This second session with Jennie Child was building upon what we learnt in the first session (fundamentals of DEIB and what Yellow Cat Recruitment wants their vision to be) whilst encouraging us to focus on the different stages of recruitment in order to achieve our diversity strategy. In particular, the activities, biases and solutions for these issues. 

We covered:  

• Recap on DEIB  
• Different types of biases  
• Analysis of the different stages of recruitment – reviewing the activities and biases and barriers of those stages  
• Reviewing how we may have unintentionally been biased against candidates  
• Providing solutions to those biases and barriers  
• Expand on three solutions and work to put these into practice 

We broke out into three groups and came up with solutions to embedding our principles across three areas; ‘Sourcing & Preparation’, ‘The Interview’ and ‘Decision and Offer’. Jennie was great at challenging us, going through the stations with each group and encouraging us to come up with our own ideas by asking thought-provoking questions.

It was quite enlightening – especially coming to terms with past actions we may be taking as recruiters that are barriers to candidates as a result of our own unconscious bias. We then curated some solutions to these biases and barriers people may face in order to create a more inclusive and open recruiting process – we came to the conclusion that providing support for successful and unsuccessful candidates was important and putting things into place to protect candidates throughout the whole of the recruitment process. Jennie went through the official names of different biases and their definitions– Who knew there were so many biases?   

The ‘B’ in DEIB 

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion are key in every workplace, but we must put an emphasis on Belonging. Something that stuck out to me was Jennie saying that “You can’t have belonging if you don’t have inclusion”. Belonging is that step further – it’s aftercare. If you put everything into place only to a certain point, things will fall apart later down the process.  

We can all take steps to ensure everyone feels included, such as adjustments to make the recruitment process easier and more accessible etc., but overall, it has to be a change in mindsets to ensure everyone gets a fair chance. Our aim is that our workforce will genuinely represent all sections of society and that each employee feels respected and able to give their best.  

Final thoughts

Overall, I encourage all companies to have DEIB training as I wouldn’t have believed myself to have biases before these sessions but I’m now very aware everyone has unbalanced misconceptions, treating others differently, even if it is just within the subconscious. We must make more effort to be aware of this and challenge ourselves to look at recruitment through a different lens.