Diversity

As a business, we reject racism and social injustice. We are avid supporters of creating better working environments for ALL. We recognise that unfortunately the working world isn’t fair, it isn’t equal and change needs to happen. We also believe that diversity in the work place creates a better work environment and a fairer working world.

Diversity comes in various forms, many of which we can’t see. As a business we want to celebrate all areas of diversity and use our skills and network to help bring about change. We believe that education is a key to this as well as active steps that will help to create a more diverse working environment.

Since our founder, Alice Weightman, set up Hanson Search, we have been championing diversity in the work place through many partnerships and initiatives. We published a report on “getting the balance right” in 2012 about women in the workplace , launched a social action campaign with Uprise in 2015 to support people from different backgrounds entering into the industry, worked with the government on the Disability Confident Campaign 2015 and became ambassadors of the Ideas Foundation in 2019. In fact, one initiative lead to the launch a social enterprise - The Work Crowd – helping businesses to connect with talented freelancers faster, cheaper and smarter than ever before.

For 2020 we have launched a diversity advisory board at Hanson Search to be focussed on three main areas:

1. Education
2. Promotion
3. Change

We will be doing this for both Hanson Search, our industry and people outside our industry from diverse backgrounds to encourage them to into marketing and communications.

Our commitments for 2021:

Education

• We will launch a speaker series titled “Conversations About Diversity” to convene voices around diversity in the workplace
• We will run annual training for consultants to help them when speaking to clients. We will teach them  about indirect discrimination and ensure they are thinking about diversity at all times

Promotion

• We will ensure that all marketing materials, webinars and adverts represent a diverse range of people
• We commit that all adverts for jobs are pushed out to diverse groups on LinkedIn and Facebook to ensure we expand our networks and give people outside our networks the opportunities to view them
• We will encourage people from diverse backgrounds into the industry by developing a list of all the initiatives in the market and partner with foundations/organisations that are working with these communities. We will promote the initiatives to these groups and run quarterly webinars for people to join and learn how to get into the industry, write a CV, apply for jobs and interview skills
• We will use our skills and networks to promote paid internships to a broader community of individuals

Change

• We will ensure that Hanson Search is a diverse workplace and will take proactive steps to ensure this when hiring internally
• Our current stats for candidates that we have placed into clients are 68% women and 18% black, Asian and minority ethnic background – we want to ensure that by end of 2021, 20% of candidates placed are from a black, Asian and minority ethnic background
• We will aim for all our long lists to be 20% black, Asian and minority ethnic and 50% female 

Download our diversity and inclusion policy here.