For too long, many organisations within the UK global sustainable development sector remained homogenous, with a lack of staff and board diversity, as well as a lack of inclusive practices, resulting in harmful systems and the continuation of outdated ideas. Over the last few years, diversity and inclusion has become an increasingly crucial priority for many, including the team here at SIDA, and there is a lot of work still to be done. Representation is of the utmost importance, from board members through to volunteers, and should be a critical step on each of our own journeys towards a more inclusive, anti-racist and fairer sector.
We’ve pulled together 6 tips to increase diversity and inclusion in your recruitment – SIDA has committed to employing these concepts in our own recruitment process, and are always open to hearing from our community on how we can continue to learn and improve.
1) Recruit in diverse spaces
The first step to increasing diversity in your workplace is to recruit and advertise your position in spaces where minority and other marginalised individuals will see your advertisement. This can include seeking applications from specific groups, (for example, stating that you particularly welcome applications from under-represented groups in your organisation, which might be women, people with disabilities, or from minority ethnic groups). Note that in the UK you cannot appoint on the basis of membership in those groups as under the UK Equality Act you cannot discriminate in how you provide services (including hiring, appointment to panels, committees, boards, etc) unless hiring of a certain group is part of a genuine occupational need (ie, if your NGO’s explicit purpose is to be a platform for voices of the Global South.)
Hence, you should heavily advertise and recruit among marginalised groups you wish to attract, but anonymise the applications (see 3 below), so that you are not recruiting based on traits or membership in those groups.
2) Gender and race neutral job applications
Make advertisements race and gender neutral (there is software that can do this for you). Pay attention to the words you use: if a post says the work environment is competitive, more men apply, but if it is collaborative, women apply. There are two options to address this problem, you can either delete gender-biased words from the advertisement and look for neutral words, or mix them evenly.
3) Anonymous applications
The most important thing you can do is ‘blind’ or anonymise applications for appointments to any position. Applicants should be invited to submit anonymous application materials only. This includes CVs, cover letters, writing samples, even work samples. Ideally, an individual who is not on the hiring committee* should go through the material to make sure it is completely blind and delete any information that might suggest bias. You can anonymise this as far as you want, it might just be names (which already makes a huge difference), but you might also want blindness to where the applicants’ education comes from, or even dates to minimise age bias. Wealth of experience will still show and can be an important factor.
4) Division of labour: do not give everyone the same material for review. All material should be ranked or graded
The division of labour approach to application review is that it limits the amount of bias any member of the committee is able to have about any applicant. If I found two writing samples I thought were brilliant and I have no idea those samples came from a person who did a PhD at Cambridge and a person who studied at Mogadishu University then my hiring decision cannot be biased on race or immigrant status, etc.
Typically, applications involve a CV or application form and cover letter. Shortlisted candidates are then invited to provide either a writing sample or work sample of some description. These need to be divided among the hiring committee. The cover letter and CV in particular will introduce biases, so you don’t want the entire committee to see those. For instance, if you have a small committee of only 2-3 people, you might give one person the CVs and the other the work samples.
If resources allow, each committee-member should rank the top two or three applicants on each pile. Next, the committee narrows down to a handful of applicants via discussion until you have a shortlist of candidates to interview. Depending on your application system you may want to create a grading or scoring system instead of discussing applicants.
5) The interview is an exam: same questions and give it a grade
Interviews should be done to a standard set of questions and the hiring committee trying to grade answers to make the decision process more objective (and to try to alleviate the natural bias we all have for the last person who spoke). The questions and grading rubric should be agreed upon by your organisation in advance. The grading scale does not need to be complicated, something as simple as ranking out of five the specific attributes for which you are looking (ie, capability to do the job, communication skills, etc).
6) Work sample receives a grade and is sensitive to the available time of applicants.
Work samples should be graded or scored when at least some of the committee know nothing about the CV of the candidates. This allows those members of the committee to grade the candidate based on skills rather than biases about things like education or previous jobs.
If you ask candidates to do a work sample before the interview, they need enough time so that anyone working non-traditional hours or caring for other people is not given a disadvantage. For instance, asking a single parent with a young child to complete a work sample in 48 hours could be impossible. This would usually mean giving them something like a week to produce the sample or simply giving them an hour to do it as part of the interview.
After interviews the committee should meet one last time to compare scores and rank candidates based on all the information available. By this point, application materials and interviews have been ranked and scored, and the committee should have one or two individuals chosen based on merit. At this stage references might be needed or other non-anonymised material in order to make a final decision, but often you can make this final decision still using blind applications confident that as little bias entered your decision process as possible.
*We would suggest a hiring committee of three people – you might want/need to draw on board members to assist.