Why Inclusive Recruitment Only Works If the Equity Work Comes First

Lots of organisations want a more diverse workforce. Far fewer are willing to do what actually creates one. The gap between declaring commitment to inclusion and delivering it is where most employer brand efforts fail — and where candidates with lived experience know exactly what they are seeing.

Jo Major is the founder of Diversity in Recruitment, with over two decades in recruitment spanning education, charity, and global organisations. She has a clear-eyed view of what inclusive recruitment actually requires.

Equity Is the Starting Point — Not Diversity Hiring

• Most organisations reach for diversity first — the optic-driven move of hiring people who look different — without building the foundation that makes retention possible.
• Jo's pyramid model starts with equity: the "doing bit" that recognises not everyone starts on a level playing field. Equity means different resources, policies, and ways of working to bring people to the same starting point.
• In recruitment, equity shows up in how a job advert is accessible (written, recorded, audio, BSL-interpreted), how interviews are scheduled (not with 12 hours' notice), and how processes account for disability, neurodivergence, and caring responsibilities.
• Inclusion and belonging sit above equity in the pyramid — they cannot be sustained without it. Hiring diverse talent into an inequitable environment accelerates attrition, not representation.

Hiring Without Internal EDI Work Is a False Promise

• Bringing underrepresented talent into a company that has not done the internal work is, at best, a short-term fix. At worst, it is a promise the organisation cannot keep.
• Candidates with lived experience of exclusion know when a culture has not changed. A wheelchair symbol on a careers page is not evidence of an accessible workplace.
• The cost of a hire who leaves because the reality did not match the promise — particularly one sourced through a headhunter — consistently exceeds the cost of doing the change management work first.
• Authentic representation in employer brand content only becomes possible once there are authentic stories to tell. The content follows the culture, not the other way around.

EDI Is a Change Management Project, Not a Campaign

• A six-week EDI initiative does not change anything. Hiring frameworks built over decades, along with the behaviours embedded in them, require a project manager, sustained resources, and time.
• The payoff is content: an organisation that has done the work has a genuine story to tell — what they used to do, what they changed, and what the measurable impact has been.
• Concrete documentation lands: five anti-racism actions taken in the last twelve months, with specifics on training, language audits, pay gap analysis, and supply chain standards. That is employer brand content that candidates trust.
• Generic passion statements — "this means a lot to us", "we're caring and inclusive" — without supporting evidence are not only ineffective, they signal that the work has not been done.

Candidates Are Reading the Evidence, Not the Statement

• Candidates from historically marginalised groups are applying pattern recognition built from lived experience. They are not persuaded by surface-level signals.
• Evidence-based communication — specific actions, case studies, mentorship programmes, pay gap data — is what builds credibility with the talent most organisations say they want to attract.
• The hiring process itself signals equity. Bias in shortlisting and selection undoes everything upstream. Structured processes that actively audit for preference and pattern are not optional extras.
• Organisations willing to document their imperfect journey — where they started, what they discovered, what they are still working on — are more credible than those claiming perfection in a policy PDF.

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