Two in five recruiters not recording diversity of own firms

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Two in five (41%) recruitment firms are not recording the demographic make-up of their workforce and could find it challenging to identify which groups are underrepresented. Many firms do not track the diversity of their workforce because they feel they are “too small of an organisation” (38%) or simply had not considered it (26%), a survey by the Association of Professional Staffing Companies (APSCo) and the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) has found. Six per cent feel that collecting this data would be “time and resource heavy”, while 4% feel they do not have the expertise to collect data about the diversity of their workforce. “The glaring finding of the report is a lack of effective diversity monitoring in some recruitment businesses. As the old saying goes, what gets measured gets managed, so effective data collection needs to spread more broadly across the industry,” said Neil Carberry, chief executive of the REC. APSCo chief executive Ann Swain said: “When we first embarked on this collaborative research, our hope had been to identify what the current make-up of the recruitment sector looked like, any discrepancies between corporate and individual views, and where diversity may be ‘lacking’. “What we found, though, was a more pressing issue: a lack of information. Without a clear and honest picture of your workforce, will be difficult for staffing companies