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Case Study: Equal Pay - Transport of London
Transport for London (TfL) has recognised that the Gender Pay Gap can be perpetuated when current salaries and benefits are taken into account when making job offers to new joiners.
As part of its Gender Pay Gap Review the company proposes to address this by focussing decisions on pay for new entrants on the value of the role rather than the existing salary offered by their employer. Requests for salary would be removed from application forms and from reference requests.
A project was incorporated into the 2006 Equal Pay Review to establish the feasibility of this and to develop a set of guidelines for recruitment specialists and managers about how to determine fair salaries for the role.
Clear guidance is being provided to managers and recruitment specialists regarding the process of making fair and robust decisions about the starting salaries for new entrants. Discussions between the Employing Manager, Reward and Recruitment Teams are expected to identify and resolve any potential salary issues. This includes consideration of the salaries of employees doing similar roles across TfL as well as the external market rate of pay for the role that the individual is being recruited into. The aim is to ensure that new recruits to TfL are paid according to their contribution to their role and not for any historical reasons.
At present, discussion regarding salaries is likely to commence after the short listing stage. The application route for the role dictates at what stage the salaries of applicants are known. For example, senior roles requires application by CV only and do not request salary. Up to Manager level, however, the supporting application form requests existing salaries, although not all applicants choose to complete this section.
Work is continuing to build and develop the partnership between the Employing Manager, Reward and Recruitment Teams and work in 2007/08 will continue to assess whether salaries should be removed completely from all job applications
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