At Charityworks, we know that recruiting the best talent into the non-profit sector means accessing the widest possible network of that talent. To that end, we outsource human resources UK to ensure the diversity of our candidates and graduate trainees and we reflect this in the way we promote, recruit, and select candidates and trainees on the programme.
Charityworks also believes that diverse candidates benefit the sector and our employer partners, as working in a diverse environment helps the sector to better represent the communities that it serves.
This statement is informed by the collection of our diversity and equal opportunities data, which is used solely for monitoring and reporting purposes, and never used for assessment purposes or selection decisions.
OUR MARKETING
Charityworks actively seeks and encourages applications from candidates from diverse backgrounds. More specifically, our equal opportunities and diversity monitoring has indicated that the programme currently marginally under-represents minority ethnic groups and so we actively encourage applications from eligible candidates from a BAME background. To ensure our programme encourages a diverse range of applicants:
- We actively promote the Charityworks programme to partner university societies with diverse ethnic populations, such as our network of over 500 BAME societies.
- We run events and produce content through our blog, aimed at demonstrating the non-profit sector as a career of choice for people of varied cultural and ethnic backgrounds.
- We regularly promote Charityworks through accessible platforms such as live-streaming webinars, and provide text-only marketing for our university partners to share.
- We actively seek the best talent from a range of UK universities with varied student populations. Half of our partners are Oxbridge or Russell Group institutions and the other half are non-Russell group universities.
- We actively participate in campus events aimed at widening participation students like pre-fair workshops.
OUR RECRUITMENT AND SELECTION PROCESS: REMOVING UNCONSCIOUS BIAS AND ENSURING FAIRNESS
Charityworks is committed to ensuring all candidates are considered fairly based on their performance against our fixed competency framework. This ensures we recruit the absolute best talent for the programme from the widest possible talent pool, irrespective of where graduates studied, their background, socio-economic status, gender, ethnicity, disability status, sexual orientation or other characteristics that are irrelevant to the programme.
Actions we take to provide equality of opportunity for all candidates include:
- We anonymise application forms during marking to ensure that candidate answers are assessed without any consideration of their name or background.
- As part of this anonymization, we don’t take into consideration where candidates studied, or the method of that study eg. full-time, part-time or distance learning.
- We believe a candidate’s academic ability is shown by nature of having achieved a degree, and so we don’t take into account a UCAS tariff or A-Level results.
- We use a scoring framework that marks candidates based on competencies for the programme
- We standardise our question setting across our applications and interviews to ensure that everyone is assessed against the identified competencies and programme requirements.
- We provide guidance and brief all our assessors throughout our recruitment and selection processes in recruitment best-practice to mitigate against any potential for conscious or unconscious bias or discrimination.
- We always use multiple markers when assessing each candidate to ensure marking is accurate and fair.
- We use assessors from a diverse range of cultural backgrounds and experience.
- We offer alternative forms of application format to encourage applicants with disabilities and who require reasonable adjustments to perform at their best.
- We ensure all our assessment venues are accessible.
- We work with candidates with a disability or health condition to implement reasonable adjustments to enable them to perform at their best during the assessment process.
- We assess the use of gendered or culturally biased language in the way we communicate with candidates during the process.
ON THE PROGRAMME
Charityworks is committed to ensuring all trainees receive an excellent experience that values the diversity of talent in the sector when they are on the programme:
- Our programme delivery team are themselves from different backgrounds and are culturally and ethnically diverse.
- We actively encourage the participation of speakers and mentors from a range of backgrounds and with different experiences to support trainees.
- Our programme team are approachable, and we deliver a high support, high challenge programme that is robust whilst being flexible and considerate of individual life circumstances.
- We seek constant feedback on everything we do, through regular surveys of our participants, clients and supports and actively respond to make improvements to the programme year-on-year.