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Shifting the dial, one job advert at a time

CFG reaffirms its commitment to #ShowTheSalary to end discriminatory recruitment practice.

Since CFG’s restructure in early 2020, the HR team has recruited for several new posts and has welcomed onboard (all online!) no fewer than seven new team members. To say that it has been an exciting and busy year would be an understatement.

Like many charities, we’ve realised that ‘business as normal’ won’t cut it in the post-pandemic world, so we’ve made time to review our HR practices and processes during the past year. We’ve approached this work from several different angles, but at the heart of what we do are our values.

Like our members, we strive to reduce inequity and we want to ensure that diversity and inclusion is at the heart of everything we do. So, it soon became clear that one of the areas we needed to look at was how we attract and recruit new team members, and the messages we send out when we advertise for new team members.

We’ve now joined with hundreds of other charities to sign up to the #ShowTheSalary pledge – a simple promise to show the salary on our recruitment ads. The campaign was launched just over one year ago and since then it has shone a light on salary secrecy and discriminatory recruitment practices in the sector. You can read all about the ‘Why?’ here.

The campaign’s simplicity belies its effectiveness as it has led to hundreds more charities displaying the salary and given many more pause for thought.

As the original campaign team recently wrote: ‘We had one clear goal, to shift the dial on salary secrecy in the charity sector… Over the past year, hundreds of organisations have signed our pledge to always #ShowTheSalary when they recruit… And thousands of roles every year are now guaranteed to #ShowTheSalary as a result of your actions. The dial has definitely shifted.’

The #ShowTheSalary pledge now goes further, and we’ve also pledged to never asking candidates for their current or previous salary. And nor will we ever make holding a degree a requirement unless it’s truly essential.

Showing salaries when recruiting shouldn’t be considered a ‘nice-to-do’. CFG has been including salaries on adverts for many years, but we felt the time had come to sign the pledge and formally signal this as one of our non-negotiable commitments.

We’ve not always got it right in the past, but if there’s one positive to come out of the pandemic and the events of the past 20 months, it has been a challenging of perceived wisdom and poor practices. And it has helped to open up the debate on what equality, diversity and inclusion truly means, for each and every one of us.

For more resources and information, visit the Resources page of the #ShowTheSalary website.

 

For more on culture and EDI this month, listen to the latest Charity Podcast - Difficult Conversations part 3 with Caron Bradshaw and Yassine Senghor.

"Time and time again, I've seen that there are barriers to people really fulfilling their potential... And when you give people equal opportunity and you give them the chance to really shine and express their potential, then you get fabulous outcomes, brilliant decisions and great outputs." - Caron Bradshaw OBE, CEO, CFG.

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