This week I had the pleasure of attending (and photographing) a panel discussion on inclusive recruitment in digital, held by my excellent associates at William Joseph. It was a great panel:

• Yasmin Georgiou, of William Joseph, chairing
• Rania Nur, also of William Joseph
• Tessa Cooper, of Collaborative Future
• Elvi Morrison, of The Maudsley Charity

There’ll be a full write-up on the William Joseph blog, and you can see all sorts of bite-sized insights (bitesights?) on the live Twitter stream. An early point from Tessa, which prompted some really thoughtful discussion, was this gem: Nepotism isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Their point was that recruiting from within your networks will only squash inclusivity if your networks themselves aren’t inclusive, welcoming and diverse. Worth thinking about.

This was in contrast with the normal, unchallenged assumption held in many of our organisations that the only fair way to recruit is to put everyone through a precisely standardised system. Which, of course,

• ignores the fact that people aren’t standard;
• and rather depends on the system itself—the people, process, tech, admin and everything else—being maximally well-designed, inclusive, usable, accessible and free from error. Hands up if you have ever encountered a recruitment system that was this?

And, if you’ll allow me a quick rant about a personal bugbear: errors in such systems are not just an unfortunate implementation detail. They are a fundamental issue of equity—because a system not working properly, or clearly, just enhances the sense of powerlessness in the user. Not only can they not get the thing done; their experience isn’t important enough for someone to pay attention. This in contrast with the organisation’s experience, whose time is worth far too much to bother fixing it. In other words, designing for equity and designing (and implementing) for quality cannot be separated. One is inherent in the other.

One attendee shared the fact that he himself is currently looking for work, and that the recruitment processes he’s going through are a massive amount of work in themselves. The quantities of free labour they involve are, of course, disproportionately difficult to cope with for those who experience other disadvantages or demands on their time.

Some time back, I applied for two different posts at a fairly prestigious organisation, was shortlisted for both, and walked away at that stage because the experience of their recruitment and HR systems was such a bad omen. This was somewhere that explicitly trumpets its pro-social values, and commands a lot of public respect solely on the basis of those values.

These two issues together—disproportionate demands of free labour, and lack of attention to user experience—most certainly put off some of the people you might most benefit from meeting. And the people put off, or less able to jump through the hoops and work out the latent assumptions and unwritten implications, will not be evenly distributed across society. Of course they won’t.

But despite bad outcomes, and unreasonable demands on people’s time (both applicant and recruiter), the same old practices persist. It brings to mind the excellent Lou Downe on service design:

We have set expectations when we enter into these interactions that are borne of years of experience of watching others complete the same tasks. These learned behaviours are often so strong that we will go along with a bad way of doing something, purely because we presume that ‘this is just the way that it is’.

Lou Downe, Good Services: How to Design Services that Work

Anyway. Is there good news? Certainly, events like this—and the existence of initiatives like Collaborative Future and RadHR—are reasons to be cheerful.

In terms of whether the wider world is interested in moving away from monolithic, inaccessible recruitment approaches, it’s harder to tell. In our little room, filled with a mixture of design, digital and charity types (if only there’d been a synthesiser contingent in there too, I’d have been in heaven), there was plenty of both existing good practice and appetite for change.

I’d like to think that was a microcosm, or perhaps a focusing lens, for ideas that are shared by more people out there than we assume. And the more we start actively calling out the status quo, the more people might feel empowered to make meaningful changes.

Recruiting managers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but a huge amount of what’s already making your week tedious and your colleagues homogeneous .