Diversity in the workplace is becoming of increasing importance and many organisations are rethinking how they go about recruiting with diversity at the front of their minds. Diverse workplaces bring new perspectives which lead to more collaborative approaches, productive employees, greater innovation and increased performance.
We caught up with one of our customers who’ve been analysing higher education data sets for the past 18 years to improve their recruitment strategies. This customer is one of the largest financial services firms in the United Kingdom and through the data insights have been able to work very closely with universities and students across the country.
We asked them how our tailored datasets have helped them overcome challenges over the years, the solutions they’ve identified and the positive impact these insights have led to. Follow the journey of their campus recruitment coordinator who works within their wider candidate engagement team.
I primarily focus on internships and maximising diversity in Campus recruitment for our 3 UK offices in; London, Bournemouth and Glasgow. As a subject matter expert and business intelligence analyst, I make recommendations from analysing Jisc tailored datasets of higher education (HE) data to inform strategy on sourcing candidates.
“Diversity and inclusion is important to my organisation because the success of our business depends on it. We know that together, we – as a diverse and inclusive organisation can spark innovation and discover more ways of sustaining competitive advantages.”
Recruitment challenges
As an organisation we aim to achieve a 50/50 gender workforce balance and understand the importance of being able to access robust data to help inform our graduate and campus recruitment strategies. We also focus on diversity metrics such as ethnicity and disability to ensure we constantly work towards our goal of becoming a truly diverse talented global network.
We are successful at attracting strong and diverse graduate talent to our London office from universities around the UK, but it’s not such a straightforward process at our two other sites in Bournemouth and Glasgow, so we rely on data insight to ensure we have students applying to all three offices, from a variety of universities and backgrounds.
It is also important for us to recruit graduates with different skillsets as required by differing business functions across our UK sites. We employ graduates for roles in business, economics, finance, asset management, product development, technology and corporate management. For example, our Bournemouth office has a large number of technology roles so we need applicants with technical skills such as coding and would typically encourage computer science graduates to apply. In comparison we are happy to consider all subjects studied by graduates for corporate management roles which helps to ensure we drive diversity throughout the organisation.
“We want to understand why we struggle to get students from various locations and to address this we need to ensure we analyse the right higher education data.”
Driving forward the diversity of our UK campus recruitment strategy
As an organisation we use a variety of internal and external data sources to address our campus sourcing and recruitment needs. We analyse HE data provided by Jisc annually to ensure our insights are up-to-date and support our objectives.
I recently analysed the data provided by Jisc to support our UK campus recruitment strategy. The analysts were extremely knowledgeable about the higher education data landscape and helped us to understand the data we need to analyse to drive forward our graduate recruitment diversity strategy.
“Using HE data helps to ensure we have a diverse graduate workforce.”
Informing campus and graduate recruitment planning
“Ethnicity and disability are key focus areas for us. We want to improve our outcomes year on year and we have.”
My organisation has benefited from the insights drawn from analysing student and graduate data since 2004 to inform our campus and graduate recruitment planning.
The data has enabled us to identify universities with a strong diverse student population and courses taught in key subject areas relevant to our business needs.
We tend to see year-on-year trends with graduate applications coming from the same universities, the data has allowed us to widen our search by placing student campus recruiters in universities where we want more applicants but currently may not be getting any.
Looking to the future
We plan to analyse new HE datasets at a more granular subject level and we will continue to work with Jisc’s analysts to ensure we are utilising the right data where needed.
“Working with Jisc has been really straightforward. Our contact manager is helpful and there when I need support. Overall the service has been great.”
Explore how HE data can inform your strategic planning
About our customer
A global leading financial services firm, featured on the NASDAQ stock exchange. Their core focus in terms of recruitment is to improve diversity and inclusion across the organisation.