National Inclusion Week 2023: How Gravitas’ Have Created an Inclusive Hiring Process

Inclusion is at the heart of everything we do at Gravitas, where we aim to promote inclusivity and allyship across all our networks. 

Our internal Talent Acquisition team playan important role in driving inclusivity from the very first interaction they have with potential employees for Gravitas, by ensuring an inclusive hiring process.

For National Inclusion Week, we sat down with our global Talent Acquisition team; headed up by Associate Director, Ryan Sullivan, and consultants Dickson Tung, Aron Cheung, Feben Petros, Georgia Wilkinson and Alex Sutton to discuss how they ensure an inclusive hiring process. We discuss: 

• What is Inclusivity?

• Why is an inclusive hiring process important?

• How do we, Gravitas, build inclusivity into our hiring processes?

• Let's talk about unconscious bias...

• How can we future proof an inclusive hiring process?

Watch their video to find out how we bring this inclusive strategy to life. 

 

If you want to work in an organisation that understands and promotes the importance of inclusivity, visit our Careers page to learn what job opportunities we currently have available. ​

 

Video Transcript

What is inclusivity?

Providing everyone from different backgrounds the right tools and the right sources to basically get to where they want to get.

Creating an environment where all employees feel valued, respected and included regardless of their backgrounds, identities or perfectionistic.

Why is an inclusive hiring process important?

It really means that you can open the door to anyone and really give everyone really equal opportunities and regardless of what they faced and their backgrounds and in their lives will not be a hindrance for them.

It's about broadening the talent pool. We can have different choices in the talent pool with inclusivity and being diverse.

It's actually so that people can add different aspects to the business. Being able to say how you feel about something. You can't have all the same person because then you would never be able to grow. That can't happen unless you are an inclusive environment that accepts people's different kind of thought processes and different ways that they go about doing things.

This diversity of the thought can foster a more innovative and creative environment, so we can have different new ideas to do some brainstorming.

How do we build inclusivity into our hiring?

We find diverse people because we use diverse means to find them. So all different job boards. It's not just the same thing oer and over.

We make sure our job description is inclusive.

Adverts that we posed have gone through gender decoders. We also make sure that we target loads of external forums and universities, colleges as well just to make sure that we are tapping into as many communities as we can.

Inclusive hiring process involves designing and implementing practises that ensure all the candidates have an equal opportunity to be considered.

Our interview processes are standardised globally. This means that every interview we do globally, the questions do not change and the process is exactly the same. Therefore every person gets the same equal opportunity across the globe.

They're gonna all have role plays, they'd all have the same interview prep. We ask them questions throughout the whole interview process as well. Do they feel like they need any help in certain areas? I think being a supportive environment in that sense, being the the port of call, basically makes them feel like they have the confidence to go forward in that interview and feel like they have all the resources (they need).

The leadership team themselves are really diverse. So again, that means that any interview that happens across the globe, every leader within Gravitas is really backing the same message, backing the same process, meaning that everyone has the same opportunity.

How can we future proof an inclusive hiring process?

We offer so much training that really tackles and internal interviews, but then also unconscious bias. Part of our management training programme also includes how to make sure that when you are an interviewer, you are being as inclusive and diverse as possible in your practises. This helps raise awareness, develop a common understanding of what inclusive practises are, and equipping individuals involved in the hiring process with the necessary skills to mitigate biases.

Lets talk about unconscious bias…

Unconscious bias refers to the human tendency to form opinions about other people without having enough relevant information.

When we progressed candidates through to further interview stages, we've booked them blindly into interviewers diaries to eliminate as much unconscious bias.

With the unconscious bias training. I think that's one of the most important things because a lot of the time it isn't conscious. It's not a conscious thing that goes through people's minds. By incorporating these practises into the hiring processes, organisations like us can really kind of create an inclusive environment and welcome candidates from diverse backgrounds.

We work with Programme One, so Programme One is a collective of improvement agencies that aim to address the inequality of black representation and the recruitment industry. We partner with job boards and charities like Programme One because it helps drive the inclusivity.

How can you promote inclusive internal hiring?

The Gravitas TA team are obviously brand ambassadors for the company and for us. It is really key to make sure that we are hiring people that really align with our full values of respect, integrity, passion and excellence.

Everything that we look at is really based on this person's motivation and how well they want to succeed.

Respect is so important to us that we want to make sure that everyone and anyone that works for Gravitas has a respect for each other. So this can contribute to where we feel fairly valued, respected and included. We always say it's 80% attitude, 20% skill and obviously the competencies of if you've got work ethic, the right motivations.

We all come from such diverse background, it always kind of gives everyone a different perspective, whether it's learning different cultures, learning more about different colleagues within our office. It's always very interesting to have these kinds of conversations to understand more about everyone's background and experiences and you know, how they got to be here at Gravitas and what their journey is.

A diverse range of employees can represent a range of backgrounds and this promotes a culture of belonging and feeling valued. Everyone can come into the office and relate to someone and just see a version of themselves in the office and just be able to connect with that and that is really important.