Diversity drive
Good progress made says council despite Covid setbacks
BRISTOL City Council has overhauled how it hires staff in a major drive to tackle institutional racism.
A raft of measures taking “positive action” have been introduced to help the local authority become diverse and look more like the community it serves, including favouring underrepresented candidates to decide tiebreaks for jobs.
All 800 hiring managers at City Hall have been retrained in the last year to overcome unconscious bias, while specialist head-hunters are being tasked with finding talented employees and leaders from minority groups.
It comes after cabinet members accepted the findings of an independent review in July that the council suffers from systemic racism.
Consultants DWC found that even if the organisation implemented everything it intended to do to tackle discrimination of
Black, Asian and ethnic minority (BAME) staff, it would not be enough and that positive action was required.
The recommendations, agreed in full, included headhunting BAME people for senior positions, more diverse shortlists and rewriting job descriptions and adverts.
A council meeting heard these were now being implemented and were already having an impact. But human resources committee members were told the pandemic had reduced City Hall recruitment by a third and increased competition for jobs, resulting in a drop in appointments of young people aged 16 to 24 despite a rise in applications.
Head of HR Mark Williams told the meeting: “The important point for me to make is the impact of Covid on the organisation.
“The amount of recruitment has fallen in part due to the council’s turnover rate reducing from 12 per cent to 7.7 per cent, which has impacted on our activities to improve the diversity of our workforce.
“That has had a substantial impact on the work the team has done.
“But at the same time over the last 12 months we have made substantial changes to the way we undertake our
recruitment. It’s disappointing that we’ve seen a reduction in success rate around the 16 to 24 year age group.
“Young people are a key part of our labour market, and with the wider implications of Covid on the labour market it is a key priority for us to support young people in work.
“We are working hard around the apprenticeship programme and have introduced the living wage for the rate of pay for apprentices.
“We have improved the rate of career progression for BAME and LGBT groups, so those are really positive messages.”
Mr Williams said the council was working with external partners with strong records in sourcing diverse candidates for top positions.
“Improving the diversity of senior leadership is a really important priority for us,” he said.
“The recruitment team is working really hard with managers when they are recruiting to roles to use targeted strategies to ensure we get the best possible field but we attract the most diverse talent.
“We have really revised and updated our information on our job pages to make that even more focused on the diversity of the city.
“My overall message is there is positive progress.”
Resourcing manager Elouise Wilson told members: “In the past year we have retrained all our 800 hiring managers council-wide in terms of best practice. A key part of that training was around unconscious bias and making sure managers were aware of their biases and how to ensure that doesn’t creep into the recruitment process.”
She said less reliance was now placed on interviews because they were not good indicators of future performance.
“I am really confident managers are well trained around those practices and any assessment is always placed on the essential criteria – they are not allowed to throw anything else into it,” she said.
She added that managers saw candidates’ names only after inviting them to interview.
Members welcomed the “positive progress” but Lib Dem group leader Cllr Gary Hopkins said he was concerned about the “catch-all” category of BAME and that it should be broken down so that trends for different ethnic groups could be analysed.
The city council was first labelled “institutionally racist” by an independent report into the 2013 murder of Iranian refugee Bijan Ebrahimi.
A follow-up report by diversity expert Kamaljit Poonia in June 2018 said while the leadership team was keen to make the council a diverse and equal place to work, its efforts were not filtering through to officers.
That led the authority to adopt a new equality and inclusion policy and strategy the following November.
We have improved the rate of career progression for BAME and LGBT groups, so those are really positive messages Head of HR Mark Williams