Reporting on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

Reporting on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion has been a topical challenge for HR and recruitment teams for many years, but with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and recent changes in the working world due to the pandemic, growing a diverse workforce has become even more prevalent. In order for organisations to understand where and how they need to improve their processes, you need to understand how you can start reporting on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.

The recent LinkedIn Global Talent Report 2020 sited one key theme across four recruitment trends; empathy. In order to better understand, secure and retain top talent, recruitment leaders need to appraise their employer brand, rediscover their internal recruitment opportunities and celebrate diversity through employing candidates based on people analytics, to mitigate the risk of unconscious bias. Whether diversity is trending or not, you need to consider how you reduce discrimination within your recruitment process and reporting on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion should be a key part of your strategy.

Key metrics

The primary benchmarks of discrimination and diversity in recruitment are protected characteristics. As the make-up of the UK workforce evolves, alongside the roles and requirements you need within your business, so do the protected characteristics that influence decisions. These protected characteristics go way beyond age and gender and include location, race, sexual orientation, religion and more.

In implementing your diversity strategy, you will be able to analyse and report on these vital metrics to assess whether the changes you are making to your processes are impacting new hires within your organisation.

Where to begin

Monitoring and reporting on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion begins within your Applicant Tracking System (ATS). As available within the IRIS networx ATS, equal opportunities monitoring can form part of your application process, and tools such as automated sifting, blind shortlisting, and scoring can enable you to benchmark and identify where further changes may be required. 

Within your ATS you will be able to report on key demographic information. It is important to note that for reporting purposes the data should be anonymised, like it is in the IRIS networx ATS, to enable you and your talent team to analyse the data without compromising the privacy of your applicants. These reports can identify what demographics reach which stages of the recruitment process and where there are shortfalls that need to be addressed through process changes or even advertising and vacancy positioning. With a recent survey highlighting that 67% of job seekers consider the diversity of an organisation before completing an application, reporting on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion forms a vital part of your recruitment strategy.

Designing useful reports

With so many reports and data points at your fingertips, it can be easy to get caught up in a mass of data, however, it needs to be insightful to drive change. It is worth spending some time on designing reports that will feed into your wider diversity strategy, and a couple to get you started could include:

• Successful applications within your organisation per demographic/range
• Total applications to a specific role per demographic/range
• Stages of application/recruitment reached per demographic/range
• A review of your existing talent pool by demographic/range

Within your ATS you should be able to visually present the data and feed them directly into your KPIs, clearly demonstrating your performance alongside your diversity strategy and enabling you to digest and act upon the wider picture. As with all management reporting, you should be reviewing this every 30 days (depending on the volume of your recruitment) and sharing widely once a quarter. This will enable you to tweak your processes, reflect on what is and isn’t working for your organisations and continue to evolve and adapt.

Generating wider company buy-in

Although HR and recruitment professionals are heavily involved in the diversity strategy, it is a cross-functional challenge for the entire business. With limited reporting, comes limited knowledge and understanding, therefore having clear reporting on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion will enable you to demonstrate how changes are impacting recruitment and organisational diversity. 

With recent research highlighting that 85% of CEO’s believe that a diverse workforce has improved their bottom line, it is vital that these reports are shared to inform all relevant stakeholders so you can collectively pioneer your diversity strategy.

The importance of reporting

With diversity comes greater creativity, reduced employee turnover and a wider talent pool and improved employee engagement. The benefits of a diverse workforce are tremendous! 

Reporting may only be one part of your diversity strategy, but it is an incredibly influential part. Your reports showcase change over time and the impact it is having on the business. This enables you to define where more work needs to be done and what strategies and techniques are working to reduce workforce discrimination within your organisation.

 With research demonstrating that companies with a more even gender balance are 25% more likely to outperform those who do not, it is vital for the entire organisation that this reporting is in place.

Being transparent with reporting on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

Committing to changing and challenging your existing processes to improve on diversity within your organisation is a long-term initiative. Reporting on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion is not for vanity metrics, but to drive real impact and improvements for the benefit of the organisation, employees, customers and the wider communities you operate within. A Glassdoor report highlighted that 40% of people believe HR and Hiring Managers are in the best place to increase diversity in the workplace and they are right.

It is a positive to be seen to be making changes to deliver a discrimination-free recruitment experience and something prospective employees are looking for when moving roles. It all comes back to empathy and understanding and your reporting will provide you with the insight to put the human experience at the centre of your hiring process to grow a prosperous and diverse workforce.

Check out IRIS networx ATS for more information on how we can support you in diversity reporting.