Ensuring that every person involved in the recruitment process is aware of gender-issues, discrimination and stereotypes

Ensuring that every person involved in the recruitment process is aware of gender-issues, discrimination and stereotypes

One of the first steps was to identify the people involved in the recruitment process. We talked to the Department Coordinators and gathered the documents that define the recruitment and promotion processes from the Faculty of Engineering. In total, only at this faculty, at least 36 people are involved in the recruitment process, including Teachers, researches and administration staff. Candidates are selected and interviewed by the Department Coordinator and the knowledge area coordinator, and in some cases the coordinator of the research area is also involved in the process. As a result, we discovered that 7 out of 26 interview committees are balanced, 18 are only made of men and 1 is made only of women.

We identified the important topics and the experts for the training session. We then identified all the people involved in recruitment processes of all the faculties of Mondragon Unibertsitatea and spoke with the coordinators to help us recruiting attendance. We organized the first training session in invited the 27 people involved in the recruitment processes.

The first training session was held on December 4^th, 2018, with a duration of 4 hours and an attendance of 14 persons.

During the session, the current recruitment and promotion processes of each faculty were also discussed.

After the session, an evaluation form was prepared to gather feedback from the people who took part. The evaluation was very positive and we are preparing the next session focusing in inclusive language.

As mentioned above, 14 people from the 4 faculties that conform Mondragon Unibertsitatea took part in the session, which represents 50% of the aim target. Besides, it was positively underlined the fact that people from all the faculties attended the session. Furthermore, from the 27 people identified as persons who take part in recruitment processes, 19 were the ones who signed up for the session, even though finally just 14 of them were able to attend. The rest couldn´t attend but showed a big interest on it and asked for documentation used in the training session, which was shared will all of them.

Evaluation questionnaires were delivered to participants at the end of the session; 10 respondents participated in the survey.

In respect to the evaluation report made afterwards, the measurement was done using a scale of 1 to 5 and the results were:

• %100 have evaluated the importance of the issue between 4 and 5
• For 90% of the people the professionalism of the speaker is above 4
• For 75% of the people, what they learnt in the session will be very useful when handling recruitment processes.

Some of the respondents suggested increasing the number of session, confirming their interest towards the issue that were addressed.

During the course, and specifically in relation to gender mandates, it has been very explicit the unconscious predisposition that most people have -including those who directly participate in selection processes-, to be influenced by stereotypes that make them, many times, act involuntarily in a discriminatory way.

Even in the very definition of the job for which the recruitment process is done, these stereotypes are unintentionally filtered, with which we have learned that both, at the time of defining a job and in the selection process itself, besides being necessary to have a composition of teams balanced from the point of view of gender, there should also be a person expert in the subject to guarantee that this type of discriminatory situations do not take place, which, often can be imperceptible for the rest of the team.

We´ve also learned that many times there is a big lack of this kind of skills and therefore, this kind of training it is something that should be repeated in the future, aimed to the new people that incorporate to the recruitment processes.

Recruitment, career progression and retention

Training

Mondragon Unibertsitatea (MU)
Higher education institution

Department Coordinators and Knowledge Areas Coordinators