Diversity Series: Sourcing Talent

by Alicia Buckley, Associate Consultant Madlin Hanna Consulting

We have recently had the opportunity to take a step back & consider our responsibility as recruitment consultants for improving the diversity of the corporate affairs industry. When you consider that the goal of businesses and teams in our sector is to create truly effective and representative campaigns, the lack of diversity doesn’t make much sense. So, how can we improve diversity?

Entry-Level

It begins at entry-level. Much more needs to be done on attracting people to the industry so that we can then focus on retaining and filtering diverse talent through to the senior level. One of the challenges is that many people who don’t have links to the industry through family and friends don’t actually know what a career in communications entails. It’s important to think about how you open up your pool. JPES Partners has a proven track record of recruiting grads through the Guardian jobs page, Miles Donohoe (Director) uses this to remove the bias of hiring only graduates that you know. It allows for any student to apply which encourages a far bigger, broader and diverse range of candidates.

 Celebrating Different Backgrounds

The beauty of comms is that each practitioner has a different story: some are ex-journalists, some lawyers or bankers or marketing experts. In fact, many of the senior leaders in PR roles didn’t necessarily take the direct route into the industry. Internships and work experience placements offered to old friends and relatives will only exacerbate the problem. Cat Ommanney, Director at MHP firmly believes that communications can only benefit from improving diversity. In fact, MHP have enjoyed success with their apprenticeship scheme & their graduate training programme allows early comms recruits to try out different sectors in a rotation scheme.

Holding Suppliers to Account

As we ask agencies what their D&I policies are and how they actually enact them, they are asking the same of us. It’s a lovely way of partnering to tackle the task at hand and marks a real change in the industry where aligned values are increasingly important. Jo Preston (Director at Teamspirit) says they’re committing to their D&I policy internally & with their external providers, asking everyone they work with to provide their own policies and approaches.

Through this series, we will be connecting with the industry to share tangible actions we can all take to improve representation. Next in the series, we will cover what makes a successful comms practitioner.

MadlinHanna Consulting is a recruitment consultancy specialising in corporate affairs, covering public affairs, corporate communications and financial PR. Contact us on 020 8088 4102 for more information or a confidential conversation.