Diversity profile monitoring

Diversity profile monitoring should be part of your recruitment and selection processes. Monitoring enables you to identify whether there are any barriers to participation, exit points or discriminatory practices in your process.

For example, if at application stage you have a diverse range of applicants but the shortlist of candidates isn’t as diverse, you have the opportunity to explore what might be happening during the process and make changes. You could, in this instance, adopt anonymised application sharing so shortlisting is not affected by demographic details.

Completing a diversity monitoring form should be at an applicant’s discretion. You should ensure that every question is optional and that applicants can respond with ‘prefer not to say’ so they only include the information they feel happy to share.

You also need to ensure that access to the information provided by applicants is limited and that there are clear retention schedules in place to indicate when submitted forms should be deleted.

Terminology in the diversity space is fast-moving, so you should look to review and test your form with internal advisory groups, networks or representative bodies to stay up to date.

Whether you are using diversity monitoring forms internally or externally, research indicates that it will take time for respondents to trust how you might use the information.

Be patient around responses, highlight changes you have made as a result of information gathering, and reiterate the confidentiality of the process to increase completion rates over time.