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Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) are not just buzzwords – they’re fundamental to building innovative, high-performing teams. In early careers recruitment, embedding inclusivity from the outset ensures that talent from all backgrounds has equal access to opportunities. Research consistently shows that diverse teams drive innovation, improve employee satisfaction, and enhance financial performance. Yet, unconscious bias, socio-economic disparities, and accessibility barriers continue to hinder progress.
We explore actionable strategies for making your early careers hiring process more diverse, inclusive, and effective.
The Importance of DE&I in Early Careers Recruitment
A diverse early careers pipeline lays the foundation for long-term workplace inclusion and success. DE&I matters to us as individuals. It’s good for business too. Research by McKinsey and others has found that companies that embrace diversity gain significant benefits. Their findings show that:
- Companies that are ethnically and culturally diverse are around 33% more profitable.
- Diverse companies are around 12% more productive and boost collaboration by as much as 57%.
- Diverse companies are more forward-thinking, with 19% higher innovation revenues.
To close diversity gaps, organisations must proactively refine their strategies and in our experience, clients tend to measure this in 3 key areas – Gender, Ethnicity and Social Mobility.
To elevate your Attraction campaign, there are some fundamental approaches that help broaden the talent pool and mitigate the impact of bias in recruitment.
Leveraging Digital Media for Early Careers Attraction
Reaching the right candidates requires a strategic approach to digital media selection. Understanding the available inventory and how it can be leveraged ensures more effective Attraction strategies. Organisations should consider:
- What’s digital media? Job boards, social media, or programmatic advertising.
- Expand recruitment channels – Partner with organisations such as STEM Women, and Black Girls in Tech to reach diverse talent pools beyond more mainstream media.
- Types of media inventory – Balancing your strategy of Push inventory – highly targeted activity delivered to specific audiences targeting underrepresented groups (i.e. targeted emails, paid social advertising) and Pull inventory – more passive material waiting for candidates to find through self-search (i.e. Employer profiles, Job adverts)
Engaging Underrepresented Groups
Effective engagement requires a proactive strategy. Diverse talent won’t apply unless organisations make their efforts visible and accessible. Candidates want to see themselves in the company, with values that align to that of their own. To make sure you’re standing out against your competitors, consider these approaches:
- Showcase diverse role models – Use success stories to feature genuine employees from underrepresented backgrounds, providing aspirational pathways for candidates.
- Support & Remuneration – Mentorship programmes, attractive benefits packages, financial assistance, and tailored onboarding and Learning & Development experiences help remove systemic barriers and improve retention.
Balancing Diversity with Recruitment Volume
Scaling recruitment while maintaining DE&I goals is a delicate balance. Keeping the pipeline strong, while also taking the time to provide equal opportunities in the process to attract (and hire) the best candidates. It’s all too easy to focus on the numbers and forget about the essence of inclusion and representation. But the good news is, with the right strategy, both can thrive. Here’s how Amberjack helps organisations achieve both:
- Utilise labour market analytics: identify diversity gaps in your recruitment process and make data-driven decisions about where to focus your efforts. Optimise the targeting of underrepresented groups, ensuring your recruitment process is both efficient and inclusive.
- Monitor and adjust campaign performance – Data-driven insights ensure talent acquisition teams can remain agile, pivoting mid-campaign to ensure you meet diversity targets without unintentionally excluding qualified candidates.
- Implement keep-warm strategies – Engage and retain candidates before they even start with a structured support plan to reduce drop-offs and improve candidate engagement.
- Widen Participation: Minimising unnecessary academic credentials and life-experiences and instead assessing on potential allows you to identify talent based on their abilities rather than their background or educational institution.
Ensuring diverse hiring at scale is one challenge, but how you communicate your DE&I commitment is critical. The way you position your employer brand and recruitment campaign can significantly influence the candidates you attract.
Crafting Inclusive and Impactful DE&I Recruitment Campaigns
A truly inclusive recruitment campaign isn’t about ticking boxes – it’s about building a transparent and genuine narrative that resonates with diverse candidates, ensuring they see themselves reflected in your organisation. To create meaningful engagement, consider the following:
- Use inclusive language and representation: From employer branding to job adverts and candidate communications, consider using an online tool like Textio to remove any social bias.
- Leverage authentic storytelling: Early careers candidates apply when they connect with a company’s values. Showcasing genuine employee experiences—through testimonials, visual storytelling, and live events can leave a lasting impression.
- Showcase real initiatives: Be transparent about your organisations’ diversity initiatives and projects, even if a ‘work-in-progress’, your ambition and honesty about where the culture of the business would like to be fosters accountability and builds trust with candidates and employees.
- Amplify diverse voices: Featuring testimonials and inclusive and representative imagery not only enhances authenticity but also resonates with diverse candidates who want to see themselves represented.
The impact of these efforts is tangible. Glassdoor reports that 67% of job seekers consider workplace diversity a critical factor when applying for a job. A strong employer brand not only attracts diverse talent but also strengthens long-term DE&I retention by aligning your values with those of the talent you seek to hire.
Attracting diverse talent is just the beginning— as the early careers market adapts ensuring you are constantly evaluating and measuring the impact of your DE&I strategies is key to driving long-term inclusivity.
Measuring DE&I Success in Early Careers Recruitment
Once your recruitment Attraction strategies are in place, the next step is evaluating their effectiveness. Tracking key DE&I metrics ensures that efforts translate into meaningful progress, allowing organisations to refine their approach and drive continuous improvement. Key metrics might include:
- Candidate profiles: Measuring candidate demographics goes beyond hitting a target; it’s about understanding whether your recruitment strategies are truly inclusive and widening participation in your early careers programmes.
- Retention and progression data: Monitoring employee demographics beyond Attraction can help you identify issues with, and barriers to, retaining and advancing diverse groups of employees.
- Candidate experience feedback: Surveys and focus groups are valuable tools to understand how diverse candidates experience your hiring process. This feedback helps refine and improve future recruitment strategies.
Tracking these metrics ensures that DE&I efforts are not just superficial but lead to tangible, long-term improvements.
Building Partnerships to Support DE&I Recruitment
Strategic partnerships and collaborations can expand your reach and provide resources that might not be available internally.
- Partner with diversity-focused media sources: Channels with established networks that specialise in recruiting underrepresented talent (i.e. STEM Women, Zero Gravity, Black Girls in Tech)
- Collaborate with universities and societies: Target and build University partnerships that have a strong focus, and proven track-record, on working with diverse populations (i.e. King’s College London).
- Support and sponsorship programmes: Creating and supporting partnerships that give candidates an opportunity to experience learning and open doors to opportunities they might not have previously been able to access (i.e. soft skill sessions for females in predominantly male industries like Trading)
Broadening your Attraction campaign through external partnerships allows you to reach, engage and support more underrepresented groups by ensuring that your DE&I strategy is grounded in attainable opportunities for all.
Creating an effective DE&I strategy for early careers recruitment isn’t just a “nice-to-have”—it’s a necessity. The benefits are clear, for both individuals and business. Avoid ‘Diversity Washing’ to superficially engage with underrepresented groups. Instead, build your campaign with genuine, respectful and transparent DE&I initiatives and goals at the heart and you will benefit from attracting motivated and engaged candidates. Candidates that are better-aligned to your work-culture and if you walk-the-walk once they’re onboarded, you’ll retain this talent for longer, building a diverse and talented workforce of the future.
Ready to take your DE&I recruitment strategy to the next level? Get in touch to talk about tailored solutions that’ll help you build an equitable, inclusive future.
