How has Give a Grad a Go fostered a gender diverse workplace?
Reflecting on the feedback from our most junior, and senior, female employees, Give a Grad a Go has succeeded in fostering an empowering work environment.
We speak to our People and Operations Director, Claire Donaldson, about how she has worked to create a gender diverse workplace:
âWe recognize the importance of equality across our workforce and ensure that both males and females get the same support, recognition, and opportunities.
Recruitment may traditionally be seen as a male-heavy industry, however in our UK team, we currently have a split of 57% female & 43% male, with more females in both in our sales and marketing teams.
At our UK Director level, this is a 50% split for male/female and in our Australia team, our Country Manager is female.
We recognize that we can always do better (and are continually striving to) but some internal measures we have taken to achieve diversity at Give a Grad a Go include:
- Ensuring we have standardized questions in our internal hiring process to ensure each candidate is being asked the same questions
- Working with our marketing team to revise our job descriptions to ensure they attract a wide array of candidates
- Constantly reviewing our own internal policies and benefits for staff for instance, enhanced maternity and paternity pay and hybrid working
- Transparent progression plans and salary scales to ensure that across sales, marketing and operations, everyone who has the same job title/ same level of seniority (e.g. Digital Marketing Assistant or Account Manager) is on the same salary
- Conducting Employee Engagement surveys to give employees a voice and ensuring they can share anonymous feedback on any areas of the business they feel need improving.
Our internal policies ensure our staff feel supported.
Whether this is under our equality and diversity policies, or policies around how to raise issues internally, we want to ensure everyone knows how they can speak out if any issue arises.
We have also recently updated our offerings by providing enhanced maternity and paternity packages to ensure our staff feel supported long-term and see recruitment as a career.â
How has Give a Grad a Go built a gender diverse recruitment ethos?
Whilst working to achieve gender diversity internally, it has also been pertinent that our commitment to promoting diversity and inclusion continues to be reflected externally in our placements with our clients (our 2021 stats show a 47% female & 53% male split across all industries).
This has been particularly pertinent in our encouragement of female talent within traditionally male industries.
For instance, whilst the industry expectation for gender split within law, tax and accountancy sits at around 45% female, our placed candidates were 67% female.
We also work hard to partner with clients that promote the same gender-forward values that we do â we are proud to have worked with the likes of The Female Lead on their recruitment drive.
In terms of the candidate side of things, Give a Grad a Go is committed to being an equal opportunity employer.
All qualified applicants will receive consideration regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, faith, disability, or other.
We are continually finding ways to improve the way we work, so we have created a voluntary, anonymous Diversity & Inclusion survey for all new registrations.
The D&I survey enables us to can monitor our D&I across the database and gather data on key issues – we have had over 6,500 candidates take part in the survey so far!
We have also implemented initiatives such as anonymised shortlisting â we provide clients with anonymised candidate CVs so that they are unaware of the candidateâs gender before the shortlisting process.
This CV initiative has been a positive step forward in terms of reducing unconscious bias at CV selection stages, and we are constantly striving to develop additional initiatives to tackle challenges surrounding diversity in our recruitment services.