Candidate Diversity Index

Digby Morgan’s Michael Shields reports on the results from the company’s ongoing diversity research programme; the Candidate Diversity Index.

We have attended a number of Town Hall style addresses over the last two or three years at a number of the major global financial institutions on the specific topic of diversity. These have been arranged and organised by Human Resources, but ordinarily actually delivered by Board members, country business heads and senior leaders in business units. This is clearly very much a top down initiative, with the aim of ensuring that we as suppliers are fully on board and understand the importance of diversity to their business and why it is such a major agenda point.

The message has been very clear, consistent and ongoing and underlines that this is not a ‘fad’ or something which ‘is nice to do’, but fundamental to the success of organisations operating across local and international geographies. From organisation to organisation, the theme has been very similar in addressing suppliers on this topic and the message is loud and clear; diversity is a Board level priority and, despite the ongoing difficulties in the market, senior individuals will willingly give up their time to address this topic.

From a supplier perspective, we at Digby Morgan are continually supplying tenders for Preferred Supplier Arrangements and specific pieces of search work and the area that we are asked to address again and again is that of diversity. Not just what our internal policy is but rather how diverse are we as a business, how we attract candidates from as diverse background as possible and, finally, how we measure and evaluate this.

Our clients are taking this very seriously and we are committed to ensuring that we mirror this enthusiasm and commitment. The attraction piece can be easily explained, but the measurement is ordinarily more difficult.

We have, therefore, over the last two years been actively and accurately tracking the diversity of our candidate base through the implementation of our Candidate Diversity Index. Every individual who applies for a position via Digby Morgan is automatically sent a questionnaire covering gender, age, ethnicity, disability, religion and sexual orientation. The size of the sample is now in the thousands rather than the hundreds and we have also seen a marked increase in the number of people volunteering information which can only be a positive.

We are now in a position to share some meaningful data with our clients on diversity from this ongoing research which has thrown up some very interesting statistics. For example, the gender split is almost exactly 50/50 as is the split on applicants over and under the age of 40.

We are very proud of the ongoing work we are doing in this area and, as mentioned, are more than happy to share this with our clients. If you would like to discuss this in more detail or see some of the results from our Candidate Diversity Index, please contact Michael Shields at michaelshields@digby-morgan.com

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