Dealing with Diversity - a study of the recruitment process within the healthcare and industrial sectors

Uppsatsen berör synen på mångfald inom rekryteringsprocessen hos rekryteringsansvariga. En jämförelse görs mellan vårdsektorn och industrisektorn. Det fanns också ett samarbete med ett Equal-projektet i denna uppsats.

Sammanfattning:

"This is a study of the recruitment process with regards to diversity. The purpose is to describe, understand and analyse what factors effect how the informants and the organisations they represent deal with diversity. The study is also meant to provide a comparison between the healthcare sector and the industrial sector with regards to aforementioned problem area. We also aim for the study to be useful for the Swedish branch of the Equal Initiative – a European Union strategy to create more and better jobs and prevent discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation.

The study is carried out as a qualitative interview study with 5 interviews from the industrial and healthcare sectors respectively. The healthcare sector is represented by 5 separate departments from one large organisation where as the industrial sector is represented by 5 separate organisations. The results show that the informants are positive towards bringing more individuals with diverse characteristics into the organisation. There seem to be difficulties however specifying the positive effects of diversity as well as promoting diversity through the recruitment process. There was also an evident lack of using policy documents and such regarding both diversity and recruitment within the organisations.

The organisations represented in the study could all be classified as using a “Reactive Diversification Strategy” where the organisations avoid discrimination but act some what laissez-fair when it comes to searching out diverse individuals in the labour market and bringing them into the organisation. Almost all of the informants described using a traditional recruitment method where selection is made by screening CV´s inviting a few applicants for interviews. Personal attributes such as social competency and out of work activities where regarded as relatively important indicators of job performance. Reference checking was considered highly important as the evaluation of personality and such seemed to be a difficult task. Being able to work in a team was viewed as important in both sectors with more emphasis on adapting to existing work force within the more traditional industrial organisations and more focus on communication within the healthcare sector which both could be interpreted as impeding factors regarding diversity. According to the results, there was more use of internal recruitment within the healthcare sector as well as more emphasis on adhering to LAS-legislation. Within the industrial sector, using external recruitment agencies and consultants seemed to be a more common phenomena compared to the healthcare sector."