Enterprise Mobility is Opening Doors to Diverse Talent

Enterprise Mobility is one of the largest mobility providers. It recruits more than 2,000 people in the UK every year across a very broad range of roles. Diversity and inclusion has long been at the heart of its recruitment strategy, but the company signed up to Business in the Community’s (BITC) Opening Doors campaign in July 2022, recognising that being part of the network could help to increase its impact.

“Getting the right people into the business is an absolute priority for Enterprise Mobility,” explains Clare Beynon, Talent Acquisition Marketing Manager. “That means putting diversity and inclusion front and centre of our approach. We want our workforce to mirror the communities that we operate in, not just because it’s the right thing to do – which of course it is – but also because a diverse workforce is essential to innovation and creativity, it increases employee satisfaction and productivity and, crucially, it increases business revenue. We pledged to take forward a number of different actions as part of the Opening Doors campaign, including some which we had already made progress towards, but where we knew we had more work to do.”

Commitment 1) Use neutral language

Although it recruits to a vast array of different roles, like numerous other employers within the automotive sector, Enterprise Mobility has found it challenging to attract as many women into the business as it would like.  This can be due to the perception of our sector,” says Clare, “but that isn’t the whole picture. We spent some time reviewing our job descriptions to ensure that gender-coded words which were particularly associated with male stereotypes were not included, as this can discourage some women from applying. We used a gender decoder to identify those linguistic turn-offs and removed them.”  

Commitment 2) Provide training on inclusive recruitment and ensure your employees understand your commitment to inclusive recruitment

Enterprise Mobility has been recognised as a ‘Disability Confident Leader’, the highest level of the Disability Confident Scheme, for its inclusive approach to recruiting and retaining people with disabilities. Recognising that training must be an ongoing, iterative process, it committed to doing more to ensure that every employee was fully informed about – and supportive of – its commitments. It collaborated with MyPlus, an organisation that helps employers to realise new possibilities through the recruitment and development of disabled talent, to create bespoke training for hiring managers.

Commitment 3) Recognise non-traditional or informal work experience

Over 70,000 candidates apply for 1500 graduates positions each year. But despite the huge volume of applications it processes, Enterprise Mobility ensures that each and every one is screened by a person.

“Identifying and nurturing a person’s potential is the cornerstone of our recruitment process,” Clare affirms. “We know that many jobseekers, particularly young people and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, struggle to recognise and articulate the skills that they have. They often overlook the skills that they’ve acquired through part-time jobs or hobbies, but which show us that they have the attitude that we’re looking for. That’s why it’s so important to us that we apply the human touch – we know what we’re looking for in a future employee, so we make an effort to comb through each submission carefully and with an open mind – we don’t assume the candidate will know how to best present their skills and we don’t use AI.”

The whole process is an opportunity to get to know each other and to work out that we are right for each other – it’s not just one way. – Clare Beynon, Talent Acquisition Marketing Manager, Enterprise Mobility

This personal approach continues throughout the entire recruitment process. “We don’t use AI at all in the selection process,” she continues. “We have no psychometric tests, online tests or assessment centres. What we do have is people talking to people: and we never forget that it’s just as important that the candidate chooses us as it is that we choose them. We want everyone to know exactly what they’re getting. So we offer weekly coaching sessions to all candidates, making sure that there is always one member of the recruitment team, one hiring manager and one recent recruit on hand to answer questions from any angle. Our ‘interview’ is badged as a conversation between two people, and then the final stage is a visit to the branch, where the candidate will sit with the team for a few hours, experience what a ‘typical’ working day looks like, and then have another 1:1 conversation, this time with the hiring manager. The whole process is an opportunity to get to know each other and to work out that we are right for each other – it’s not just one way. The time we put in at the front end pays dividends in terms of the diversity of the workforce that we employ, and our retention rates. We have also seen an increase in the success rate of candidates.”

The benefits of the Opening Doors campaign

“We’ve made great strides in improving the accessibility of our jobs in recent years, but we jumped at the chance to sign up to Opening Doors. We know a lot about inclusive recruitment, but we also know enough to recognise that we can always do more, and so the expertise of BITC, and of the employer network that we’re able to tap into because of the campaign, meant that we had no doubt that committing to the campaign would benefit our business.”

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