Case Study: Ernst & Young

Interview

The case study below is based on interviews with Fleur Bothwick (Director of Diversity and Inclusiveness) and Stephen Isherwood (Co-Head, Senior Manager, and Graduate recruitment). The views expressed are those of the interviewees, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department.

Clients and partners

E&Y’s services are used by a variety of organisations in diverse sectors such as automotive, biotechnology, mining and metals and technology and communications. Many of these organisations are listed in the Fortune Global 500 (E&Y serves 77% of them) and S&P Global 1200 (E&Y serves 65% of them). The company’s objective with these organisations is to improve regulatory regimes and company reporting, promote transparency and strengthen corporate governance.

E&Y has about 260 partners, 41 of whom sit on the firm's 'Global Advisory Group', which steers the firm's future direction. Other professional and non-professional staff total 135,000 worldwide.

Diversity and inclusion

E&Y’s mission statement for diversity and inclusion is to:

"attract talented people from diverse backgrounds, [to] emphasise that inclusiveness matters more than ever today. As business challenges become more complex, [there] is a need to call upon the widest spectrum of views and opinions to address them. Our open culture offers continuous personal and professional development, which allows people to grow and succeed."

Although Fleur focuses mainly on retention and progression strategies she does market, for recruitment purposes, aspects of E&Y's diversity and inclusiveness to prospective graduates. This may be in partnership with the organisation's eight minority support networks.

Communication channels

E&Y uses a broad range of media channels, working with those who have specialist knowledge of how and where to target advertisements aimed at attracting specific under-represented groups, both on and off campus. E&Y also use a specialist disability recruiting company who can, Fleur says, "advise us on reasonable adjustments for disabled graduates, for example how much extra time you need to give dyslexic graduates for online testing".

Other aspects of recruitment that Fleur is involved with include career fairs set up specifically for gay and lesbian graduates and specific intern programmes for other minority groups.

Retention and progression strategies

Fleur says E&Y are proactive in many retention and progression strategies and projects aimed at underrepresented groups. For example:

"we are about to pilot a Women's Leadership Programme to take place over two days, which all our senior women will go through. We've also launched an initiative called Career Watch, which is where a senior partner is given responsibility for the progression of a senior woman through to partner. It's different to a mentor or coach. Their role is to specifically identify hurdles and unblock them from a business perspective; so, for example, introduce them to clients, take them to certain conferences, include them in client entertaining, that sort of thing".

Mentoring and support is not exclusive to senior employees. Other employees are able to join mentoring circles run by the women's network and enjoy talks about progression by partners during the 'Partner Breakfast Series'. Other networks, like the Black network, have helped to market the junior leadership programme – a self-nomination programme that facilitates underrepresented groups' progression.

‘Work Smart’ and ‘New Ways of Working’

'Work Smart' and 'New Ways of Working' are two initiatives that E&Y have designed to get people to work more smartly, more flexibly and more informally.

'Work Smart' allows employees to choose how they work their contracted hours and 'New Ways of Working' is about E&Y being as flexible as possible in meeting people's requirements, for example through job-sharing and term-time working.

Fleur says it would be naïve to think that there is no resistance to these initiatives. For example, a person may not even ask about flexible working if they think they are going to be declined by their manager. Consequentially, she says it is important to market and publicise initiatives and policies to both employees and prospective applicants.

However, she argues that marketing and publicising may not be enough, since many biases, stereotypes and outdated ideas of working still exist.

Diversity and inclusion training programmes

E&Y have rolled out several diversity and inclusion training programmes, such as a half-day workshop for partners which aims to engage ‘the heart’, ‘the head’ (the business case) and ‘the hands’ (what you can do differently).

E&Y also runs a change agent workshop and most recently has trained about 500 of its staff (including assessment centre staff) in implicit bias and stereotyping and impact decision making.

These programmes are aimed at promoting awareness to those in decision making positions. Fleur gives an outline of what's involved in these sessions, for example the reincarnation exercise:

"You are asked to think about your five successes and your two failures in your life. Then you're asked to take a playing card and, depending on the card you take, there are obviously four different suits. Spades will be gender and clubs will be ethnicity, and one will be disability and one will be sexual orientation and you're asked to swap with that strand of diversity.

So if you've got the gender card and you are a man, you are asked to think about your life as a female and how your life would have been different and how those five successes and two failures would be different. Then you discuss it as a group. This exercise is the ‘heart’ piece, where it is quite powerful, thinking about if I was gay, would I be a partner now in the firm."

Many of EY&Y’s initiatives, such as the various networks, are bottom-up, grass-roots initiatives. E&Y is also proud to say that it also seeks advice and guidance from other groups such as Stonewall, Opportunity Now, Race for Opportunity, Working Families, and the Employers Forums on Age and Disability.

Fleur also suggests that prospective employers look at the 'Diversity Works for London' website. The website’s benchmarking tool helps employers to judge their progress against set criteria and evaluate that over time.

Graduate recruitment process

Stephen Isherwood says there are some interesting new developments in the nuts and bolts of E&Y's graduate recruitment process. Like many large organisations, E&Y targets about 30 universities and market on campus and in the press. It employs from all disciplines. This can be by direct application or through its Industrial Placement and Summer Internship programmes.

E&Y has a partnership with Lancaster University and the Educational Institute of Scotland to develop a degree programme with a core syllabus that is designed to fit with the requirements to work for E&Y. This programme is also tied to industrial placements, so that graduates will leave with a year and a half's experience and relevant qualifications and background. Aside from this route, they have about 300 interns and about 50 other industrial placements annually.

E&Y receives around 16,000 applications annually which are reduced to between 500-650 appointments. Once students apply, E&Y carries out a sifting and assessing process, looking at candidates’ academic track record and skills. Stephen says E&Y is now moving away from the traditional competency based recruitment criteria, as many applicants understand the formula too well and many answers and relevant experiences were well rehearsed.

Instead, the company is now moving to a, "strength-based system which is more about looking at people's more innate strengths, those natural aptitudes that people have for a role". E&Y believes this system will lead to better recruitment decisions.

The development of this system has involved E&Y working with an organisation called Work Positive and the Centre for Applied Positive Psychology. The system focuses on 16 strengths that relate to the work that E&Y does. It differs from the old competency based system in that, at the interview, rather than asking applicants a standard set of competency based questions, a broader range of questions are asked at a higher pace to look at the answers people give, for example in terms of quality:

"Some of the strengths that we identify are people's ability, or that people have a sense of pride in what they do. People's analytical ability is also strength. Working with others is strength. So we'll ask questions around these areas and ask for examples, but in a slightly different way than before."

Interviewers will also look at body language and other signals like tone, to identify whether someone has pride in what they have been doing or has a specific interest in a subject. Once applicants have been assessed, those showing the required abilities are invited to attend an assessment centre. Positions are awarded on successful completion of the process.

Conclusion

Overall, E&Y's diversity and inclusion policies and fairer recruitment practices show the company to be leaders in its field. But it believes it has more to do, and its diversity and inclusion journey should never reach an end, since fairer recruitment will always change in a rapidly changing business and employment environment.

E&Y would like to improve the diversity of applicants from all universities and backgrounds, so that it is able to have the very best candidates. But Stephen says the company then risks having up to 50,000 applications a year, which would be unmanageable.

E&Y reviews its recruitment practices on a regular basis and ensures that all those involved in the recruitment process are thoroughly trained.

Three major themes can be drawn from E&Y. Firstly, they are promoting openness of employees' working pattern needs. Consequently, two initiatives have been undertaken: 'Work Smart' and 'New Ways of Working'. Both of these are aimed at flexible working and are challenging conventional ‘9-5’ working patterns, which for many are unsustainable. Fleur says the upshot of this process is that the focus is less on where or when you work and more on what you produce.

The second theme is to re-evaluate applicants' competencies. For example, rather than looking for the usual competencies, E&Y tries to identify strengths and abilities, otherwise, as Stephen says, this can result in "candidates going, ‘right, this is a teamwork question’, and regurgitating prepared answers parrot fashion".

The final important theme found in the interviews with Fleur and Stephen is that E&Y is now looking at the issues of bias, stereotyping and impact decision making. They think this is one of the key issues for the future; not about changing people's biases and prejudices, but about making people aware of the possible negative effect on other people.

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