Continuing to grow and develop a diverse and inclusive culture within Blue Square is really important to us. A key part of our strategy is focused on our commitment to build and nurture the diverse talent within Blue Square.
To help us make sure we’re making positive progress and understand where we could be doing better, when candidates apply for a role with us, we share a survey designed to help us better understand the diversity of the people who are interested in joining us.
We ask for information on age, disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, and religion.
The data collected is only ever used for top-level statistical analysis – never to pinpoint individuals. The information can only be seen by our HR and Diversity & Inclusion teams, and only ever in an anonymised format. It’s also held separately from the candidate’s application, so can’t ever be used to identify the person. We ask for a vacancy ID to verify that the person responding is a genuine applicant and help us understand how our applicants apply to specific roles.
Gathering this data is invaluable to helping us monitor the effectiveness of our talent attraction approaches and making sure our business is as inclusive as possible for everyone who works here.
Our intention has always been to build a deeper level of insights that will help us to focus our D&I strategies in the right areas. We believe that there’s real power in insights, so for now this is a knowledge gathering exercise, giving us a deeper understanding of whether we’re attracting candidates from all parts of society.
It means that we have a better understanding of whether there are parts of society that we just aren’t attracting through our current recruitment methods and gives us the ability to dig deeper & look at shifting our approaches or putting resource into the right places to diversify our talent pool.
We also ask new joiners to provide the same information when they start with us. This allows us to review that information alongside the data we’ve gathered from our candidate pool and helps us to identify whether we can make any improvements.
Our ‘Grow and Create’ workstream that forms part of our D&I council, set the objective to “continue to build and nurture the diverse talent we find within Blue Square through our commitment to evolving our talent strategies, growing our employee value proposition, supporting the future diversification of our business through positive action, and developing a culture which recognises and rewards the individuality of our employees”. Being able to pull from our candidate diversity data for true insights means that we can ensure that our approaches are evidence-based and focus on the areas that need the most attention.
We think it’s only fair that if we’re asking for this information, we’re transparent and open about where we are on our journey towards true diversity and inclusion. Here are some snapshots of the current make-up of our Blue Square teams. There’s more work for us to do, and we’re proactively making sure that it remains at the top of our agenda.
Snapshot from Blue Square Marketing April 2021
We’d love your feedback, so if there’s anything you’d like to share with us directly about our approach you can reach us at diversityandinclusion@bluesquare.uk.com.
