Purpose:
Monitoring the diversity of recruitment and promotion locally, and working with employers to champion diverse workplaces.
Stimulus/Rationale:
Equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) is always evolving, and it is important to interrogate practices, people, systems, processes and policies.
Process:
In Kirklees (United Kingdom), the local council has formed the DIVERSITY = INNOVATION project group with local employers including SMEs and larger businesses such as Cummins Turbo Technologies and Syngenta agrochemicals to monitor the diversity of recruitment and promotion locally, and work with employers to champion diverse workplaces.
As of 2024, there is a network with 16 employers as members, including Kirklees Council. These employers seek to be ambassadors for diversity in their own right: for example, Cummins recently partnered with Conscious Youth to deliver an international event on black leadership in recognition of Black History Month.
The network is planning to input into the developing West Yorkshire Fair Work Charter dedicated to genuine levelling-up across West Yorkshire – encouraging good pay, fair and flexible working conditions, and promoting diversity and social mobility throughout the region’s the workforce.
In addition, the council has itself adopted an approach of name-blind recruitment, resulting in a more diverse pool of interviewees than more conventional methods of CV-sorting, as the latter can be subject to both explicit and implicit bias. Instead, applications and CVs are judged on the applicant’s credentials, rather than their names or other personal details.
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