I was honoured to be invited by the Fair Pay Innovation Lab and SAP SE to join the Fair Pay Management Circle. Situated in the boardroom of Germany’s highest valued company, we discussed what companies could do to reduce gender inequality. Earlier this year new UK legislation required companies to publish pay gaps between men and women. Germany also has legislation in place where employees can request benchmark information with regards to salary and compensation. I personally welcome the development to create transparency and raise awareness. Obviously, not everything is within the scope of control of employers. Politics and society as a whole have an important role to play in Talent Equality.
Anonymized applications have been in political vogue in recent years. Everything related to gender, age and ethnicity is being hidden in the application. I have had some heated discussions over the years on this topic since I honestly believe that anonymized application processed will not help drive diversity… at all. I am actually convinced of the opposite. Make candidates more visible and enrich applications to be able to make informed decisions rather than let bias continue to drive hiring. “Anonymous applications rob candidates from their unique opportunity to convince.” Back to the topic of fair pay and gender equality… I would want to broaden it to talent equality. It is not just about the differences between female and male employees. Age groups and employees with a different ethnic background also suffer from structural inequality.
How will we ever be able to drive diversity in the workplace if we are not able to fix this? Whereas many employers have programs in place to resolve inequality, they still allow the problem to occur at the gate. I would argue that it is usually better to prevent than to try and cure. In my view talent inequality starts with recruitment. Hiring managers who conduct unstructured, biased interviews resulting in candidates that cannot be compared.
Across the many recruitment campaigns that we have supported with Cammio, we have seen that candidates benefit from visibility. And that’s not just people in sales or retail staff. And it’s also not just young people to tackle another misconception. We see candidates across a wide range of roles, age groups and geographies. They are not anonymous. They benefit from structured interviews, either pre-recorded or through scripts in live interviews. Their interviews are consistent, can be rated by multiple people based on pre-determined qualifications on competencies for example. The interviews can also be enriched with personality assessments. And since online video interviews are so easily accessible, more people can be interviewed in less time. Now more people have an equal opportunity.
So let’s embrace diversity, reduce inequality and do this right from the start. With video recruitment obviously.
And as side-note, I was genuinely impressed by the dashboard data with predictive scenario’s that SAP had available for its management. Powered by SuccessFactors data, it provided a real-time insight into HR data. Proud to be a partner with Cammio.
HAPPY HIRING
