I am Outsource’s Inclusion and Diversity Client Partner, and I work with Clients to create an inclusive culture where all employees feel valued.
I consult businesses on where they can improve or change their attraction and hiring processes in order to widen their candidate pool and ensure everyone is invited to apply, regardless of sex, age, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, religion, race, disability, marital, and parents and carer status. This includes coaching the hiring community on their perceptions of the role, identifying where biases might be at play, and working with the business to identify the right solution for them, whether that’s reframing the problem, removing the role description or CV entirely, or using external interview panels, to give a few examples.
After a year of teaching English as a Foreign Language, I began my 10 year career in recruitment sourcing candidates for a number of Outsource’s financial services Clients. After 6 months in this role, I was quickly promoted to manage Outsource’s two largest financial services Clients, Santander Technology and Nationwide Building Society, supporting with contingent, executive, graduate and permanent hiring strategies. In 2017, after a discussion around the lack of women entering and returning to the tech sector, I established the ‘Diversity Matters’ team within Outsource to highlight the lack of inclusion and diversity in Technology, Engineering and Logistics, with the aim of helping businesses to drive change in these areas.
In the last 2 years, along with the Diversity Matters team, I have delivered 4 successful knowledge sharing events to firstly inspire Women in Tech and latterly, Inclusion in the Workplace, welcoming over 180 Clients, and a wealth of speakers from diverse backgrounds sharing their lived experiences – from being one of the first female Chief Data Officers, the importance of male allies from a Director of the Tech Talent Charter, the problem solving skills picked up when living with a disability, and the importance of language when creating a culture of belonging from the perspective of a transgender awareness specialist, to name a few.
As a proud ally, I take 100% responsibility for empowering others, giving a voice to those not in the room, calling out prejudice, and supporting future talent. Driven by my passion, alongside my account management duties, and whilst also delivering Inclusion events, I designed and launched a full Inclusion and Diversity audit programme to support Clients with everything from consulting on job adverts, websites, and general brand perception, to educating the wider business, through carefully curated partnerships with experts in specific areas of Inclusion and Diversity, and designing and delivering bespoke assessment strategies.
With the full support of my CEO, I was appointed as Outsource’s Inclusion and Diversity Client Partner, and am now fully established as a subject matter expert in Inclusive Recruitment Strategies, delivering workshops and audits to external Clients UK wide, as well as consulting with Outsource’s internal exec team.
I am also an associate member of the Institute of Diversity and Inclusion Professionals and I recently co-founded The Swindon Inclusion and Diversity Network to offer peer to peer support to businesses in and around Wiltshire.