Client Profile
Large multinational, with 6000+ employees across New Zealand and Australia in the hospitality industry.
The Challenge
Our client is in a phase of rapid expansion, opening new hotels and facilities across their geographical footprint. The organisation has a very diverse workforce, employing both skilled and unskilled workers across a range of areas. Although they have a diverse workforce, there tends to be a concentration of different ethnic groups in different areas of the business.
With a large in-house recruitment function tasked with the recruitment of a significant new workforce, they were keen to reduce the level of unconscious bias which plays out during the recruitment process and pave the way to expand the attraction and retention of a wider and more diverse talent pool. Our client wanted to raise the level of awareness and build capability across the hiring manager population to start to address some of the biases that were acting as barriers to increasing the diversity of the workforce.
Our Approach
In order to understand the client’s challenges in more detail, we started by undertaking a series of interviews with key stakeholders. This helped us to understand some of the pressure points and challenges in attracting, selecting and recruiting diverse talent.
We then designed a learning program for our client, focussed on raising awareness on unconscious bias and how it impacts decisions/judgments during the recruitment process.
We wanted to ensure that the theoretical learning was complimented by practical exercises, discussions and reflection points. This meant that the training had to build understanding as well as leave participants with tools to apply in their day-to-day roles.
What We Delivered
We delivered a series of half-day Unconscious Bias Awareness training workshops to around 100 hiring managers, with the aim of raising awareness of and minimising the level of decision making based on unconscious bias. Participants were provided with workbooks, models, tip sheets and frameworks to take away with them after the training and apply in their day-to-day roles.
What Our Client Had To Say
Feedback from the attendees indicated that the training created a level of personal and organisational awareness of unconscious bias and how it impacts decision-making across the employee lifecycle as well as a set of basic tools to assist them to overcome future decision-making based on their unconscious biases.
