Inclusive recruitment is essential for building diverse, high-performing teams and ensuring fair access to opportunities.
Key benefits of inclusive recruitment include:
There is a vast body of research showing how unconscious biases can result in unfair and biased hiring processes. Experts have recommended a number of strategies to reduce this in the recruitment process.
However, most of these strategies focus on educating the hirer on ways to counter bias during recruitment. Bias can be ingrained into the process well before this point though, so it’s important to start at the very beginning of the process, when you design your jobs and create your job descriptions.
Recruiters and hiring managers often default to technical skills as the primary screening criteria when evaluating candidates. While these skills provide a clear and measurable way to filter candidates, this approach can introduce bias into hiring and lead to missed opportunities for talented individuals.
A technical skills approach disproportionately favours men over women. LinkedIn research shows that men list, on average, three more skills on their profiles than women.
In contrast, women are more likely to showcase soft skills such as communication and collaboration. Given that LinkedIn profiles with five or more skills receive 31 times more outreach from recruiters, it’s unsurprising that men are more frequently shortlisted.
Women also tend to be drawn to job adverts that emphasise soft skills, such as teamwork and leadership, while many technical roles focus primarily on hard skills. Despite this, LinkedIn found that 92% of hiring managers view soft skills as more important than technical skills.
When defining high performance, managers often highlight qualities like communication and adaptability, yet these are not always prioritised in job descriptions or recruitment decisions.
To create a truly inclusive hiring process, organisations must balance technical and soft skills, ensuring talented candidates from all backgrounds have equal access to opportunities.
One area where we see a considerable level of hidden hiring bias is level of education, or to coin the phrase created by social psychologists, ‘Educationism”.
Research has found clear evidence that educated people are implicitly biased against the less educated. Educationism can be both a conscious and unconscious factor in a recruitment process.
Managers often list a specific level of education or qualification requirements in their job descriptions, when the reality is that it’s not required.
It’s important to realise that qualifications are not always a good indicator of candidate ability. Laszlo Bock, Google’s senior vice president for people operations, finds that GPA scores (average grades) ‘are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless’.
“After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different.”
There are roles where qualifications are essential. But there is a strong argument for only using degrees as a requirement for a specialised position or for specialist subjects where in-depth knowledge is required that can only be gained through study or extensive training.
33.8% of people in the UK and 37.5% in the US have a degree. So, if you are specifying the requirement for a degree and screening on this in your recruitment process, then you are actively excluding more than 60% of the population.
This includes individuals who did not have the opportunity to go to university, or who chose not to, but who might have worked their way up the career ladder and be perfect for the role.
By specifying degree requirements where none is necessary, you are adding bias into the process and blocking prospective high-potential candidates.
Complexity is a major barrier to inclusive hiring. Many job descriptions are simply long lists of tasks, making it difficult for candidates to see how their skills and experience align with the role.
A study found that job descriptions filled with jargon and complex wording discourage applications, particularly among early-career professionals. For example, BITC research found that 66% of young applicants didn’t understand job ads full of jargon and didn’t feel they should apply as a result.
A Canva study found that jargon appeared in 36% of job ads, with ‘team player’, ‘dynamic’. and ‘self-starter’ the most common.
Research shows that jargon-filled job descriptions can negatively impact candidates' confidence, particularly younger applicants. Many feel they “don’t deserve” the role or are “not good enough” to apply, simply because they feel intimidated or unsure about what the job entails.
For neurodiverse candidates, overly complex and wordy descriptions can be particularly challenging, creating unnecessary barriers in the hiring process.
Studies also show that women are less likely to apply for a role unless they meet 80-100% of the criteria, while men are more likely to apply even if they meet fewer requirements.
Best practice for inclusive recruitment begins with job design. The way jobs are designed plays a crucial role in attracting a diverse range of candidates.
Job design influences who finds a role appealing, how candidates are screened, and ultimately, who is interviewed and hired. Without careful consideration, unconscious bias can creep into the recruitment process, limiting access to opportunities for underrepresented talent.
Inclusive job design ensures that roles are structured to appeal to the broadest and most diverse talent pool possible. This means consciously shaping job descriptions, responsibilities, and requirements in a way that removes unnecessary barriers.
By focusing on inclusivity, businesses can eliminate bias, expand their candidate reach, and create a fairer hiring process, ensuring that talented individuals are not discouraged or excluded from applying.
The key is to proactively challenge and eliminate the biases around the way jobs are designed and promoted wherever bias may occur. This may be within business, during job profiling, job description creation, job advert creation, or during screening and interviewing.
How a role’s responsibilities are defined - what the role holder is expected to do and take ownership of - significantly affects both its appeal to candidates and the inclusivity of the job description.
Simplifying job descriptions, focusing on clear, essential responsibilities, and avoiding excessive requirements removes barriers and encourages a more diverse range of candidates to apply.
To make job descriptions more inclusive, focus on defining the key responsibilities in clear, simple terms. Best practice in job design shows that every role can be summarised in 4-5 clear bullet points.
Instead of overwhelming candidates with long lists of tasks, break the role into 4-5 core segments that summarise the key areas of responsibility. These might include:
Each responsibility should be concise and distinct, ideally written in a single sentence of no more than 17 words. It should also describe responsibilities clearly. Long, complex sentences reduce engagement and make information harder to absorb.
One of the most critical aspects of writing an inclusive job description is clearly defining what is truly required for success in the role. Job requirements shape who applies, who progresses through the hiring process, and how employees develop within an organisation.
These can include soft skills, technical skills, knowledge, experience, and qualifications—but not all requirements are equally essential.
Flexible and hybrid working are an important consideration for job seekers so it’s important to consider flexible and/or hybrid working when designing roles.
71% of workers view some kind of flexible working pattern as essential when considering a role, so a failure to offer this will deter candidates.
Make sure that the flexible working options available for the role are fully explained in the job description. If it is decided that a role is not suitable for some options, document the reasons why to ensure that they can be justified.
Every day, hundreds of thousands of job descriptions are posted online, yet research shows that most people spend less than six seconds reviewing each one.
Usability expert Jakob Nielsen found that users read only about 20% of the text on a page, they scan rather than read.
This means that if a job description is too long or poorly structured, many potential candidates will lose interest. To attract and engage talent, job descriptions must be clear, concise, and easy to digest.
Many organisations struggle with inclusive recruitment because there is often no clear, standardised process for job design. Even when a process exists, it is frequently inconsistent across different departments.
Without a clear framework, it is difficult to be naturally inclusive in job design. Everyone has unconscious biases and personal preferences, which can influence hiring decisions.
To drive meaningful change, organisations must create structured processes and guidance for anyone involved in job design and job description writing.
Governance should be in place to ensure that inclusive job design principles are consistently followed across the business. This is the only way to achieve lasting, systemic change in recruitment and hiring practices.
The interview process is one of the most vulnerable stages for unconscious bias to influence hiring decisions. If not managed carefully, biases can shape how interviews are conducted and ultimately impact who gets hired.
One of the most common forms of bias is the ‘halo and horns’ effect. This occurs when an interviewer allows one strong or weak impression to overshadow everything else. For example, if a candidate previously worked for a prestigious company, the interviewer may overlook weaker responses, assuming they must have the required knowledge.
Likewise, a single negative detail can unfairly influence perceptions, leading to missed opportunities for strong candidates. Another common bias is affinity bias, where interviewers unconsciously favour candidates who remind them of themselves, rather than objectively evaluating suitability for the role.
Structured interviews for inclusive hiring
So how can organisations minimise bias in interviews? Bias awareness training can help, but it is not enough on its own, thanks to unconscious biases. Instead, structured interviews have been proven to be far more effective at ensuring fair decision-making.
A structured interview involves:
By ensuring interviewers focus only on the most essential job criteria, structured interviews reduce the risk of bias creeping into hiring decisions.
Inclusive recruitment is not just about tweaking job adverts or training hiring managers, it requires a systemic shift in how organisations design roles, structure job descriptions, and conduct hiring processes.
By embedding inclusive practices from the very start, during job design, businesses can eliminate barriers, attract a more diverse talent pool, and create fairer hiring processes.
A truly inclusive recruitment strategy demands continuous improvement. Organisations must challenge outdated requirements, reduce unconscious bias, and ensure that recruitment practices align with modern, skills-based hiring approaches.
When implemented effectively, inclusive recruitment drives innovation, strengthens company culture, and creates opportunities for a wider range of talented individuals.
RoleMapper is an AI-powered job description management solution, built with inclusion at the core.
Our proprietary AI and advanced Natural Language Processing allow our customers to transform and digitise their job data into best-in-class, inclusive job descriptions and a robust, future-focused job architecture and job titling framework.
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RoleMapper's AI-driven, modular solution will ease the pain of creating, managing and updating your job architecture and job catalogue.
Book a demo to learn more about how RoleMapper can help clean up & harmonise your job architecture & job descriptions.
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