Inclusive Recruitment
You can't build an inclusive culture if you keep hiring the same people.
About this keynote
Recruitment is the entry point for everything else. You cannot build a culture that works for everyone if the people you hire, the processes you use, and the experience you create during hiring keep reproducing the very patterns you are trying to change. Hiring is where good intentions meet the machinery — and where they so often quietly fail.
So this is a practical, unsentimental look at where bias actually lives in recruitment. Not the obvious prejudice most people already know to avoid, but the structural and behavioural patterns nobody notices until the diversity data has already compounded in the wrong direction.
What we explore
The distinctive angle is following the candidate, not the policy. We trace the full journey — the language in the advert that subtly signals who belongs, the criteria that reward people who look like the last hire, the panel dynamics where one confident voice quietly sets the verdict, the questions you’re legally required not to ask and the ones you inadvertently imply, the offer decision, and the first weeks on the job where diverse hires are so often lost. A recurring thread is the uncomfortable truth that diverse shortlists don’t, on their own, produce diverse hires; what happens to those candidates inside the process matters far more. Throughout, the candidate experience is treated as a live window into your culture — because that is exactly how a marginalised or LGBTQIA+ applicant is reading it.
Think, feel and act differently
Think differently — bias is structural and procedural, not just personal; the process hires, not the poster.
Feel differently — motivated rather than defensive, seeing better hiring as a craft you can sharpen, not an accusation.
Act differently — fix one stage of the funnel, whether that’s the advert, the scorecard, the panel or the first month.
Moving from “we mean well” to one concrete, evidence-based change in the process — that is how the session takes a room from awareness, through understanding, to action.
Who this is for
Talent acquisition teams, hiring managers, HR business partners, and leadership teams who are serious about improving their diversity data and want the recruitment-level interventions that genuinely move it. It is also valuable for organisations preparing for demographic shifts in their talent markets.