Over the last 5 years we have seen a number of clients looking to improve diversity within their end-to-end Supply Chain & Operations teams. Areas such as engineering, logistics, operations, and manufacturing seem to be the most challenging areas for most clients in terms of diversity of candidates. Amongst our clients, we have seen the main focus be on improving gender diversity, with a secondary focus on ethnic diversity.
This this in mind, I’ve written this article to give some practical steps businesses can implement to attract more diverse talent when hiring into their supply chain and operations teams.
But first, let’s explore: why is diversity an issue in these areas?
There’s multiple reasons that certain functions within the supply chain tend to have less diverse teams. These could include:
- Legacy views of culture especially within manufacturing, the industry is often associated with “stereotypically male” traits like hands-on work, heavy lifting, physical demands and driving.
- Working patterns within manufacturing/operations – early, late and night shifts plus rigid start and finish times, with no option for home/hybrid working
- Lack of awareness of careers/career paths in the industry, which in turn attracts less people – supply chain & operations are a lesser known career path and don’t attract from a broader range of entry points due to this
- Similar entry points from education – especially historically, entry programmes into these careers i.e. apprenticeships for engineers, have attracted a more male student population
- Experience bias – we often see things like “years of experience” on job adverts being typically high, ruling out a potentially more diverse talent pool who have entered this industry more recently, for example since a focus has been on promoting careers in this area for women who may have come from different industries but still have relevant experience
- Barriers to entry – we often see adverts looking to hire very specific candidates with requirements on education, industry and specific skills - alongside years of experience as above, this can mean candidates are often hired from the same places/companies and doesn’t broaden the talent pool to allow for more diversity
- Lack of representation – marginalised candidates look for visible diversity in leadership and interview panels. The absence of representation at senior levels can discourage diverse applicants.
- Not working on employer branding and more specifically, department branding – a lot of companies are working on their employer branding to become more appealing to a broader, more diverse talent-pool. However, work is rarely done on the branding of more specific or operational careers, which can mean the diversity of applications is not improved as this area is still not seen as inclusive or attractive
What are businesses doing to improve diversity within Supply Chain & Operations?
The first (and probably most important) point to make is that hiring diverse candidates into your business could be summarised as “starting at the finishing line” if you haven’t put the work in to create an inclusive organisation; diverse talent will not stay or thrive in your business without this and the hard work really needs to happen before they are in place. You can read about this in another of our articles, *HERE*
I’ve included some practical solutions below:
Inclusive communities:
- Join inclusive communities such as Boom! Women in Supply Chain, Women in Logistics and LEAD Supply Chain
- Several of these organisations run inclusive events or events on improving diversity and inclusion programmes for Supply Chain Operations specifically
- You can also sign your company up for fun activities such as the Big Logistics Diversity Challenge: https://biglogisticsdiversity.co.uk/
Talent sourcing:
- Broaden your talent pool – if you use the same methods you’ll get the same results!
- Sign up to diversity job boards – there are many of these, some are more generalist and some are more targeted towards specific demographics (e.g. https://bmejobs.co.uk/ or https://disabilityjob.co.uk/)
- Talent pipelining – if you know what roles are coming up you can get ahead; hiring with urgency often prioritises speed over diversity and it takes time to make genuine change to your resourcing methods, so start this in advance
- Allow enough time for shortlisting; a “first past the post” method can often harm diversity efforts as processes can start moving before you’ve had a chance to review the full selection of people in the pool
- Use specialist agencies – functional specialists (ideally over industry specialists!) will have a broad talent pool by nature and can not only help you access a more diverse talent pool, but they should be able to advise you on how to improve your role/JD/branding/requirements to access this
- Exhibit at careers fairs for school/colleague/university leavers to highlight both Supply Chain & Operations careers and your business
- Social mobility is an excellent way to improve diversity within teams generally, and you could consider working with a number of organisations who support those from underprivileged backgrounds get into employment (e.g. care leavers, prison leavers) such as Radical Recruit or Bridge of Hope
- Key tip – if urgency is key, speak to a specialist agency, otherwise allow time to find a diverse talent pool
Branding:
- Your employer brand is important but the branding of your specific Supply Chain department is more important to the candidate who will be working within it
- Create employer branding documents and campaigns that highlight what life is like working in your Supply Chain, inclusivity practises, diversity stats, progression routes etc. Sharing real positive experiences from your employees (as long as they are genuine!) is a great place to start.
- Key tip – candidates need to know about your Supply Chain department, not just your consumer or employer brand
Role definition:
- Removing barriers to entry i.e. review educational, skillset or industry requirements and focus only what is essential, whilst considering what is transferable
- For example, for a warehouse management role, could you consider someone coming from a manufacturing management role or vice versa?
- Broaden your potential pool of talent by considering if you could hire someone more senior or more junior for the role (or just right!) to open the pool of people you’d typically see
- Remove “years of experience” as a requirement (it’s also technically discrimination so best not to include this regardless!)
- Think about shift patterns; can you realistically flex an hour either side, for example, for the right candidate? (we recently saw an example of a manufacturing candidate who is a woman, reject a role as her shift start-time could not be flexed by 30 mins to allow for school drop off)
- Key tip – focus on skills-based requirements, and keep these as broad as possible
Hiring process :
- Implement a ‘blind CV’ policy (removal of name, employer, educational institutes) or ideally, zero CV policies i.e. the line manager doesn’t see a CV but instead a talent partner selects who they meet and provides a summary of experience/skills match
- Removal of personality profiling as a decision-maker in a process and ensuring if this is used, it’s reviewed by someone with training on how to review profiles
- Making sure any skill-set testing is accessible and takes into account things such as neurodiversity, English as a second language etc.
Advertising:
- Always advertise salary ranges, bonuses and benefits
- Highlight flexible working policies, full benefits package, all ‘inclusive’ policies (i.e. parental leave) on adverts, or include a click through link to a website page (removes the need for a candidate to ask for this information, which they may feel uncomfortable doing)
- Include shift pattern information, including days and hours, and mention if these can be flexed
- Reduce the number of requirements in an advert – keep this to a few essential bullet points to encourage applications rather than reduce them Having your inclusive policies available for people to access, including things like DE&I policy, commitment to equal pay policy, inclusive recruitment policy, anti-discrimination policy etc.
- Having a document with all of your benefits, inclusive benefits and inclusive policies available that can be sent to candidates alongside a JD/company information
- Making sure careers pages and adverts have accessibility tools to make them easier for everyone to read and understand
Interviewing:
- Interviews should be conducted by at least two people, to remove unconscious bias (especially things like familiarity bias!) and interviewers should be trained in not only what bias is, but how to interview without bias too
- Interviews should be competency-based and have a clear scoring system for interviewers to use, including positive and negative indicators to allow hiring managers to score objectively OR each interview should have a clear plan of what its looking to achieve i.e. what are you looking to understand from a CV run through or motivations interview? How will you measure this in an objective manner?
- Consider sending interview questions (or a summary of discussion points/competencies being explored) to candidates in advance, to allow them time to prepare fully - this helps candidates not only bring their best examples to the interview but also allows candidates with neurodiversities to be more prepared
- Train line managers on inclusion policies to make sure they can answer questions if the candidate asks during the process
- Allowing candidates to request flexibility if they have accessibility requirements for interviews – and proactively asking them if any support is needed, rather than them having to request it
- Work hard to ensure your interview process is a positive one, remember it’s a two way street! Glassdoor/google etc. reviews that are negative about interview experience will harm your ability to hire candidates from marginalised groups. Trust us, people do look at these!
- Always ensuring feedback to candidates after interviews – the supply chain industry is not huge and people speak, and again negative reviews will harm your ability to hire generally
We have helped many of our clients to implement a range of solutions to help attract and retain more diverse talent in their businesses. If you’d like to talk about how Pod Talent can help you to hire more diverse talent for your Supply Chain & Operations team, get in touch with our CEO – lucy.morgan@pod-talent.com