruiting not only the best talent, but also that diverse perspective.”
Tell us about why you entered the award
“We entered the awards because we’ve been doing a lot of really great work this year and we thought that this was a really great way to showcase that work as well as finding out what others are doing in this space. Obviously when we do work like this, we don’t want it to just be hidden. We want to share what we’re doing so that others can learn from us and we can learn from them.”
How have you reviewed each step of the process to give you the edge in winning the gold award?
“Our ED&I strategy formed this year with four strands to it. We did a piece of work around how we advertise our roles and how we engage with candidates. We then did the work in terms of training our hiring managers – offering them inclusive recruitment training. We have something called an Inclusive Recruitment Champion, so we have one of those sit on every recruitment round that we run to be the guardian of best practice, and then the fourth strand to it was around the actual candidate journey. One of the big things that we changed there is that we send out all of our interview questions in advance to candidates. We’re really upfront and really transparent about exactly what to expect throughout our process.”
Changes such as sharing interview questions can be met with resistance from Hiring Managers, how have you addressed that?
“Any big change comes with a bit of scepticism. I think what really helped is that we did our research beforehand to see whether anyone else out there doing that, and the kind of impact that it had and it was very much a journey where we took them along with us. That’s why we ran the inclusive recruitment training alongside making these changes to the process.
It was really important to us that we got feedback, not only from the candidates, but from the hiring manager perspective. We did small trials of different ways of sending out questions and instead of sending out the full set, we send out part sets and since then have refined our strategy from that perspective and taking on board the feedback from both sides. We now find that we have much higher quality interviews, the candidate satisfaction is a lot higher than it has been, and to be fair, the hiring manager satisfaction is a lot higher.”
What have the results been in the early days?
“One of the things that we shared as part of our award entry was the diversity metrics that we’re able to track. And across all of them, we’re seeing improvements in diversity. The amount of people that come from a background other than a white background has increased quite significantly. And it’s the same across the board in terms of those that may have a disability or a different sexual orientation.
We also as a workforce are probably a little bit different in that we were a majority female workforce, and we’re seeing that gender change as well, as well as the age of our workforce.”
Find out more about Tribepad’s commitments to DE&I Strategy, as well as how our software makes your recruitment fairer, faster and better for everyone.
