If you cannot defend your hiring decisions, you do not have merit-based hiring practices.

A dark cloud of grief hangs over Black Britain. This is not something I wanted to be saying in a first blog post, but it is something important to acknowledge that just as different parts of a country experience different weather conditions, so do different communities. If you are not part of that community you may not be aware of the storms others are experiencing. To some the case of Professor Jason Arday may look like the story of a professor who was accused of lying being caught out, with a tragic ending. To the Black community, and those who see the part that racism played at each stage from the initial accusation to the media pile on, it is a wider signal about how harmful institutions still are to Black lives. It is a signal of how unwelcome we can still be in elite spaces.

Everyone says their people are hired on merit. Fewer can tell you how merit was measured, or point to a paper trail that proves it. Professor Jason Arday's death has forced a horrible version of this test into public view, and what it has revealed is not just about one university, or one appointment. It's about what happens when a recruitment process isn't able to survive scrutiny, such as media claims that Professor Arday was a DEI hire and a ‘diversity poster boy’ implying that he was a symbol chosen for what he represented as a Black man rather than for his skill and experience.

As media pressure built, attention turned to how Professor Arday had been appointed. When journalists asked panel members what the basis for his appointment was, none responded. The University of Cambridge has since confirmed it will be reviewing how it appoints senior academics, following the allegations made against Professor Arday.

If your appointment process is robust, you can speak with confidence, because you know the criteria exist, the evidence exists, the record of who assessed what and why exists. Whereas, if the process isn't robust, you're left improvising a defence under the worst possible conditions, in public, while someone's reputation is unravelling. Or you go quiet, and the silence does its own damage, to your reputation and to the person left carrying the impact of it.

Here's what people still get wrong. The UK doesn't have affirmative action. Nobody can legally be placed in a role purely because they're underrepresented. But positive action is legal: encouraging underrepresented candidates to apply, assessing potential and transferable skills rather than only the markers that quietly exclude people who didn't take the traditional route. Positive action is a legitimate tool, and it does not require abandoning rigour. What it requires is a process that's written down, applied consistently, and able to survive scrutiny.

A robust process protects everyone who comes through it, not just the organisation defending itself after the fact. Underrepresented candidates get hired on evidence instead of a decision nobody can later explain. Employees get to work somewhere that already knows why they're there. That's not bureaucracy. It's protection, for the organisation and for the people in it.

So, how do you make your recruitment process robust whilst working to meet your diversity targets?

If you only do two things do these

Off the bat, super important things to prioritise are having a recruitment policy that details and explains your inclusive hiring approach and expectations. This is a document you can constantly refer back to and keeps the organisation aligned on the way you do recruitment and why. The second most important thing is making sure all hiring managers have attended not only inclusive hiring training, but that they understand the different ways that discrimination and bias shows up for different demographic groups. This doesn't mean that they have to be experts, but actively growing hiring manager’s understanding of the biases that different groups experience not only improves your hiring practices, but it trickles out to the actual line management they do and their approach to performance management, reducing bias here too.

Vitally! You want the recruitment policy and the inclusive hiring training to be linked together. The training that everyone receives should reinforce the process you have written in your recruitment policy and the anti-discriminatory elements of the training should reinforce what you have written in your policy. If the training contradicts or deviates from anything you have written in your policy, and vice versa then you are instantly undermining the changes you are trying to implement, potentially confusing the participants and they are then less likely to follow through on the inclusive practices or following the policy.

What else? Oh don’t worry, I’ve got you, there are so many other great things you can do!

Scoring

Score at each step of the process. Use a matrix to score the CVs or applications, then use a matrix to score the interviews. Then you hire the person who has achieved the highest score. If anyone questions your hiring choice or calls that person a diversity hire you can actively say that ‘they scored the highest against a matrix that was applied to all candidates.’

Gather evidence

As part of your matrix have a section that requires evidence for the score that has been given. For the interview this is why it is so important to take notes that jot down what the candidate actually said so that the evidence is defensible rather than carrying a judgement. Judgements are where bias is more likely to slip in.

The Interview panel

You want a minimum of 2 people on an interview panel. You’ll notice that I’ve not said ‘diverse interview panel’ here, which is something that is often aimed for by organisations because it does help to reduce bias by having a variety of backgrounds and experiences reviewing someone. But, if you already have underrepresentation in your organisation, having an expectation that the existing under-represented employees should sit on panels means they are doing it more often, and this contributes to the minority tax they experience. Instead, you want to focus on the competence of all hiring managers in anti-discriminatory approaches. This way it doesn't matter who is on the panel, it won’t impact whether an under-represented person gets hired or not. So you ideally want three trained panellists who have read the recruitment policy, have templates to complete and take turns taking notes and asking the questions.

Prioritise Objectivity

You want to remove subjectivity as much as possible so that everyone is receiving a fair process. This includes aspects such as asking the same lead interview questions, assessing against the same criteria, following the same interview structure, having the same panellists interview candidates etc. But there is another important element, making sure the assessment criteria does not benefit a certain group, or those with more societal privilege. Ways that this can sneak in can be through requiring a certain qualification that is not essential to the role; communication style preferences that can impact neurospicy applicants. Using gender-coded language which sets up expectations of behaviour that are biased. There are loads of examples and this is why it is important to do an inclusivity scan of your job descriptions and scoring matrixes. I know this is something that people don’t feel confident doing, and I assure you the confidence will grow as the inclusive recruitment practices and training sets in. In the meantime, you can use AI to review the documents. AI has its own biases, but it can be a great second pair of eyes to check for anything you have missed or for if you aren’t certain about something.

Implement the above and it becomes easy to defend all of your hires. It avoids tokenism and reassures all under-represented employees that they are there based on their skills and experience.

*Note on terminology: You’ll notice that I used the phrase ‘underrepresented’ throughout this piece. That is because I am directly speaking about representation in organisations. Once a minorised group obtains proportionate representation within an organisation they would no longer be underrepresented and are then not a diversity target for the organisation because they achieved it. The focus then becomes maintaining diversity through how inclusive the organisation is.

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