Ensuring inclusive recruitment practices among its supplier recruitment agencies is simply one element of BT’s overall drive toward sustainable procurement practices, the communications giant’s chief procurement officer, Hari Sundaresan, has told Recruiter.

BT recently urged its supplier recruitment agencies to commit to identifying and removing barriers to employment for disabled people. (See Recruiter, 21 September and recruiter.co.uk, 14 September.) However, the link between BT and corporate social responsibility
(CSR) has been established for some time, said Sundaresan, who has held his role for a year.

“When we focus on sustainability areas, it’s a very holistic approach in terms of seeking overall value for money. It’s not just cost savings,” he said. “It’s looking at how they deliver their product or service.”

BT’s sustainability procurement programme includes on-site risk assessments for areas of CSR as wide ranging as climate change and labour standards. However, recruitment agencies are unlikely to be subjected to the on-site assessments, said Liz Cross, head of CSR and governance for procurement. “On-site is the top of the pyramid of our approach and… agencies don’t tend to fall in the ’high risk’ category.”

Instead, agencies would have had their standards scrutinised and had to fill out in-depth questionnaires, she said. “The follow-up with recruitment agencies will be much more about diversity, an element of sustainability.”

Cross acknowledged that the diversity requirement was “getting more profile on the sustainability agenda than perhaps it was four or five years ago”, due in part to increasing awareness due to the Olympics.

However, Sundaresan emphasised: “We don’t wait for an agenda to come along. We do what we think is the right thing. This is just part of a journey, an evolution.”

He asked recruiters supplying BT to challenge the company in working to fill vacancies. For instance, a recruiter should challenge job requirements that may call for a worker to go to a particular building every day. Perhaps instead, he said, the recruiter might suggest the job in question could be home-based.

Asked how long BT anticipated it would take to realise an impact from the challenge to recruiters, Helen Chipchase, disability and carers lead, BT Diversity Centre of Expertise, said: “We know that there is quite a mixed ability and mixed understanding among recruiters. We think that the journey will take as long as it takes for some of them. But I think in terms of the impact on BT, I would expect to see that happening certainly within the next six months.

“Change is happening now; it will just take a while depending on who it is to filter down the chain.”