Initiative targets fair recruitment

PEOPLE who leave school early are not able to get jobs for which they are competent because there is an over-reliance on academic qualifications and educational attainment.

A report by the Equal Community Initiative yesterday claimed employers who had moved away from the traditional recruitment policy and looked instead at competency, were able to employ people who offered commitment and productivity even without a Leaving Cert.

The initiative said due to the success of such competency-based recruitment, it removed the Leaving Cert requirement for local authority clerical officer positions.

The initiative has launched Delivering a More Inclusive Workplace: Innovations from Equal, which contains a range of models of recruitment, staff policy and flexible work arrangements which can assist in making the workplace more accessible to those experiencing inequality.

To prove the value of such approaches the Equal initiative established seven projects with the specific objective of influencing national policy. Since 2005, these projects have been piloted in many employment sectors, aiming to make the workplace more inclusive for people with disabilities, older workers, women, long-term unemployed people and minorities.

In one, the KWCD Employer Exchange in south-west Dublin, employers developed alternative recruitment strategies targeting the long-term unemployed.

Within 18 months, the project saw a 60% increase in the number of job placements involving long-term unemployed people and the employers who took part in the project also worked with their newly recruited staff to enhance their skills through training and mentoring.

Peter Cassells, chairman of the National Centre for Partnership and Performance, said: “This valuable report from the Equal initiative comes at a time when cases before the Equality Tribunal have reached an all-time high. In the first six months of this year the number of complaints before this tribunal rose by 50% on the same period in 2006.”