Recruiting involves actively seeking and selecting qualified candidates to fill job positions, while interviewing is the process of assessing and evaluating candidates for their suitability.
Recruiting encompasses steps such as identifying staffing needs, creating job descriptions, and posting advertisements. Interviewing involves various types of interviews, questioning, and assessing candidates' skills and fit for the organisation.
Both processes are essential for building a talented workforce and should be conducted professionally and ethically in compliance with relevant regulations.
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The language you use in job advertisements influences who applies and who self-selects out of the process. Phrases that subtly favour particular backgrounds, experiences, or characteristics can discourage strong candidates from ever submitting an application. Reviewing adverts for biased language, focusing on essential skills and experience rather than vague concepts like "cultural fit", and being explicit about flexibility and accommodations widens your candidate pool significantly. The talent you don't reach is the talent you don't hire.
Unstructured interviews, where each candidate is asked different questions in a different order, are particularly vulnerable to bias because there's no consistent basis for comparison. Structured interviews use the same core questions for every candidate, scored against defined criteria. This doesn't make interviews robotic; it gives you a fairer way to evaluate genuine capability. Combine structured questions with diverse interview panels where possible, and you significantly reduce the chance that hiring decisions are shaped by gut feel or surface impressions.
If you keep recruiting through the same channels, you'll keep reaching the same pool of candidates. Expanding your sourcing to include diverse professional networks, universities, community organisations, and specialist job boards opens your business up to talent it would otherwise miss. Working with recruiters who specialise in diverse hiring can also help, particularly when you're trying to break a long-standing pattern in who applies to your roles.
Inclusive recruitment isn't only about who you interview, it's about how you interview them. Be prepared to make reasonable adjustments for candidates with disabilities, including accessible interview locations, additional time, alternative assessment formats, and adjusted communication styles. These adjustments shouldn't be an afterthought triggered by a disclosure; they should be offered as standard, signalling that your business takes accessibility seriously from the very first contact.
Even the best recruitment policies fail if the people doing the interviewing haven't been trained to apply them. Unconscious bias training, structured interview techniques, and clear guidance on what is and isn't appropriate to ask all need to be embedded with the managers actually conducting interviews. Without that investment, fairness becomes a matter of individual judgement, which is exactly the inconsistency a strong recruitment process is supposed to remove.
Learn more about inclusive recruiting and interviewing by reading our blog article Understanding EDI: Workplace Diversity and Inclusion Explained.
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