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Soft service provider, SBFM, has signed the 2024 Social Recruitment Covenant to reinforce its commitment to creating inclusive and equitable employment pathways for disadvantaged groups.
The Social Recruitment Covenant is a collaborative national programme created by recruitment and training provider PeoplePlus. It is designed to promote social mobility by encouraging organisations to adopt more inclusive hiring practices.
It advocates that by understanding social value in recruitment and employment practices, businesses can increase social mobility and create organisations that better reflect the communities they operate within. This includes focusing on young people not in employment education or training, carers, the long-term unemployed, ex-offenders and disabled people.
The covenant will help develop SBFM’s Evolve initiative, which has provided targeted training and development opportunities for individuals facing barriers to employment. SBFM partners with its clients, called Evolve Partners, and its charitable partners to identify opportunities. 196 candidates were placed in roles last year through SBFM’s social referral partners including the Shaw Trust and Reed in Partnership.
Evolve then trains and provides long-term, catered employment opportunities for candidates, which include, for example, scaled reintegration and training for prisoner recruits following their release, and detailed video tutorials for disabled employees.
Matt Chapman, CEO at SBFM, said: “Joining the Social Recruitment Covenant is an important step towards our ongoing commitment to building a more inclusive workforce. The covenant will provide a structured framework to amplify our efforts, to ensure that we can offer meaningful opportunities to individuals who have been historically overlooked.”
SBFM also recently signed the Crisis Homelessness Covenant, which contains a set of pledges and guides to support people at risk of or experiencing homelessness in the workplace.
