Your diverse workforce starts with recruitment

The South Yorkshire Housing Association (SYHA) employs over 600 people, working to provide nearly 6,000 quality homes and support to over 10,000 individuals in the community or supported housing.

SYHA increased the number of racially and ethnically diverse people hired in just 12 months as a result of introducing the Race Action plan - from a baseline of 3.7% to 22% of new starters.

1. Understand your organisation’s D&I goals

SHYA wanted the workforce to mirror the diverse community they serve. They wanted to address barriers to growing their talent from racially and ethnically diverse backgrounds.

With over 100 managers all making decisions around hiring, they needed a structured system to tackle bias in the recruitment process - ensuring consistency across the business by introducing best practices for inclusive hiring.

2. Consider implementing a race action plan to diversify your workforce

In 2021, the SYHA developed a Race Action Plan. They conducted a deep dive into their workforce and customer diversity data to identify any themes or gaps – then, they set a target to review and design a process that would help an inclusive hiring process across the business.

The SYHA commissioned deep analysis, drawing out the experiences of racially and ethnically diverse colleagues and exploring how deep-rooted racial bias impacted their lives. This insight shaped bespoke solutions for the Race Action Plan.  

Having managers with an ability to ask relevant interview questions and assessments is key to sourcing talent and provides a fair and consistent approach. To support this, they introduced a selection of new solutions:

• New standardised rating process, defined by skills, to minimise the risk of bias – from shortlisting candidates to rating interview performance, scores are then averaged.
• A new interview guide which incorporates the behavioural, situational, and strength-based approaches and structured interview principles
• People partners made available to coach recruiting managers throughout the process including the creation and plannin