Recruitment Diversity Strategies : 2023

For companies to survive and flourish in the candidate driven market of 2023 business leaders need to foster and create progressive businesses, with diverse workforces, and flexible working practices. Greater diversity isn’t therefore just the right thing to do, it makes business sense.

For years we have been warning of twin strategic employment threats, (1) the low adoption of overall diversity and (2) the failure to embrace effective succession planning in critical leadership roles. Both are interconnected. The leaders best equipped to meet tomorrow’s challenges are unlikely to share the same demographics configuration as todays. 

In the United Kingdom the 2010 Equality Act ensures, through statute, firms eliminate discrimination, advance equality, and foster good relations between different parts of society. In particular, it focuses on age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion/belief, sex and sexual orientation. 

 Diversity is defined as “recognising, respecting, and celebrating each other’s differences”.

A diverse work environment constructed from a wide range of backgrounds and mindsets can create a business culture of innovation and creativity. Diversity offers tangible benefits to the goals and reputation of all businesses.  However, diversity in all its forms, is also an operational requirement in the Investment and Financial Services industry.  

The UK FCA has indicated that it expects to see “sufficient diversity” in regulated firm’s leadership teams with Diversity and Inclusion acting as a key consideration towards positive business conduct.  Increasingly they plan to ask “tough” questions on ethnicity, gender and diversity representation, and whether business cultures are open and inclusive.

In recent industry specific research papers, PWC and EY have also highlighted the lack of diversity within financial services as concerning, in particular quoting that the investment management sector requires “further focus”.

Unintentionally, the implementation of strategies to increase diversity seems to be somewhat glacier. COVID super-charged the issue, squeezing out many working women and re-winding hard won diversity gains.  It was widely reported during the pandemic that female careers were negatively impacted with an unproportionable amount of childcare firmly resting on female shoulders. Critically diversity agendas seem to run for a while, then get side-lined when more pressing business demands arise. 

Companies must do more to tackle overall diversity, not just that of gender, race and sexual orientation. Employers must ensure they establish a culture where people treat each other with mutual respect, and where bias, bullying, discrimination, and micro-aggressions are actively tackled. Within professional services it is also important not to lose sight of the less highlighted causes such as class and background. 

There is also a suggested link that family status plays a significant role in educational, occupational and earnings attainment in later life. The UK is a highly unequal society with deepening income disparities and with an impending recession, heightening income insecurity.

If class differences can define levels of earnings and future career progression, then these pre-programmed stereotypes perpetuate inequalities and can become harmful, limiting or provide a barrier to an individual’s ability to choose their own career path.  Unconscious biases emerge and companies run the risk of putting polish before potential.  Via awareness, acknowledgement training, it is estimated it takes a generation to reach a truly utopian view, where both conscious and unconscious bias’s level out.  This is the estimated period of time required to ingrain positive cultural change.

Hard work and commitment can propel people forward faster than previous experience or academic qualifications given the right environment. This means an open-minded approach to recruitment which can only be truly transformational if it is a commitment that is recognised and delivered strategically from senior leadership. 

The best way achieve positive change is with an emphasis on business culture. Where the values and mindsets of the workplace are aligned with that of the customers and clients.  Being reflective of the diversity of society as a whole.   This requires business owners and employees to advocate the benefits of diversity in thought, approach, background, and views, propelling the company forward towards corporate goals. This corporate mindset is not just required from board-level via soundbites, or rhetoric from HR departments but though a deep inbuilt cultural beliefs and actions.

If firms are to overturn the lack of available talent scales tipped by COVID and the UK’s Exit from the EU, re-balancing and restocking diverse workforces will require strategic initiatives.  Having a robust framework surrounding recruitment, career progression and culture is therefore key.  

Companies need to provide a supportive culture that enables women to continue to work as their personal circumstances morph and change, whether this be in the physical office or the virtual one. 

Businesses need to look beyond education and experience when they recruit, focusing on transferable skills.  Resilience, adaptability, tenacity, speed of response, ability to flex, capability to overcome personal challenges and experience of learning something new are all excellent starting points.   Companies will also need to be more open minded to the concepts of re-training.  If there is healthy commitment from individuals to re-train, coupled with support from the employer, with a structured programme to follow, then success is achievable.

A new career can be forged, all it takes is the opportunity.