Rabobank's HR policy celebrates differences in people. Diversity encourages enterprise and brings out people's true qualities. In addition, diversity within teams promotes quality and creativity.
Attraction and development of various talents
Society is constantly changing, and so is the labour market, which is currently becoming tighter. In order to be able to recruit enough high quality staff, we need to take active steps to appeal to all segments of the labour market: young and old, male and female, and all ethnicities. Every year, Rabobank offers work placements to a large number of students. The Work Placement Desk allocates placements at Rabobank Nederland, where increasing the number of students from ethnic minorities was again a priority in 2007. The target was to fill 30% of placements with students from this target group. 19% has been achieved (2006: 21%).
Women in senior positions
The Rabobank Group aims to appoint women to senior positions. Various initiatives exist to promote this. In 2007 women made up 7% of the executive management of our organisation. The target is for this figure to increase to 10% in 2008.
Rabobank aims for greater cultural diversity
Rabobank intends to achieve its ambition of greater cultural diversity within its workforce by means of small-scale awareness-raising activities that serve as in-house examples. As part of this, in 2007 it took the first steps towards setting up a professionalisation programme for HR advisers and recruiters, and it experimented with an active recruitment policy for ethnic minorities. This policy will be evaluated to see how successful it is and how we should follow it up.
Read the case study 'Does new policy offer opportunities for diversity?'
Position paper on cultural diversity (pdf)