Recruiting for Difference

On Friday I spent the whole day in a workshop looking at Equality and Diversity issues. I've been a member of the University Equality and Diversity Board since it was formed, and have watched as the University policies in this area have matured and been embedded in all aspects of University life. Now what we're doing is taking a very concentrated, in-depth look at how we can take this further. Of course, this is a huge area, so we've had a couple of meetings to look at what areas to focus on. We've chosen three:

• Recruitment  - how we can improve our recruiting for difference for staff and students
• Civic - How the University relates to the City in terms of Equality and Diversity
• Policies - are the many good policies we have being put into practice.

Three groups have been set up to look at each area, and I'm leading the recruitment one. Everything is explained on our web page here, including the membership of each group. It's being facilitated by Simon Fanshawe - co-founder of Stonewall, stand-up comedian, broadcaster, writer and all round lovely person. On Friday we were lucky to have a co-facilitator, Roy Hutchins, another writer, director and performer. Great day - all three groups were present, and we really worked hard to come up with an action plan for how we were going to take this forward, especially what data we already had, what else we needed and how we were get information from the people who matter - our staff and students. Focus groups, world cafes and one to one interviews will be happening over the next few weeks. Anyone who wants to can sign up for them here. Or, you can contact me or any other member of the group directly if you'd rather have a chat, or give us information you think might be useful.

As we intend to conduct some one to one interviews, we took part in an extended role play on Friday to look at interviewing skills. Simon and Roy played members of staff with issues they wanted to get over to us, and we took in turns to interview them in front of the group. Slightly nerve wracking, but very useful.

So, I'm interested to hear what you've got to say about recruiting for difference. When you work in a department like ours where nearly everything revolves around team work, to me its a no-brainer that we need as many people with different skills, backgrounds, ideas as possible -that's what makes a good team. So, what do you think the value of recruiting for difference is - and what can we do to make ourselves better at it?