Camden Council - Inclusive Recruitment

Becoming a truly inclusive, anti-racist organisation remains one of our biggest priorities. In August 2020, we launched our Race Equality Action plan. In the Race Equality Action Plan we committed to creating an organisation where 'Our end-to-end recruitment processes are fair and unbiased and this is reflected in our candidates and final appointment decisions'

We set up an Inclusive Recruitment Working Group to conduct an end-to-end review of the recruitment process. The working group consists of diverse people from across the organisation, so that these voices are included from the very beginning of this work. With the Working Group's support, we have implemented a series of changes including:

• Introducing anonymised recruitment 
• Launching our Inclusive Recruitment Volunteer Programme – recruiting staff, particularly Black Asian and other ethnic staff, to be available to take part in the recruitment process where hiring mangers cannot otherwise ensure diversity in the shortlisting and interview stages.
• Letting managers know that all panels need to be diverse in both gender and ethnicity, and removing any rules around seniority levels for interview panellists
• Introducing Inclusive Recruitment training for Hiring Managers 
• Reviewing our job descriptions to ensure that the language is inclusive and gender neutral
• Looking at where we advertise our jobs externally, to ensure that we are attracting a diverse range of applicants
• Refreshed our Assessment and Selection guidance, providing Hiring Managers with best practice recruitment guidance, along with the Council’s inclusive recruitment policy,
• Taking positive action by reviewing all-white shortlists for roles at grade Level 5 and above – this is to address our ethnicity pay gap.

Our next steps will involve creating an Inclusive Recruitment Toolkit, so hiring managers can easily understand what they need to be doing and thinking about in order to create a truly inclusive recruitment process.

For more information on how we are making Camden Council a more diverse and inclusive place to work please click here.