Feature

posted 22 Jun 2010 in Volume 12 Issue 12

Case Study: Recruiting for Diversity

Graduate Recruitment Manager Edward Walker of Pinsent Masons reveals how the firm’s focus on diversity in student work placements has resulted in solid organic growth.

Over many years, we have worked hard to develop and sustain an inclusive culture, with a workforce that is fully representative of all the communities in which we operate. Pinsent Mason’s diversity policy, which was formally introduced in 2006, has played a key role in this respect and has helped inform activity in areas such as recruitment, employee development and the improvement of relationships with both clients and suppliers.

Making diversity central to our activities led to Pinsent Masons becoming the first law firm to feature in Stonewall’s annual Workplace Equality Index, which recognises the top 100 employers for lesbian, gay and bisexual people in Britain. More recently, with 45% of students in our work placement programme coming from a minority group, we were also recognised as having the ‘Best Work Placement Diversity Scheme’ by the UK’s National Council for Work Experience.

We run a number of competitive placement programmes that are broadly similar to other law firms and these ultimately provide the majority of our trainee solicitors. However, trying to tackle diversity at this late stage of the selection process is problematic: many of the biggest barriers to entering the profession will have already become entrenched, particularly those relating to educational attainment. This means the pool of potential applicants is already relatively small.

To help break down these barriers, we run structured work experience programmes aimed at students who have completed their GCSEs and who are starting to study towards further qualifications. The programme has been running since 2003 and now covers six of the firm’s UK offices. This year, the programme will see over 150 students undertake placements with the firm.

Strategic planning

Widening access to the profession was not the primary driver for the programme, it was actually a pragmatic response to an ever-increasing number of informal requests for work experience, a challenge most law firms will recognise.

Prior to this, all work experience placements were dealt with on an ad hoc basis at a local level rather than being coordinated by the recruitment team. Almost inevitably, this meant that there was a lack of structure and consistency to the content of the work experience. While most students really enjoyed their time with the firm, this was not universally the case.

From an employer branding perspective we felt that it was essential that the experience which students received reflected the values of the firm, and the best way to achieve this was to centralise the design and management of the programme.

Once this decision had been made, we chose to focus our efforts exclusively on 16-18 year olds, as these years represent a critical juncture in a student’s educational and career development. The subjects chosen and grades attained by students at this stage of their studies typically play a critical role in determining whether they will be able to access the legal profession. Making students aware of the importance of these decisions and raising their expectations became a key ambition of the programme, especially given the lack of practical careers guidance offered in some schools.

Getting started

There were a number of challenges that we faced in getting the work experience programme off the ground.

Simply making sure staff members are aware of the programme’s existence, when it was running and how students must apply has been frustrating at times. However, ensuring information is readily available through the firm’s intranet site and publicising the scheme through the employee magazine has helped a great deal. The most powerful driver has probably been word of mouth amongst employees and the fact that so many of them now come into direct contact with the students while they are in the firm.

We also needed to take into account the demands of the school timetable. We now run four separate intakes of students, designed to coincide with the summer break and October half-term holidays.

Focus on diversity

Although not our primary motivation, using the programme to widen access to the profession emerged naturally from the aforementioned goals. It was also undoubtedly given a boost by the introduction of our diversity policy, which made all employees aware of the benefits to employing a diverse workforce.

In 2007, we also launched our Starfish corporate social responsibility (CSR) programme, which aims to inspire young lives. This programme has seen a majority of employees undertake voluntary work, particularly in the area of improving literacy and numeracy amongst students from disadvantaged backgrounds. For those employees who had been working with students through our CSR programme, it was a natural next step to explore whether we could subsequently bring them into the firm through the work experience programme.

To some firms the idea of launching a new diversity initiative for school-age students might sound like re-inventing the wheel as there are now a number of successful external initiatives such as the ‘Legal Launch Pad’ and ‘Pathways to Law’, which focus on particular strands of diversity. We see these schemes as complementary to our own rather than a substitute, as our ambition is to have a programme that brings students from different backgrounds together, rather than separating them from one another. In this way diversity simply becomes ‘business as usual’.

Student Recruitment: A Diversity Checklist

While the intentions of our programme are not really breaking new ground, what is different is our rigorous approach to an area of activity that many law firms still treat in a fairly ad hoc manner.

If you have been inspired to look at your own work experience programme and want to increase its effectiveness as a tool for widening access to the profession, here is a checklist of helpful things to consider:

Set yourself a target and then measure your performance. What gets measured tends to get done so you will need to carefully think about the data you will need to collect to ensure this is possible.
Run a pilot programme, perhaps in one practice area or location. This will give you the opportunity to refine the programme before trying to roll it out across the whole firm.
Engage with senior stakeholders. Ideally look to recruit a well-known face to front the programme, as this will help ensure buy-in from other members of staff.
Be patient. Initially, changes are often relatively small. But, make sure you capitalise on these successes and use them as an inspiration for future activity.

Sowing seeds

This more inclusive approach to tackling diversity has created its own challenges. Of key importance is getting the HR basics right, in particular attraction and selection.

My aim from an attraction point of view has been to ensure that as many students as possible are aware of our work experience programme and understand how taking part can benefit them in their development.

My team’s activity is focused on building relationships with local schools and sixth form colleges that fall within the natural catchment areas of our offices. We send out marketing materials (including a number of work experience brochures) to each school and also offer to visit the school to make a presentation about the programme. We now have a database of over 100 schools that we are in regular correspondence with and this number is growing every year.

Initially, some of this activity brings relatively limited returns, with only a small number of students applying from each school. But, in the medium term, the activity has proven very successful. Students returning to school following a place on the programme invariably become ambassadors for the firm and the number of applications subsequently grows through word of mouth. We also encourage former work experience students to support the firm at presentations to other students, as their perspective on the programme is of real interest to potential applicants.

Selection process

While attracting students to apply for work placements can be a major challenge to increasing diversity, the selection process is another potential obstacle.

The aim of any selection process should be to identify the candidates best able to meet the demands of the position. However, high grade requirements and lengthy application forms pose two of the biggest barriers to encouraging applications from candidates from non-traditional backgrounds.

Many firms see grades as a proxy for intelligence; setting a high minimum academic requirement also conveniently reduces the number of applications a firm has to process.

In reality, academic grades when taken in isolation do not accurately reflect academic ability. They fail to take into account contextual value added, which provides an indication of how the student has performed relative to what was expected. Failing to take this into account is one of the major reasons why students from underprivileged backgrounds are underrepresented within the legal profession.

In response to this issue, I have ensured our work experience programme has no minimum grade requirements. Instead, we look at a broader range of factors, including the student’s motivation for undertaking work experience and his/her level of attention to detail.

By widening access at this point, we can use the work experience programme as an opportunity to explain to students why their academic results are important to their future careers. This provides many students with a renewed drive to achieve the best possible results they can when they return to their studies. More importantly, it allows those students who may have been under-performing to address this before it is too late.

Even the above approach raised problems, however, as attention to detail initially seemed to adversely impact candidates who spoke English as a second language. To overcome this problem, I revised the marketing materials for the programme to ensure they highlighted the importance of attention to detail, and provided some helpful hints for students to help improve their performance in this area.

Reaping results

Although there is always room for improvement, I am generally very pleased with the level of diversity we are currently seeing amongst our work experience students. The programme has now been running for a number of years and we are really starting to reap the long-term benefits of this investment.

Each year, we receive applications for vacation placements and training contracts from candidates whose first contact with the firm came through our work experience programme. In many cases, these applications have led to successful hires.

An ongoing challenge, however, is to ensure this level of diversity does not drop off at later stages of our recruitment processes, such as when recruiting for our vacation placement programme. This is something I am continually reviewing through careful monitoring of the materials we use and also through increasing the amount of information we make available to candidates prior to them making an application.

The ultimate ambition is to recruit the very best people into our firm. I feel that this is an achievable goal because of our commitment to diversity, and not in spite of it.

Award-winning programme

Pinsent Masons’ award-winning work experience programme for students aged 16-18 broadly follows this format:

A first day induction to provide students with an overview of the firm and ensure they have the necessary IT knowledge to use our systems. Students are also given a workbook with various research tasks to complete during the week.
Each morning, a trainee gives a talk to students on a different topic, such as routes into a legal career.
Each day, students rotate to a new practice area where they are supervised on a one-to-one basis by a trainee solicitor.
A group exercise is run during the week to help students improve their ability to work in a team.
A quiz is held at the end of the week to provide a bit of competition for the students, with the opportunity to win a prize.

– edward.walker@pinsentmasons.com