Equal Employment Opportunities

Medium-term plan

Delivering on our stated outcomes to improve public safety and to achieve a 25% reduction in re-offending by 2017 requires us to ensure our staff can relate to and represent the communities we work with. As a consequence, we look to ensure our recruitment practices, including advertising, are targeted specifically at encouraging and selecting a gender-balanced and diverse workforce. In the medium term we will continue to monitor and report on our staffing profile and assess our selection practice in line with any significant changes to our offender population.

Leadership development is also critical to our future success and diversity in our leadership pool of talent is important. In future we will look for opportunities to target individual development for women, Mäori, and Pacific Peoples into senior positions.

For all our staff, Corrections offers significant career pathways and development opportunities, and our profile for women in particular at senior and middle management levels continues to track very well. Through our leadership and talent management programmes we are continually looking at ways in which we can expose our top talent to a wide variety of leadership models and development opportunities within the department, the Justice Sector and wider public sector.

Short-term plan

A refresh of our recruitment, learning and career pathways for our key frontline roles as part of the Frontline Futures project is a key focus for the next 12 months. All aspects of our HR processes and systems as they relate to attraction, development and retention for these frontline roles are being reviewed. Changes we are making are being well tested against a range of criteria, including with our cultural advisers and frontline managers and staff to ensure they meet and reflect our own needs, as well as those of the offenders and communities we serve.

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