Phoenix is Opening Doors to More Diverse Talent

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Phoenix is the UK’s largest long-term savings and retirement business, with a mission of helping everyone achieve the retirement they want.

Phoenix signed up to Business in the Community’s (BITC) Opening Doors campaign in 2023. The organisation had already implemented many of the campaign calls to action yet recognised that there is still more progress to be made in order to create a truly inclusive recruitment process. Phoenix has committed to providing training, materials and guidance on inclusive recruitment to all employees, engaging with partner recruitment agencies on implementing inclusive practices and focusing on skills and capabilities from candidates during the hiring process.

“The Opening Doors campaign provides a single, simple framework against which we were able to audit our approach to inclusive recruitment,” explains Jane Avison, Head of Employer Brand and TA Operations at Phoenix Group. “We were already doing 19 of the 25 actions it sets out, but there were six outstanding that we recognised would improve our ability to attract diverse talent. That’s not to say that we won’t ever need to review what we’re already doing – we’re always looking for ways to learn and improve – but we felt that identifying three new actions to focus on would have the greatest impact.”

The Opening Doors campaign provides a single, simple framework against which we were able to audit our approach to inclusive recruitment.

New actions Phoenix has committed to

Provide training on inclusive recruitment and ensure your employees understand your commitment to inclusive recruitment.

Phoenix have long been invested in ensuring that all of its employees understand and embrace its approach to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I). However, while there was a lot of experience and expertise among the workforce in terms of gender and ethnicity, the organisation felt that its Talent Acquisition colleagues and hiring managers in particular would benefit from training across all seven of Phoenix’s inclusivity lenses – gender and ethnicity, but also age, social mobility, disability, neurodiversity and sexual orientation – to ensure that recruitment was diverse in its broadest sense.

Phoenix worked with The Clear Company, a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and culture consultancy, to develop a bespoke, accredited one day training course for recruiters and hiring managers, covering all seven lenses. Phoenix Talent Acquisition Partners are all now accredited, as well as groups of hiring managers who frequently recruit. The organisation has aspirations to roll this out to all colleagues in the future. The key content from this course has been embedded across the hiring manager and candidate journeys, including the guidance and training for new and experienced hiring teams, to ensure that everyone understands how to recruit inclusively.

“It was vital that the training we delivered was tailored to Phoenix’s inclusive recruitment ambitions. There are a lot of ‘off the shelf’ DEI training modules available, but we believed that something specific to our vision would have the greatest impact,” says Jane. “The course has been very well received by our colleagues – receiving an average rating of 9.7/10 from those who have completed it.

“Of course, training isn’t a one-off, tick box exercise. There is always more we can do. Colleagues have indicated that they would welcome more support in relation to trans-inclusion, so we’ve partnered with Global Butterflies to deliver a separate module specifically for our Talent Acquisition team covering trans and non-binary inclusion in the recruitment process. We’re also looking to do more on social mobility as we want to increase our effectiveness in this area.”

Engage your suppliers, including recruitment agencies, on inclusive recruitment and ensure that they adhere to your inclusive recruitment ambitions.

From time to time, Phoenix uses external agencies for some of its recruitment activities. The refreshed training and materials for hiring managers provide the opportunity to review the guidelines given to these external agencies.

“We repurposed some of the materials that we’d developed for the hiring managers for our external agencies to ensure that they were all fully trained on our seven inclusion lenses,” Jane explains “Candidates won’t differentiate between the approach that an external agency working for us takes and our own in-house approach – for their purposes, they are one and the same. So, it’s essential that external agencies are held to the same high standards as our internal workforce – for example, we impose very strict requirements on our marketing agencies around the use of diverse visuals, reading age and so on.”

Ensure each stage of application and assessment is appropriate for assessing a candidate’s skills and capabilities.

At the start of its Opening Doors journey, Phoenix’s application form was four pages long, and requested information from the candidate that wasn’t needed for the purposes of deciding whether they met the criteria to move onto the next stage of the process. Nearly four-fifths (78%) of jobseekers who started to fill in an application form for a role at Phoenix failed to complete it. Phoenix admits that there is still work to be done to complete this commitment, but the organisation has made strong progress, specifically in relation to the application process.

Jane explains: “We began by mapping the questions we asked on our application form against what we really needed to know. This identified some ‘quick wins’, for example, we were asking for a candidate’s date of birth, which has no bearing on their suitability for the role. We didn’t need to know it, so we removed it. We also looked at Business in the Community’s (BITC) good practice guidance and undertook some competitor analysis, which led us to remove questions like ‘current salary’ which we now know can discourage some candidates – particularly diverse talent – from completing the application form. Our form reduced from four pages to just one, and our application completion rate tripled.

“We also looked at our job adverts to ensure that we were providing all the essential information. Since April this year, we have made it mandatory for all Phoenix job adverts to include a salary range, which is BITC-recommended best practice.

“We continue to ask for diversity data from candidates, but we make it very clear why we are collecting it and how we will use it, and we ensure that it is entirely optional for the candidate to disclose it. So far this year, 71% of candidates provided at least some diversity data.” Only a select group of Phoenix HR data colleagues can access this data, and it is not available for recruiters or hiring managers to see, unless a candidate asks for a reasonable adjustment. Instead, it is aggregated and used anonymously to understand trends and where there may be barriers.”

How has Opening Doors helped?

“We’re really pleased with the improvements we’ve made to our application process and are seeing significant benefits already; over the coming year we’ll be making changes to ensure that the assessment process focuses on the essential skills needed to do the job,” Jane says.

“BITC’s Opening Doors campaign has helped us to identify the areas of our recruitment processes that we still needed to target, and we have benefited from easy access to a network of likeminded employers to shape our approach.”

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