Hello there. In the last lecture, I talked in general about a business case for diversity and inclusion and what needs to be in that and the framework, etc. What I want to talk about specifically now is building a business case to change your diversity and inclusion recruitment strategy, I say change, that's a big assumption I know. Let's say that we want a business case to build a diversity and inclusion strategy for your recruitment. As I go through, I'm going to be talking about a number of features that will be common into other types of business cases. But these are ones that you can use specifically and are used to look at recruitment. The first question you're going to ask in building the business case for anything is well, why do we need one? What's the problem? I guess some of the things that you need to investigate in building the business case, it really is do we have a problem, and what is it? Some of the things that you can think about including are things like, how wide is your talent pool? Are you drawing from across the available community? Now how do you find that out? Well, you do it in a couple of ways, and we will, in another session look at some of the data internally and externally in a bit more detail. But how will you know if you're diverse unless a, you know what the community profile is, and b, you also know your own demographic profile of your organization? Doing a demographic profile of your organization is a really good starting point for a lot of diversity and inclusion work. This is because by actually putting the organization up in terms of the types of people in particular jobs, what people are earning, what age people are, you will begin to look at a profile. One of the things I try to do in these presentations is to talk about practical experience. My own practical experience in particular has some resonance with these projects. For example, I did a large project a couple of years ago with a government department of over 1,000 people, was a very diverse group of people. It looked after services for mining, for employment, for water, for utilities, so it had over 1,000 people and we were looking at what people's career plans were. But when we had to look at the organization, out of 1,000 people, there were less than 10 under the age of 30. Now, that's really quite disturbing in many ways. One is that, what does this say about the organization? What would you do if you were presented with a profile like that and you were in an organization, what does it tell you? Well, when you look at the rest of the age demographic, more than 50 percent of people were over the age of 45. That raises some really interesting questions about the future of that organization, about the nature of that organization, about people's choices, and about capability in that organization. In order to be able to understand whether or not you want a wider pool of talent, you need to be looking at the demographics of the organization, as well as the demographics from outside. Now, of course, one of the traps of diversity is to say, well, we should have exactly the same percentage of women in our organization as there are women in the community. People do that, but it only takes you so far. As we discussed in the first course, it would be quite easy for organizations just to do a headcount and do a comparison to the diversity of the community. Some organizations do that, so if in fact there's 48 percent of the Australian population is made up of women, then potentially 48 percent of our organization should be women as well. If that's all your organization is doing, you're not doing a business case. Remember in Course 1 we talked about intersectionality and identity, that we are more than one of those identity features. What you also need to be able to see is, where are those women employed? What type of jobs are they in? What salaries are they earning? What are their career opportunities? You need that type of data to be able to develop a diversity and inclusion business case, but also one for recruitment because that will tell you something about your organization and where there are gaps. The other thing you need to do is to actually seek out and find what's happening in the workplace, so a wider pool of talent. What does that mean? It might mean going to other universities or education providers, it might be looking outside your industry for people who come from other industries because you think you might need some innovation, you might need some new thinking. That's what a wide talent pool is about. Wider talent pools can also be about people actually applying. There's plenty of benchmarking data around what you should be able to expect in terms of particular roles and the number of applicants. The second thing that you can do with your business case is actually talk about better hiring decisions. You will see in some of the material I've provided in this module that there is a very high level of dissatisfaction about the recruitment process felt in many countries and in many different industries. The figures about unsuccessful appointments, the number of people who live within the first 12 months of getting a job, managers who are uncomfortable with the lack of success with an appointment. These are all things that you can actually make a very good business case for. Is it about diversity? What could be entities? You want to make better hiring decisions, so you want a better pool of people, a more diverse group and you want people to be able to go through those selection processes as the employer and make better decisions. You want a variety of viewpoints, and that's not just from the people applying for jobs, but also in your selection process, and that's really important. We'll talk a lot more about that when we're actually looking at interviewing in Course 4. But let me go back to variety of viewpoints. So often, organizations will value experience in that industry above any other experience. You might be wanting, for example, a human resource manager. What you really want is somebody who understands human resources, has a track record, can demonstrate behaviors that you're seeking. Do they have to be in your industry? Maybe you'll learn something from outside. Why is it that organizations put so much emphasis that you've had experience in exactly the type of organization like our own. Sometimes it might be necessary. But in many cases, that's not what you're looking for, you're looking for expertise in a discipline, something that's a recognized area that requires experience, requires forward thinking and so on. You might want with the diversity and inclusion strategy increase cultural awareness. That might be not necessarily done early through the recruitment process directly, but you may in fact have other ways that you can build that into the design of jobs, etc. Increase creativity, again, linked to innovation. How are you going to measure that? As I've already said, it could be something small, it doesn't have to be huge. What are you looking for? Are you're looking to do something differently? You will be looking in your pool of talent for people who have a track record and experience and can show you they can do things differently. More innovation that's linked to creativity. Improved performance, you need to work out what that is. Again, and I'll say it throughout this entire specialization, improved performance is not always about less money. It is not about making savings. Improved productivity and performance are about a range of other things as well. Finally, there's better company reputation, and this is something that I think in the past, many organizations have rested on their laurels. These days, people need to make sure that their organization, your organization is actually one that has name recognition. You're known for what? I'll give you one example in leaving. Of course, we know that firm ABC, here in Australia is a top notch law firm. What I'm hearing people say now is, do you know that firm ABC is actually having people work for it across Australia? That it's not just employing locally physically, it's actually got teams located around the country. Now for some of you that might not say in particularly new or innovative, for the law sector, it is. Thank you.
