Researching LGBT Friendly Employers

Researching employers is an important part of your job search. How can you tell if an organisation is going to support their LGBT staff? Although discrimination at work on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity is illegal there are undoubtedly some employers who are better than others in providing LGBT friendly working environments.

A good place to start is the company literature, webpage and job adverts. Does the organisation have an equal opportunities policy or an equality and diversity officer? Are there support groups for LGBT employees? It may also be useful to get an idea of the work culture from current employees where possible.

For lesbian, gay & bisexual job seekers there are a few resources that may help in identifying employers to investigate further. Stonewall produce a list of Diversity Champions which are employers who are committed to creating gayfriendly workplaces. The Starting Out: Lesbian, Gay & Bisexual Recruitment Guide is available in the Careers and Employability Centre and we have several copies for students to take away. Additionally Stonewall's list of their top 100 employers can be downloaded from their website.
Additionally lesbians and bisexual women may need to look at any LGB workplace support groups to ensure that they are representative as a study has indicated that lesbians can sometimes feel discouraged at the way these groups were dominated by gay men leading to less involvement by women.
The University of Westminster careers service website has a useful list of LGB professional associations for a variety of sectors. Be sure to check out all their diversity information as it's full of useful tips and resources.

For trans job seekers finding friendly employers can be a little more complex. Press for Change have an award for equal opportunities but it isn't as well known as the Stonewall list and it is difficult to find out how employers get it. If you are applying for a job in the public sector the Gender Equality Duty requires public authorities to promote equality and eliminate unlawful sex discrimination. You can look at their gender equality scheme which should detail how they are avoiding discrimination against trans employees and customers.
Another thing to look out for is whether the employer has a policy on transitioning at work as well as looking at their harrassment, and equal opportunities policies to see whether they are trans inclusive. Again I would recommend the University of Westminster for further reading as their web resources are great.

If you have any questions about researching employers, disclosure or any other job or career related issues do come and see us in the Careers and Employability Centre. Appointments with Careers Advisers are available every day.

Online Jobsearching Part Two: How to look

The first post about looking for jobs online covered where to look for vacancies, this post will cover how to use these sites efficiently.

Many vacancy websites have an option to email you when there are new vacancies fitting your criteria. This can be handy but there is an easier and more orderly method. RSS stands for really simple syndication and is a way to get updates from websites sent strait to a chosen location. A nifty explanation of RSS can be found here. To see if a website has it look out for the orange logo. If you’re reading this on The Message you’ll see the logo on the left under the title.

Before you start subscribing to RSS feeds you’ll need somewhere to read them. Conveniently Sussex has provided all students with a reader in the form of SPLASH. On your SPLASH dashboard select “Add Widget” then “RSS Feed” from the drop-down menu. A feed for the University news will then pop up. If you go to tools in that widget you will be able to edit the URL and title of the feed. Other readers include Newsgator, MyYahoo, and Google Reader.

The main graduate jobs sites all have RSS feeds and they can be tailored to your needs. With The Guardian for example you can select vacancies in a certain area, on a certain salary and even exclude agencies. This means that you’ll be less likely to need to scroll through a number of unsuitable jobs.
Sometimes you subscribe in two clicks from the vacancy site; on the RSS symbol and then on your reader type (if you use a mainstream one). Sometimes you have to go to your reader, set up a feed as detailed above, and copy and paste the URL of the RSS which pops up after you click the symbol. All in all it is a fairly quick process that can yield a huge number of results.

Another useful tool is Twitter. Twitter gives 140 character updates on what people are doing and is also being used by organisations to give news updates. A group that is using Twitter particularly well is Project Brighton which tweets all the local digital jobs at http://twitter.com/brightonjobs. What is brilliant about this is that they have set up RSS feeds from a variety of other sources and tweet the results, saving everyone else a lot of time. Also on Twitter are Wired Sussex Jobs, Publishing Jobs, and SEO jobs and there are bound to be more in different sectors.

You’ll also want to follow CDEC of course as we’ll update on advice and news as well as part time jobs. You can follow many people and organisations on Twitter and, if you really want everything in one place, you can RSS their tweets. Crazy but useful.

Now you have dozens of RSS feeds and Tweets making their way to your reader but a heed this warning. It may be tempting to sit back and wait for the feeds but you still need to actively search as well. You may miss out if you rely solely on notifications. So make sure that your feeds are covering all the sites and all the job categories you would normally seek out, and then spend the time saved looking in more obscure, less mainstream locations.

Next Time: Online applications

Online Jobsearching Part One: Where to look

When looking for a job, as with looking for anything, it is always a good idea to search in a range of places. Some vacancies may only be advertised in one or two locations so it is important to keep your net wide.

Good starting places are the general graduate job websites like Get Hobsons
Prospects and Milkround. These are designed specifically for the graduate job seeker so the types of jobs are likely to be of an appropriate level. Also excellent are the vacancy pages at the Guardian.

CDEC’s own jobs database is also effective. Because our employment team select which jobs to add, the focus is on career areas that Sussex Graduates are interested in and qualified to do. Plus we look in a variety of locations for the juciest jobs.

But if the job you are looking for is more unusual, specialized or rare you’ll want to explore sector specific websites. CDEC’s Careers Information pages link to such sites. Some of the best are www.gradcracker.com/ for Engineering vacancies, www.lgjobs.com/ for local government, and www.environmentjob.co.uk/ for environment.
It is also worth thinking creatively. If you are interested in working in the press office for a charity, a suitable job could appear on the charity’s own website, a vacancy website for charities and not-for-profit, or a site for PR and media vacancies.

Part two of Online Jobsearching will cover how to use these sites effectively, and part three will deal with making online applications.