What is inclusive recruitment?
Inclusive recruitment describes all the measures, processes and practices that are put in place to attract, assess and appoint candidates to vacant job roles in your organisation. The aim of inclusive recruitment is to maximise the diversity of successful appointments.
Inclusive recruitment needs to play a crucial role in all organisations’ inclusion and diversity strategy because it is the most effective way to increase diversity across all protected characteristics, and beyond.
When you increase diversity in this way you will also be broadening the talent you have within your workplace; this combination will have a fantastic impact on your organisation’s culture and performance and highlights the business case for inclusion and diversity.
What impact does inclusive recruitment have on your organisation?
The positive impacts of embedding a diversity and inclusion recruitment process include:
- Inclusive recruitment practices equip you to avoid discrimination under the Equality Act 2010,
- Inclusive recruitment boosts your brand reputation. We know that job candidates are increasingly looking for employers who prioritise inclusion and diversity in 2024, so if you prioritise inclusive recruitment you will increase your appeal to new talent.
- Inclusive recruitment is the key step to creating a diverse workforce, which means it plays a vital role in shaping your workplace culture.
Inclusive Employers prioritise inclusive recruitment with impact
At Inclusive Employers, our expert team have deep knowledge and practice of implementing inclusive recruitment practices with organisations of all sizes and sectors.
What sets us apart is our focus on working with the needs of your specific organisation. We prioritise action-focused, sustainable change which means understanding your organisation’s goals, challenges and current recruitment processes in order to develop an inclusive recruitment strategy that will have long-term impact on your workplace culture
What does our approach to inclusive recruitment look like?
The priority for all our inclusive recruitment work is to make sure we work with you to create a recruitment process that is as inclusive as possible.
The first step to achieve this understanding your organisation’s current recruitment practices, so our recommendation is always to conduct an inclusive recruitment audit.
Conducting a thorough inclusive recruitment audit
Our work will be tailored to your organisation’s needs, but as a guide an inclusive recruitment audit will involve the following steps:
- Identify trends and barriers to inclusion by looking at your recruitment data.
- Understand your current recruitment policies and practices with an inclusion lens.
- Use focus groups and surveys to conduct a recruitment culture assessment.
Conducting an audit is a valuable part of the journey towards inclusive recruitment. The steps above involve in-depth analysis with experienced facilitators, using a proven audit framework. For our robust approach to have maximum impact we recommend a combination of a document audit (Steps 1 and 2) and colleague feedback (Step 3).
The information we gather in Steps 1 and 2 provides the foundation for the work we do in Step 3. Our focus groups will be with key stakeholders impacted by inclusive recruitment; hiring managers and recently hired employees.
We will use the findings from the inclusive recruitment audit to create a comprehensive report that highlights successes in your current inclusive recruitment approach, potential bias risks, gaps and opportunities. Importantly, we will also share our recommendations for practical, actionable best practice to optimise inclusive recruitment for your organisation.
Delivering impactful inclusive recruitment training
Having conducted the inclusive recruitment audit, we now have the in-depth understanding (of your organisation) to create and deliver inclusive recruitment training that will have maximum impact for your organisation’s objectives.
We will create workshops for your hiring managers and resourcing teams that provide them with practical strategies and best practice that will lead to increased diversity, attracting a wider talent pool and mitigating bias.
Evaluate the impact of your new inclusive recruitment approach
We recommend incorporating evaluation into your inclusive recruitment review so that you have the opportunity to understand the impact of your new approach.
We will evaluate the effectiveness and impact of the new approach through surveys, feedback sessions and performance assessments, and would recommend doing this at 6 and 12 months. Where possible, will aim to identify the return on investment of the new programme.
Additional support for inclusive recruitment
To strengthen the impact of our inclusive recruitment work together, we can provide this additional support:
- Design and develop an Inclusive Recruitment Toolkit that your hiring managers can use align with best practice, inclusive language and advice to avoid bias traps.
- Review your internal and external recruitment websites to evaluate accessibility and inclusion messages. We will create a best practice report and can host a call with your communications team and website managers.
- Additional consultancy may be needed to address specific requirements that come up in the inclusive recruitment audit. Examples of this could be re-writing policies and/or job descriptions and adverts.
Bring inclusive recruitment to your organisation
Our inclusive recruitment experts come with passion, integrity and in-depth knowledge of inclusion and diversity.
Our detailed and considered approach, outlined above, is focused on equipping and embedding you with an approach to inclusive recruitment that will bring positive, sustainable change to your I&D objectives and organisational culture.
We would love to hear from you. You can take the first step to improving inclusive recruitment by getting in touch using the form below: