Apply now!Howard Kennedy Diversity
Diversity and inclusion are essential to the success of Howard Kennedy. Find out more about the firm's diversity initatives here!
Howard Kennedy believes that a diverse workforce and inclusive culture drives innovation, enabling the firm to deliver the best experience to its people and clients. The firm's value of "Be Yourself" means that its people are encouraged to drive change.
Howard Kennedy ensures that inclusion is part of real-life at the firm by treating everyone fairly and equally from its recruitment processes to career development, progression, recognition, and reward.
The firm is working to equip its people with the tools they need to live the firm's values and be the best they can be. Some of Howard Kennedy's initiatives include:
- A dedicated Inclusion Committee that champions inclusive behaviours and culture across the firm. The committee delivers education and awareness raising campaigns throughout the year with a focus on LGBTQ+, race and ethnicity, women, and disability.
- Trained Allies Champions who help to embed a speaking up culture across the firm.
- A reverse mentoring programme that brings together colleagues with different levels of experience and helps them to understand different perspectives.
- A broad learning curriculum that includes respect at work and unconscious bias training.
- A performance system that encourages regular 360-degree feedback and career conversations.
- Values Awards, where, through nomination, the firm publicly recognises individuals who live the values in the firm.
Howard Kennedy also continues to introduce a range of policies and processes to support its people and give them the flexibility they need to balance their work and home life. These include an agile working approach, leave for fertility treatment, pregnancy loss, and dependant care, parental coaching, a wellbeing hub, and many others.
Howard Kennedy is a member of the Business Disability Forum. This membership provides the firm with access to toolkits and expert advice on how to make the firm a better place to work. Howard Kennedy is committed to filling any gaps and making changes where necessary. The firm uses Business Disability Forum resources to gain an understanding of how to attract more diverse people and hold itself accountable for continuing to do so.
Howard Kennedy is a signatory of the Race Fairness Commitment: a pledge to strive for racial equality within the legal sector by adopting a data-driven approach to ensure fair and inclusive recruitment, development, career progression, and pay practices.
Howard Kennedy has introduced pronouns in email signatures as gender is not always obvious. Those that use pronouns in their signatures remove the guess work and communicate to the recipient that they too can be themselves, one of the firm's core values.
Howard Kennedy partners with Rare Recruitment to contextualise application data and level the playing field for candidates from less advantaged socio-economic backgrounds. Additionally, all of Howard Kennedy's applications are blind screened, with all personal information hidden and marked solely on the merit of answers to the essay style questions asked. To minimise bias, Howard Kennedy also ensures that interviewers are only provided with the candidate's name prior to the interview.
In order to broaden access to the profession and ensure that it is reaching top talent, Howard Kennedy's recruitment process is focussed on an individual's potential, not their experience. The firm has removed minimum grade requirements at both undergraduate and A-Level stage, and has no requirement to have previously undertaken any work experience. Howard Kennedy does not have a target university list, students from all institutions are welcome to apply.
Advertisement
Advertisement
