Black Leadership Job Board launched

A new jobs board to enhance leadership opportunities for Black* professionals has been launched.

The Black Leadership Group (BLG), a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to creating an anti-racist society, joined forces with leading recruitment firm Morgan Hunt to create the Black Leadership Job Board, which enables potential employers to reach a wide pool of qualified black professionals across the UK.

“We are committed to inclusive and anti-racist recruitment and to supporting black leaders in progressing in their chosen careers,” the two organisations said, in a joint statement. 

“We have jointly developed this job board as a collaborative effort. Our aim is to ensure that more ethnically diverse individuals are aware of leadership opportunities available to them and to assist employers in promoting their opportunities to talented black professionals.”

Recruiters and HR professionals were among attendees for a launch webinar yesterday (09 March 2023). 

BLG Director Robin Landman OBE said:

“We really want, as an organisation, to give every black person the opportunity of getting a position where their talents are recognised. Employers need to understand that a representative workforce comes about with proactive action. Organisations must look inside themselves to ask whether they can do better to address the imbalance.

“This job board will support a strategy to recruit a more diverse, representative workforce at leadership level.” 

Latest figures reveal a severe lack of black representation in leadership roles in the UK.

• The proportion of black individuals in senior jobs in UK business has increased by just 0.1 percentage points since 2014
• Black employees hold  just 1.5 per cent of top management roles in the UK private sector
• In the public sector, the number of black employees in leadership roles remained static at 1 per cent
• Just 54,900 of the 3.9 million managers, directors and senior officials in the UK are black

Morgan Hunt Director of Strategy Clare Keniry said:

“As part of any diversity and inclusivity initiative, whether it’s tackling issues of under representation of race, gender or sexual orientation, the first step in terms of human resources best practice is to gather and monitor data on D&I within an organisation. 

“This job board is aimed at supporting those organisations who having reviewed their employee data, recognise that they have a lack of black employees progressing into leadership roles and are looking to address that.”

The Job Board, free of change until October 2023, can be found here.

BLG Director Amarjit Basi said:

“Once the data has been collected and the lack of representation evidenced, it then takes courageous leadership to act on it, and there is both the ethical and the business case to do so. You can best act on it by creating a compelling narrative and vocabulary that works for your organisation. It’s vital, however, that actions must follow words and new processes.”

*The BLG uses ‘black’ as an inclusive definition for people from ethnically diverse backgrounds who share a lived experience of the effects of racism.’