Spotlight on Ethical Recruitment

DIWA recognizes the importance of engaging critical stakeholders including recruitment agencies, who have significant roles to play in improving the lives of migrant workers.?

Our sister organization, The Fair Hiring Initiative (TFHI), has been quietly and persistently moving in the direction of ethical recruitment for over a decade.? In the past few months, there’s been a few shout-outs from colleagues and partners for this good work including in the Institute for Human Rights and Business ’s Responsible Recruitment Register and continued support from the Responsible Business Alliance , including in last week’s forum in Malaysia.??

We sat down with Camille Dela Rosa, who leads TFHI’s On the Level program to share some background on their mission, vision and operations.???

“The Fair Hiring Initiative was born out of an epiphany-- with the realization that forced labor begins not in the workplace but earlier in recruitment and it's in recruitment that when workers are very vulnerable and then they end up paying a big amount of fees to their recruiters. And so even before they arrive at the destination country or the workplace they're already in a vulnerable position…And so that was when there was that realization that there had to be a… separate set of standards for the workplace and a separate set of standards for recruitment.”

While DIWA leads the charge in labour and human rights assessments and capacity-building in the supply chain, TFHI’s mission focuses on training and certification of recruitment agencies.? DIWA supported THFI’s On the Level program by providing technical assistance in its development of the standards, capacity-building activities for its auditors and additional personnel for its audits and assessments.??

As Dela Rosa explains, the market for ethical recruitment is still nascent, a challenge for recruiters that commit to ethical practice:?

“Recruitment agencies provide a valuable service.? There are so many things that an applicant or worker needs to navigate…to find employment abroad. And it's the recruitment agency that helps the applicant or worker undertake all these steps and make sure that the applicant and worker complies with all these requirements. If employers understand that service, I believe that they should be willing to pay for recruitment fees and it should not be the worker that pays for that service.

TFHI wants a world where ethical recruitment is the norm… On the Level is really pushing to grow a list of verified or recognized agencies that have met our standards, and we want that list to be shared to more employers and for more employers to support recruitment agencies on that list.”

TFHI’s verified agencies go through an assessment process, including worker-centered audits to ensure that they operate in an ethical way.? As Dela Rosa describes, it’s “important… to build the workers' community so that workers feel they're active contributors in assessing the recruitment experience.”?

How can you learn more about TFHI?

“TFHI has a website… Our set of standards is there available for review and even downloading. We also offer courses and capability building programs for recruitment agencies and those that want to understand more about recruitment and the ethical way to implement it.”

Check out https://www.fair-hiring.org/ and stay tuned for more on recruitment systems from our Executive Director Marie Apostol in the upcoming Impact Pathways podcast with Quizrr for International Women's Day.?

#EthicalRecruitment #NoForcedLabor #MigrantWorker #Human Rights