Women Friendly Recruiters
What is the Women Friendly Recruiter Checklist?
The Women Friendly Recruiter checklist is a tool to support you to be an inclusive employer and demonstrate that you have considered the needs of women during the recruitment process. It can help to develop women friendly practices, benefits and opportunities.
The initiative is open to any organisation or business in Leeds and is packed full of benefits.
It also demonstrates you are an inclusive, supportive and compassionate employer, actively encouraging women and others to join your business. Not only this, but you will be fostering a positive workplace and a healthy, happy work/life balance, thus increasing staff productivity.
It is a working document to be used and added to over time, when your organisation offers more benefits and policies to encourage and support prospective employees.
It has three standards that employers can work towards and achieve: Bronze, Silver and Gold.
Once a standard has been achieved, you will receive a Standards Badge that can be used on all internal and external publication.
We are interested, so what do we do?
If you want to work towards being a Women Friendly Recruiter – email us and download the tool kit.
By doing this, we can monitor your progress online via your website and award you with the appropriate standard once it has been evidenced publicly.
Download Tool Kit & Guidance
Recruiters Hints and Tips
Flexible Working
- Flexi-time, hybrid working or working from home
- Part time roles, job shares, compressed work weeks
Workplace Champion
- Create a women’s network offering gender foused advice and support
- Boost confidence in the workplace and help women reach their full potential
Career History
- Demonstrate the positive aspects of gaps in career history
- See non-work experience as also bringing skills to the role
Personal Experiences
- Encourage non-work skills on application forms
- Recognise these skills as relevant and transferable
Benefits and Policies
- adopt robust maternity policies, covering family planning and pre-natal care
- zero-tolernace gender discrimination policy and other women’s issues policies
Job Share
- Attract more candidates
- Improve productivity, flexibility and job satisfaction
Struggling for ideas?
Women also have suggested the following Women Friendly Hints and Tips for employers to consider:
Flexible Working
Practices include flexi-time, working from home or hybrid working, part-time roles or job -shares and compressed work weeks.
Flexible working can increase productivity, promote a healthy work-life balance, improve job satisfaction and attract top talent from a range of diversities and ages.
Women’s Workplace Champion
Appointing a women’s workplace champion or developing a women’s network offers
gender focused advice and support for employees, and can increase female
employees’ confidence and help them to reach their full potential. These schemes also demonstrate commitment as an inclusive employer.
The Workplace Champion should have the confidence and be in a position to
effectively challenge their own employers’ internal functions to become women
friendly recruiters and to take forward proposals from colleagues with the same
confidence.
Career History
Encouraging candidates to recognise and demonstrate the positive aspects of gaps in career histories and non-work experiences on their application forms can attract a
wider range of applicants who have the skills you need and promotes a healthy
work/life balance.
Have better return to work inductions after long period of absence due to maternity,
paternity, caring breaks, sabbaticals or career breaks.
Personal Experiences
Explicitly encourage non-working/soft-skills experiences to be included on CV’s
or application forms. Recognising these skills as transferable and relevant can
attract talent.
Recruiting managers to concentrate on potential and to be more open-minded about these skills and how they were developed and to include a statement that these will be considered in recruitment processes.
How about giving examples of how people can match their skills and experience
required?
Women Friendly Benefits and Policies
Encourage women to join and stay with your organisation by adopting robust
Maternity, dependents, carers leave policies and policies that recognise menopause and other women’s issues. Promote these on websites and provide them in advance and have a zero-tolerance gender discrimination policy during the application process.
How about being inclusive and having a paternity policy, or even a policy for
safer travel at night?
Job Share
Advertising for job shares can attract more candidates and job shares have been shown to improve productivity, flexibility and job satisfaction.
Why not share recruitment policies and procedures so women understand the application process more and provide them with application templates available to download.