The Association of Professional Staffing Companies and the Recruitment and Employment Confederation have surveyed 105 staffing companies and 348 individual recruitment professionals - finding that 41 per cent of recruitment firms are not recording any demographic data on their workforce and leadership teams. This has the effect of making it difficult to identify which demographics are not fully represented.

Time and resources for not recording the diversity of the workforce is cited by 6 per cent of respondents; 4 per cent feel that they do not have the expertise; 38 per cent considered that their organisation was too small and 26 per cent simply had not considered it.

Neil Carberry - Chief Executive of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation - says that recruitment, more than any other sector, sits “at the heart of workplace diversity and inclusion”, opening opportunities to millions of people every year, adding:

“The glaring finding of the report is a lack of effective diversity monitoring in some recruitment businesses. As the old saying goes, what gets measured gets managed, so effective data collection needs to spread more broadly across the industry.”

The bodies’ UK Recruitment Diversity & Inclusion Index shows that although most of the recruitment sector workforce is made up of women, at senior level there is an even balance between men and women.

The research also found that 65 per cent of organisations were not collecting data on the sexual orientation of their workforce and 55 per cent do not record this among their senior leadership team; 46 per cent were not recording the ethnicities of their workforce and 40 per cent were not collecting any information on age.

Religious beliefs at 90 per cent and staff qualifications at 73 per cent were the least likely data to be recorded.   However, responses from individuals show the recruitment industry is made up of 47 per cent Christian; 31 per cent atheist; 13 per cent agnostic and 7 per cent spiritual.

Although 47 per cent did not record the data, 33 per cent of corporate respondents say up to a quarter of their workforce had a disability.

Ann Swain - Chief Executive of the Association of Professional Staffing Companies - stated:

“When we first embarked on this collaborative research, our hope had been to identify what the current make-up of the recruitment sector looked like, any discrepancies between corporate and individual views and where diversity may be lacking. What we found, though, was a more pressing issue - a lack of information. Without a clear and honest picture of your workforce, it will be difficult for staffing companies to identify where there are gaps or what demographics are currently under-represented.”

She added:

“But there are restrictions on what employers can and can’t ask staff and how recruitment businesses approach the tracking of sensitive personal data will require careful management and guidance.”