Diversity in our recruitment

Diversity in our recruitment is one of the three key pillars of our Diversity & Inclusion strategy. 

We aim to adopt recruitment practices that drive the attraction, selection and retention of the best diverse talent for Candyspace. In doing so we will be able to make the business as a whole more representative of a broad range of ideas, perspectives, backgrounds and experiences. 

To deliver on this, we have implemented the following: 

• We have created a panel of interviewers that represent the diversity we’re striving for in our recruitment 
• We conduct regular fair recruitment and unconscious bias training for all of our interviewers 
• We advertise all of our vacancies on job boards that target under-represented communities, including Evenbreak, Pink Jobs and My Diversity.com
• We established a work experience programme and hold regular events to provide candidates from our women in technology and social inclusion initiatives with inspiration, skills and pathways into employment 
• We have committed to shortlisting at least one candidate with protected characteristics for every role we recruit in 2023 and beyond 
• We have implemented a feedback mechanism for all successful and unsuccessful candidates that go through our process and use that feedback to continue to enhance our ability to bring in diverse talent 
• We only work with recruitment agencies who share our vision and values around diverse recruitment and whose shortlists are reflective of this

As a result of the actions we’ve taken, in 2022 we achieved the following: 

• 62% of our hires were women, increasing the proportion of women in our business to 42% in 2022 from 29% in 2021
• The percentage of our staff identifying as non-white has increased to 30% from 13% in 2021
• The percentage of our staff identifying as LGBTQ+ has increased to 10% from 6% in 2021
  
  

Our work continues, and we’ll strive to ensure our talent acquisition processes are designed to bring in the best diverse talent for Candyspace.