bp recently sponsored UK Black Business Week – an event that celebrates excellence, innovation and empowerment within the black community.
Attracting the brightest talent starts with equity and inclusion – for everyone
One of our core aims is to promote greater diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) across our workforce, our customers and our supply chain.
So when it comes to attracting talent, we recognize equity of opportunity needs to be a guiding principle.
Sponsoring events such as UK Black Business Week enables us to engage with under-represented minority talent and diverse businesses from across the UK, and showcase the opportunities that bp has to offer.
We talked to Kerry Griffith, DE&I consultant, people & culture, to find out more about this important event and what we’re doing to promote greater equity for black employees.
Tell us what UK Black Business Week is about?
UK Black Business Week is primarily about empowerment and inspiration. It showcases the achievements of black innovators, entrepreneurs and professionals across UK industry and builds a platform to enable sustained development of up-and-coming black talent.
Why has bp sponsored the event?
For bp to attract top diverse talent, it makes sense to go to places where that talent will be instead of waiting for the talent to find us. It’s about diversifying our efforts between educational settings and search agencies to recruitment fairs or industry events to ensure that we are. UK Black Business Week is the largest business show of its kind in UK and Europe for black businesses and professionals. Not only does our presence there allow us to network with exceptional talent, but it also enables us to further our aims of partnering with more diverse institutions in the pursuit of greater equity.
What is bp doing to help ensure more fairness in our hiring processes?
Inclusive hiring practices are essential for ensuring equitable hiring processes. Part of this is making sure we have access to the widest pool of available talent when selecting for open roles. bp’s hiring inclusively principles call for greater diversity in selection panels for open roles and within candidate pools. We’re also using data to determine if those candidate pools reflect the diversity of the wider job market.
How is bp creating greater equity for its black employees?
The launch of the frameworks for action on racial injustice have had a positive impact on creating greater equity for everyone, and in particular black employees. Data shows that black employees are the least well represented group across all levels within bp, but also within FTSE 100 companies. The representation ambitions we’ve established both in the UK and US should help us to start to address this imbalance within bp. We’ve voluntarily released UK ethnicity pay gap data to show bp’s UK employees that we’re committed to understanding the issue of pay equity driven by representation, and that we are seeking ways to reduce any gaps. There’s also our Leadership Inclusion for Talent (LIfT) programme – a 12-month development experience for employees in the US and UK designed to strengthen our culture of inclusivity and equity at bp. This is helping to create greater visibility to senior leadership for black talent and is providing a safe space to cultivate deep personal development.
