Inclusive recruitment: attract, recruit, retain

Start with the foundations

Most organisations want to recruit more diversely, but keep running the same process and expecting different results. Before you touch a job advert, it is worth asking a harder question: what kind of organisation are you recruiting people into? If the culture is not yet inclusive, diverse hires will arrive, sense it, and start looking for the door. Inclusive recruitment and building a culture of belonging are not separate programmes — they are the same commitment, seen from different angles.

The other foundational shift is moving from equality to equity. Treating every candidate identically sounds fair, but it ignores the fact that people arrive at your hiring process from very different starting points. Equity means giving people what they need to compete on fair terms. Once you have built that in, equality of opportunity — the thing most organisations say they already have — becomes a reality rather than a slogan.

Attract: widen who sees the door

Attraction is where bias does its quietest, most effective work. Consider:

• Job descriptions. Every "essential" criterion that is not truly essential shrinks your talent pool. Coded language — words like "aggressive", "dominant" or "ninja" — signals who the role is really for. Audit your language before you post.
• Where you advertise. Posting only where you have always posted reaches only who you have always reached. Partner with specialist networks, community organisations and universities that connect to under-represented talent.
• Your employer brand. Does your careers page reflect the full range of people who work for you — or just one version of success? Candidates from under-represented groups are watching to see whether anyone like them is already there.
• Homophily. There is a well-documented tendency to recruit in your own likeness — to be drawn to candidates who remind you of yourself or of previous successful hires. Naming it is the first step to interrupting it.

Recruit: make the process genuinely fair

A fair process does not feel fair by accident. It is designed that way, deliberately and consistently:

• Anonymise where you can. Removing names, addresses and graduation years from application reviews reduces the snap judgements that follow candidates through the rest of the process.
• Structure your interviews. Ask every candidate the same questions, in the same order, and score responses against agreed criteria before comparing candidates. Unstructured interviews are essentially a measure of how comfortable someone makes you feel — which is a measure of similarity, not capability.
• Diversify your panels. A panel that looks the same every time will weight the same things every time. Different perspectives on a panel catch different things — including different strengths in candidates.
• Offer adjustments proactively. Ask every candidate what they need to perform at their best, rather than waiting for people to identify themselves as requiring accommodation. The question itself signals that you mean it.

Retain: keep the promise you made

Retention is the acid test of whether your recruitment was genuinely inclusive or a numbers exercise. If you attract and hire diverse talent but people leave within a year or two, the recruitment process made a promise the organisation did not keep.

The question to ask is not just "why did they leave?" but "what did they experience once they arrived?" Onboarding, who gets the interesting work, who gets sponsored, who gets heard in meetings, who has a manager who invests in them — these are the things that either build or erode the sense of belonging that keeps people. Inclusive recruitment does not end at the offer letter. It ends when someone feels — genuinely — that they belong here and can grow here.

This is what #PositivePeopleExperiences means in practice: every touchpoint in the employee journey, from first application to ten years in, either reinforces belonging or quietly chips away at it.

Measure and keep improving

You cannot improve what you do not look at. Track the full funnel: who applied, who was shortlisted, who was interviewed, who was appointed — and cross-reference by characteristic. Gaps in the funnel tell you where the barriers are. Act on what the data shows, not on what you hope is happening.

Take it further

Inclusive recruitment sits at the intersection of several things I work on. Explore the keynote Inclusive Recruitment, read the connected guides on equity, not equality and inclusive leadership, or hear these ideas discussed openly on the Inclusion Bites podcast. And if you want to explore what fair hiring looks like across your organisation, I am happy to talk — the approach is always grounded in Smile · Engage · Educate: honest, human and practical.