Jo Major - Inclusive Recruitment

What is diversity in recruitment?

Diversity in recruitment is a training and advice consultancy that I run, and it helps recruiters understand the basics of equality, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and really get to grips with how that relates to their role as a recruiter, whether that be working within an internal team or agency side. So I'm all about building confidence, building skills, building understanding, and giving that essential education so recruiters can centre their work around inclusivity, accessibility, and equity.

What is inclusive recruitment?

So inclusive recruitment is the process of making sure that your recruitment services, your recruitment processes, the way that you interact with your candidates enables everybody to bring their whole selves into the process. It's about breaking down the barriers that some candidates face when entering into recruitment processes, and it's around making sure that actually we're making hiring decisions based on somebody's capabilities, skills, and experience, and suitability for the role, rather than leaning on things like unconscious bias and hiring habits that are developed through things like bias. So it's making sure that everybody has an equal access to our recruitment processes and our decision making is fair.

What is accessible recruitment?

Accessible recruitment is about recognising that some candidates will face physical barriers that will make them deselect themselves from processes IE choose not to go forward for positions. It's about recognising that not everybody accesses recruitment processes in a physical or mental way to the same way that you do or your majority candidates. And it's essentially around figuring out ways in which you can break down the barriers that some candidates face, whether that be something like an application form that for some people who are neurodivergent, an application form is an immediate deselection point. It could be that you have scheduled an interviews without a lot of notice, so immediately you've got the majority of your unpaid carers starting to deselect themselves. So, for example, women who may have more responsibilities at home for kids or for adults that they may support. If you've not given them enough time to prepare for interview, it might be that, again, they're kind of deselecting themselves from the process. It might be more practical things like your website is inaccessible because of disability or because somebody's neurodivergent. So they can't do their due diligence, they can't do their research, they can't access information about your organisation before they start to make a decision as to whether or not to apply for the role. So something simple like an accessibility toolbar or a rebuild or development of your website to make it more accessible can reduce some of those barriers. But ultimately, it's about really understanding that there is many, many physical barriers that we might not always see in a recruitment process that may result in candidates not applying or taking themselves out of process and doing the work to understand how do we actually minimise them. And working with experts, working with disability experts, working with neurodivergent experts, working with tech experts to really, really understand how you can make everything that you do accessible to everybody.

How can we ensure our recruitment process is inclusive?

What are the benefits of inclusive recruitment?