Enhancing our ED&I initiatives

Powering every person to fulfil their unique potential

Equity, diversity and inclusion at Robert Walters

We recognise the power of diversity and the role it plays in enabling each of our clients, candidates and people to fulfil their unique potential. This is why we take a two-fold approach – to promote diverse hiring practices in our clients’ organisations and to build an inclusive workplace culture within our own business.

It’s our ambition to be a global ED&I leader, leveraging our relationships with our clients, candidates and colleagues, alongside our inclusive recruiting expertise, to challenge status quo hiring practices.

Our key ESG targets and progress

Target

80%

Of employees to feel a sense of belonging by 2025

Progress

73%

Of employees felt a sense of belonging in 2023

UN SDGs

Reduced inequalities
Gender equality

Target

50%

Global leaders (Associate Director and above) that identify as women by 2025

Progress

47%

Of global leaders identified as women in 2023

UN SDGs

Reduced inequalities
Gender equality

Our ED&I framework

Consciously inclusive culture

Ensure our processes and policies create a systemic culture of inclusion with transparency and fairness. Develop a culture of curiosity underpinned by robust training and communication.

Knowing our data

Establish a baseline of diversity, equity and inclusion data to enable us to measure progress and to drive meaningful change which is regionally relevant.

Inclusive accountable leadership

We will be led by diverse, inclusive and effective leaders who embrace difference and take accountability in creating an inclusive culture.

Amplifying voices

Create a workplace of upstanders, where people feel safe to speak up and challenge respectfully. We will raise up employee voices through visible sponsorship and allyship and empathy.

Leading the conversation

We will drive the conversation on diverse recruitment and inclusive hiring for our clients, providing thought leadership and innovation in diverse and inclusive hiring services.

Powering people potential

We will work with our communities, and suppliers, creating opportunities to level the playing field to ensure that both candidates and employees reach their full potential.

Promoting inclusive recruitment practices

Inclusive hiring is an area where we can offer tremendous value to clients, as well as fortify our position as the talent partner of choice for the world’s top professionals.

We have continued our pioneering use of technology to drive  diverse recruiting strategies, using our cutting-edge approach to remove male gender-biased language from job adverts, as well as employing LinkedIn insights and bespoke advertising solutions to connect employers with the most diverse pool of candidates possible.

Recruitment Inclusivity Diagnostic

Recruitment and talent acquisition teams can have the biggest impact on the diversity of the talent that joins a business, yet many diversity and inclusion initiatives focus on employees rather than potential employees.

Our multi-award-winning Recruitment Inclusivity Diagnostic blends a deep knowledge of recruitment, HR tech and diversity programme management. Our specialist diverse hiring recruitment practitioners review and then re-engineer a business's recruitment and careers content and processes to minimise bias and enable truly inclusive hiring.

The diagnostic assesses the end-to-end recruitment process, analysing the impact of recruitment content and processes across multiple lenses, including age, disability and neurodiversity, ethnicity, gender, faith, LGBTQ+ and socio-economic, producing a bespoke report with clear actions including immediate steps that can be taken to deliver meaningful change and measurable results.

Empowering our people

Our regional ED&I councils are key to helping us to achieve our ED&I goals. With ten councils now in place globally, our 120+ volunteer ED&I council members are tasked with driving awareness and education as well as championing changes to policies and processes that underpin our inclusive culture.

In 2023, they helped our people globally celebrate over 25 different cultural awareness moments including International Women's Day, Pride, Ramadan, Black History Month, Holi, National Reconciliation Week, World Mental Health Day, Africa Day, International Day of Transgender Visibility, Diwali and International Men's Day.

Creating an environment where everyone across the business feels safe, supported and free to speak up is essential to helping our people feel a sense of belonging, and our employee resources groups (ERGs) provide a safe space and community. Our Pride ERG for LGBTQ+ team members and allies; Enable ERG for people with hidden or visible disabilities, long-term health or neurodivergent conditions or those with caring responsibilities for members of those communities; and Family ERG for working parents and carers, now have over 500 members.

ED&I in action

59%

promotions awarded to women
74

nationalities
120

EDI council champions globally
500+

Employee resource group (ERG) members

Our partnerships and accreditations

We partner with a wide variety of organisations championing diversity and equality across society. We continually look for new opportunities and platforms to support and advocate on behalf of those who are striving to fulfil their unique potential. Our partnerships, accreditations and pledges are a key way of ensuring that we remain focused and held to the highest standard in everything that we do in ED&I.

Some of our global commitments and partnerships:

ED&I thought leadership

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Hiring Advice

ED&I Gender Report

In what was another impactful year globally for the diversity and inclusion movement, +6,000 professionals completed a survey to help us understand the state of play of ED&I across UK and Irish workplaces. The ED&I Strategy Report highlights the key trends, issues, best practice case studies and str

Hiring Advice

Removing barriers and bias in recruitment

Removing barriers and bias in recruitment: Lessons from Legal & General and the NHS We invite you to watch our latest webinar and hear how L&G and the NHS have audited their recruitment processes for bias and removed barriers using our award-winning Recruitment Inclusivity Diagnostic.  Watch our web

Hiring Advice

Diverse Hiring: Practice Beyond Theory

Diversity and inclusion are not interchangeable terms. Diversity within an organization without inclusion is just many different people in the same place at the same time with no engagement or connection. Most of us will know that diverse hiring is hiring with special care to ensure procedures (like

Our gender pay gap reports

We support gender equality and we published our UK gender pay gap report on 4 April 2023. Our reports can be found online:

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See how we’re living our purpose

Powering people and organisations to fulfil their unique potential

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