Susanne Fatah is a Journalist at Swedish Radio, Julia Blomberg is a Diversity and Inclusion Coordinator at Swedish Radio, and Geraldine Von Celsing is Head of Recruitment at Swedish Radio. Together, the team is working effectively to recruit staff more consciously, create credible content on air, and grow a more diverse audience.
How are they doing it? They are putting diverse voices on air with special projects and new shows. And they are bringing new diverse audiences into the newsrooms with a new recruitment strategy.
With recruitment, they are trying to highlight gaps in their teams, use language which attracts a broad range of applicants when they put job ads out, select the right kinds of people (making a conscious effort to find skills even when they don’t jump out of an applicants CV), and catch their existing biases before they have an impact.
Swedish Radio is also reaching out to potential candidates before recruiting. They are going into schools, in areas where their listening figures are lower, and offering paid-training programmes.
This is not the first diversity and inclusion strategy in the broadcast industry, but it is one of the most ambitious.
