Engagement and recruitment

Creating a more diverse workforce aids how organisations serve their local community.  There are many ways to recruit locally, such as advertising with the local job centre or researching local community organisations, centres and events to advertise job vacancies. Our research highlights, however, that one of the key issues for employers is their ability to find and reach out to diverse applicants.

One great way to boost engagement with a diverse range of candidates is to consider barriers Underrepresented groups might face in applying for a career in the digital and tech sector, such as their perceptions of the sector, and then to build actions into your attraction and recruitment strategy to reduce these barriers.

Many specialist recruiters help organisations find talent from underrepresented groups and communities. They can work to fulfil any EDI targets your organisation may have and find talented people who may previously have struggled to get ahead in the industry due to systemic barriers.

One of the main ways your organisation can attract a broader range of talented people is to follow inclusive recruitment best practices. Research by BCS and Coding Black Females has shown that ‘long, prescriptive interview processes, the language of job adverts and poor promotion of flexible options impact the diversity of applicants for IT roles’. Our research also highlights the problems of bias in job descriptions, this particularly came out in our employer engagement sessions. De-biasing your job advertisements will help you build your inclusive culture, as people within your organisation will see that your hiring practices are designed to find the best people with the right skills for the job.

Research by Wiley Edge suggests that 61% of businesses do not use deliberately neutral job descriptions.

Inclusive recruitment best practice for job adverts includes:

• Using inclusive language in your job advert;
• Focusing on the skills and competencies needed for the job being advertised - avoid making your ‘essentials’ list too long;
• Considering whether academic achievements are necessary for the role before making them a requirement;
• Avoiding jargon;
• Stating salary, or a salary range;
• Directing candidates to a named contact should they need to discuss any access requirements or request the advert in a different format;
• Consider if you can offer the job on a flexible basis, part-time, or as part of a job share – if you can, say so;
• Avoiding asking for several years’ experience in the same role, or asking for continuous employment - this discourages those with CV gaps, and for people looking to change careers and use transferable skills;
• Promoting your organisation’s EDI policies and commitments;
• Keeping roles open for the full application period and not closing them early;
• Ensuring all job adverts adhere to these best practice principles.

Now your job adverts are inclusive, it’s time to think about the other stages of the recruitment process.

Ensure you have:

• Diverse and equitable hiring panels;
• Standardised competency-based interview questions with a focus on asking about skills;
• Communicated procedures for offering and requesting reasonable adjustments;
• Anonymous CV reviews, to avoid discrimination and make the hiring process more efficient. Remove irrelevant information (including names of educational institutions) from applications when reviewing candidates;
• Run inclusive recruitment workshops or training for all hiring managers.

You may wish to consider using positive action in recruitment when a particular demographic is underrepresented in your organisation’s workforce. Positive action is about taking specific steps to improve equality in the workplace that either do, or may, advantage a particular underrepresented group. There are numerous different ways to take actions that would be ‘positive action’, but it is important to be able to show that those steps are applicable for your organisation in particular. This resource contains some useful information on positive action, including its purpose and when it can be applied, and examples of how to use it. Additionally, you must know the difference between positive action, which is legal, and positive discrimination, which is not legal - read more here.