As we move into 2025 at Arc and set our 2025/2026 impact goals, we reflect on our achievements over the past year regarding our Social Inequalities impact pillar. We also want to share updates on our plans for the next six months. Our overarching goal remains to lead the industry in making recruitment and staffing fairer for everyone. 

Achievements in 2023/2024: 

Our original aim was to establish an industry initiative with our clients, peers, and community partners by 2025. With this, we have researched, discussed and analysed the processes we have in place and explored what we can do to improve these. We have made significant progress with our Industry Initiative. This initiative aims to collaborate with our clients, peers, and community to create a fairer hospitality industry by 2025.

We have examined how our teams make selection and staffing decisions to develop fairer selection systems and processes. With the increasing role of AI and automation, we have started discussions and implementations with our system suppliers to advance fair staffing and selection processes using technology. We are committed to minimizing discrimination and bias, ensuring that automation in staffing selection supports our goals of inclusivity and fairness. If not handled correctly, these advancements could undermine our efforts to create a more equitable workplace. 

Furthermore, we have improved the accessibility of our office spaces by relocating 5 out of 6 of these to accessible workspaces. We have signed for the 6th accessible office space with a move date of 1st March 2025. 

Although we have made good strides towards our goals, we acknowledge that we could have done more and have fallen behind in some areas. 

One of our committed annual goals was to train our staff on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) and understand their experiences with bias and discrimination. Although we implemented DE&I training for our full-time employees through a FLOW module, this was not done until November 2024. We also surveyed our team members about their experiences with discrimination, but we recognize that we could have explored this more thoroughly, as we did in previous years. 

What Will We Do Next? 

• Ensure Accessibility: Make all our offices accessible to everyone by March 2025. 

• Reflect Diversity: Ensure our full-time team mirrors the diversity of our temporary workers. 

• Ongoing DE&I Training: Continue providing DE&I training to our full-time employees and run awareness campaigns to foster an inclusive work environment. 

• Client and Competitor Surveys: Survey our most active clients and competitors to understand their views on fairness in decision-making processes and identify areas for improvement. 

• Raise Awareness: Increase our reach through client and peer surveys, social media, blogs, in-person engagements and The REC’s member network to have an impact in other sectors of the recruitment industry. This will help us engage industry leaders in the hospitality sector and beyond. 

• Technology Advancements: Inspire and collaborate with clients and technology partners who share our goals to implement fairer selection methods. 

• Legal Action: Address any legal gaps by working with industry bodies to publish guides if necessary. 

• Continuous Development: Recognize that achieving ‘100% fairness’ is an ongoing journey. We expect to face further conversations, challenges, obstacles, and progress in the years to come. 

We are excited about the impact we can make as we gain momentum with our Industry Initiative. We look forward to rallying more support within the recruitment and hospitality industries to achieve our goal. Let’s make the world of flexible work a better place for everyone!