Disability Smart Inclusive Recruitment Award

Case study

The Inclusive Recruitment award is given to an organisation or team that has created inclusive and accessible recruitment campaigns that have resulted in greater numbers of disabled people obtaining work or accessing a profession.

Judges chose KPMG UK for seeking to improve diversity in recruitment throughout their whole organisation. KPMG UK’s efforts to improve diversity in recruitment targeted all levels across the organisation, from graduate to senior roles. They organised outreach activities to attract disabled students and worked to improve diversity of senior leadership, including setting a goal to have 15% disability representation at senior level by 2030.

“The award…was for our overall sort of approach to student recruitment, but not just student recruitment…once we bring people into the firm, it’s then how do we make sure they have a good experience and that they can have a really great career at KPMG. So we just set…long-term ambitious targets, not just bringing people into the firm, but also making sure we’ve got leaders in the firm that are representative of the sort of wider UK society.” Mark Russell, Inclusion, Diversity and Equity Manager

KPMG in the UK have set the target of having staff with a disability or long-term position represent 15% of their leadership by 2030. In working towards this goal, the Student Recruitment team have used several innovative methods to recruit students with disabilities or long-term conditions. These methods include:

• Increased outreach activity, including an event with Blind in Business aimed at blind and partially sighted students and a new flagship event called Thrive, where prospective candidates with disabilities or long-term conditions can hear about career opportunities with KPMG in the UK, and the support it can provide.
• Promotion of its student programme through MyPlus’ job board and events.
• Modelling that looks at the current representation of disabled employees against their 2030 target and available benchmarking data.

In 2023, KPMG in the UK will be focusing on the recruitment of neurodiverse graduates. They will expand the data collected in their modelling to understand where they are on neurodiversity and identify representation gaps. They will also be participating in the 10,000 Abled Interns programme.

Judges’ comments

“We were impressed by the scope of the challenge that KPMG had set themselves. They have clearly recognised that inclusive recruitment is about more than getting people into employee positions, but also includes career progression up to senior leadership. The changes they have made to their recruitment processes are already showing tangible results.”

Finalists in this category

• HSBC UK (Highly commended),
• KPMG in the UK,
• Ford India Private Ltd,
• Leeds City Council.

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