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Background
Jo Major has a twenty-year+ career in the Recruitment Industry behind her. Her work has helped to grow businesses, schools, charities, and enterprises and has shaped the careers of some outstanding humans.
Jo has developed strategic D&I, Social Mobility & C.S.R. programmes that build and improve recruitment agency culture, engage employees, attract underrepresented talent, and make recruitment businesses better places to work and partner with.
She founded Diversity in Recruitment because of her absolute drive to get D&I on the agenda of recruitment businesses, no matter what their size and capacity – Jo believes that the industry has the opportunity to influence and lead real change.
Interview Transcription
Diversity, equity and inclusion are huge topics and on many companies’ agendas as they look to address overrepresentation and underrepresentation.
Educating and supporting clients to incorporate D.E.I. into recruiting, onboarding, and their company culture is a huge partnering opportunity for recruitment companies.
To effectively help clients, a recruitment business needs to ensure they are also on their journey with D&I efforts.
Marketing has a role to play in this, and I am delighted to welcome Jo Major, passionate about the recruitment industry and its leading role in evolving D&I.
We hear Jo talk about how her recruitment career evolved into the D&I work she does today and the progress and challenges we still face within the sector.
YOU can read the full transcription of the podcast below.
Sharon: Hi, Jo.
Jo Major: Hi.
Sharon: Welcome to The Recruitment Marketing and Sales Podcast. It’s a pleasure to have you on today.
I know we’ve had a conversation before this, and for our listeners, it would be great if I could ask you to introduce yourself and share some of your background. I’m curious about how you got into the world of diversity, equity and inclusion, as I know, it’s a massive passion.
Jo: It is two very big questions. I’m going to try and keep it short and sweet. Firstly, thank you so much for your interest in my work and for having me on the podcast. It’s great to talk. Any opportunity that I can get to talk to influence the recruitment space about ED&I makes me very happy. In terms of my background, I’ve been in the recruitment space for 22 years.
I spent around 17 and a half years working on a desk as a recruiter in various capacities across different industries. Sometimes managing teams or building new disciplines and new areas and specialisms out.
I’ve done everything from quick, fast turnaround contract work to C-suite level retained across a whole range of different types of industry. I fell into recruitment.
Sharon: Which most people do, don’t they?
Jo: Yes. That typical story after studies, I wanted to go travelling, thought I’d work for a utility company like Adecco, and they’re like, “Hey, come and work for us.” It was supposed to be short-term, and 22 years later, I am still in the industry.
I’ve changed the position and role I take within the industry, which came about unexpectedly.
It was down to opportunity, working for the right people at the right time but also triggered by my experiences.
I joined a recruitment business that had some big changes around culture and leadership at the time.
For the first time as a recruiter, I became aware that perhaps I didn’t necessarily fit into the type of environment I joined. My identity, background, and circumstances had never really played a part in my work experience. It was nothing super dramatic, but a few things made me think, “Oh, that feels a bit uncomfortable.” I never thought about it in that way. I wonder if that could influence my trajectory or my career within this business.
Anyway, instead of getting worried about it and running away from the situation, I decided to have a conversation with my then-leader, who was the Chief Exec. I started to talk about what we could do around evolving our culture and being more aware of inclusion, equality, and diversity. Instead of going into the problem, I was very much solutions focused and said these are the things I think we need to be thinking about.
I wasn’t expecting the outcome of that conversation to be, “Okay, then crack on.”
Sharon: So get on and do it then!
Jo: In terms of what it could look like, they said we’ll leave that responsibility to you, which was great.
At the same time, an internal learning and development role had come up. It made sense to do that internal sales training piece for recruiters and start my journey of understanding what ED&I should look like in a recruitment business. That is very much where my journey of self-education started several years ago.
Fast forward a few years, and I just spotted a gap in the market where I felt there wasn’t enough support around ED&I in the recruitment industry. I thought you know what, I’m going to pull together my experience of recruitment and my interest in education to date and my L&D experience and produce something that’s going to help the industry. That’s it in a nutshell.
Sharon: I guess it’s been quite a journey for the industry in recent years. From what’s happened so far, where do you think as an industry, where are we, and what are some of the challenges that we still need to face?
Jo: I think some brilliant recruitment businesses are doing some pockets of good work. I think that we still have a lot of work as an industry to do. I don’t think we fully acknowledge our role if I’m completely honest. Perhaps we are not gearing ourselves up for the response we will need to take when that pressure from clients becomes more prevalent. I think it’s still seen as a Corporate Social Responsibility (C.S.R.) piece as a bit fluffy.
We still fail to miss the opportunity as an industry to use our influence for good. I feel that is scope to develop a solution that allows us to support our clients. We’ve almost got to look at ourselves in the mirror and take responsibility for why some of our clients remain overrepresented. Does that make sense?
Sharon: It does make sense. I guess I’ve got two things whizzing around in my head.
One is when you talk about C.S.R.; that is a bit of a heart-sink moment as it makes me think of a tick box approach. But I guess the other big thing is when people talk about ED&I, there are probably different levels of understanding about what that means. Is there an element of lack of understanding amongst ourselves as businesses in the sector? From an education point of view, do we need to take some responsibility and address it?
Because until we do that and start, let’s say, walking our talk, how will we be in the best position to lead clients?
Without going into lots of detail about definitions and everything. What does it mean for you? What message do you want recruitment companies and marketers in the industry to take away?
Jo: I think there are a couple of things in there.
I think that the first point you made around what we’re trying to do right now is solving the problem or coming up with solutions to something we don’t have an education on. I’ve been listening, watching, and reading for four or five years, and I’m still not a finished product.
You’ll never hear the word expert being bandied around by me. I don’t believe we can strategically solve a problem we don’t understand.
We often don’t look at the systemic reasons that have created overrepresentation and resulted in underrepresentation.
If we look at the systems and processes that we’ve had as an industry, as well as what our clients have had from an internal process perspective, they’ve resulted in some people not being able to get the job that they want, get shortlisted, get interviewed, get the promotion that they deserve, be paid properly, simply because of their identity, background, and circumstance.
A lot of what I do is to get recruiters on the journey of education, to understand that we don’t live in a meritocracy.
There’s no such thing as a meritocracy in recruitment. As much as we would love to believe that if you send the applications, work as hard as you can at your interview technique, graft in your job and work your way up, the world is your oyster. Technically that’s not correct.
I think it isn’t necessarily down to the recruitment industry.
I believe that the recruitment process and the world of work haven’t evolved. We still very much model the world of work from the 1950s model. Yes, we’ve seen some pockets of evolution and change, but I don’t think we have progressed in the way we think.
From a recruitment perspective, there are still a lot of us operating a one size fits all process that
has made many recruitment businesses incredibly successful, which has helped to scale up businesses at speed.
In that process, we’ve left a lot of folks behind. The work I do is to get recruiters to understand that just because they may not face barriers in work and they’ve not been held back by their circumstances or background in their careers doesn’t mean that the problem doesn’t exist.
People are not just underrepresented or over-represented because it’s just happened like that.
It’s down to the decisions that were made, the processes that we put in place, the way that we hire, the way that we were recruiting, and human nature.
Often, I’ll find that when I’m training a group of folks who’ve never really thought about it, and we hold a mirror up to ourselves, me included, in terms of our behaviours and how we make decisions about candidates’ suitability, we’re like, “Ah, okay.”
Right now, I see how much my bias and preference play into this. Now I see how building that recruitment model automatically causes that group of people’s selected at that point.
Now, I understand why that group of people would never want to apply for this job because of my language and how I marketed it. Does that make sense?
Sharon: Completely. It reminds me of a real classic business quote around the results we’re getting today as a consequence of our past decisions. If the results aren’t what you want, that’s because of the decisions that we’ve made. We need to make different choices and decisions. That is just as relevant in this conversation, isn’t it?
Jo: Absolutely.
Sharon: Where would you see some of the biggest gaps that we’ve got in the industry?
Jo: If we’re just looking at our industry alone, and I never want to make blanket statements about people’s identity because I can’t say for sure that we lack representation from this group or that group because we haven’t got the data as an industry. We know that the R.E.C. and APSCo went out to the sector 18 months ago to try and gain that information, and that project fell flat on its face; we couldn’t get the information.
Sharon: Nobody’s holding the information.
Jo: No, we couldn’t get the data. Talking from my experience and not talking on behalf of others, I’ve experienced a massive lack of people like me in the industry.
We have limited female role models. I’ve worked for many organisations from a gender perspective, representative to a certain point, and we start seeing big gaping holes when people leave.
I’ve seen incredibly successful female leaders take time out of work for the obvious reasons, to start a family and keep humanity going and then struggle to come back into the same role because we’re not agile and flexible enough.
As I say, the work model isn’t supportive for women or people who have children to come back into the workplace and continue where they left off with changes being made to accommodate them in the world of work.
From a gender perspective, my experience is that we lack female representation.
From an age perspective, it still baffles me that so many recruitment businesses do not represent the candidate community they serve, where the average age of the recruiter population is 25 or 26.
Then when we start to talk about the recruiter’s clients and candidates, they are talking about mid-career, senior career folk.
I do not buy into the fact that the career of a recruiter is a young person’s game; I think we’ve made it a young person’s game because you can only hold down this career when you’re in your early 20s, perhaps.
I struggle to understand that lack of age representation; I really do. You’re heavily weighted at the top by an older generation sitting above a team of very young people, but you don’t see representation throughout.
As I said, the data is not there, but I also know that the noise has definitely been around disability.
There are many initiatives, awards, and acknowledgement for the sector’s work regarding disability. Can I recall the number of times I’ve worked with somebody open about their disability? No, absolutely not.
On the surface, we might be looking to do something about that lack of representation and make the recruitment industry more accessible, but it will always be the proof in the pudding. You could argue, “You’ve not got the data,” and many disabilities are hidden, but I still work with people I know who have hidden their disabilities.
Sharon: That’s exactly what I was thinking. If we don’t have open conversations and an environment and culture where we inquire and people are encouraged to be open and honest with things, they will stay hidden. It doesn’t matter how much effort you put into stats; the stats aren’t going to be valid because you’ve not got a culture that is open and encouraging people, even encouraging women back into the workplace.
With everything, I feel quite sad just listening to you talk about the age demographic.
I know that there are many young people in the industry. We have clients who shared what the industry was like when you joined 23 years ago and the hour’s people worked.
Then I am reminded of another client who is fully remote because of COVID. They live in the opposite part of the country to where their business was originally based.
They’ve got a remote team that is working extremely well. I’ve interviewed some of the team, and while they have flexible working, they might still do an hour or so, or 90 minutes at night, Jo. Still, the thing is they’re not doing that in an office until eight o’clock at night, and they might have been to the gym for 90 minutes during the day, and they’re quite happy to jump back on the P.C. when the kids are back in bed or take a phone call at 7:00 pm.
They’ve got the control; they got the choice. That can certainly work for younger people, and I’m talking about people who are probably early 30s.
I haven’t realised quite how strongly the demographic is imprinted around the 25-year-olds.
Jo: I think we’ve built this. The rhetoric we’ve built around the culture of the recruitment industry and some of the best recruitment businesses I’ve worked for have been pretty much a 50/50 split between recruiters and industry professionals. When they brought in the industry professionals, it changed the dynamic. It’s changed the representation, and those businesses tend to be older from an average age perspective.
People tend to be more representative of society, but we could talk about the unfounded stereotypes of good recruiters until the cows come home. They work hard, play hard, and you must be a massive extrovert. The language we use around thinking, fast-paced, physical ability, and out-of-hour stuff is built around what I loved to do when I was 24.
The drinking culture, the Ibiza trips, and there’s nothing wrong in that, but if I say to you, what’s your culture, and you talk about those things, that’s where the challenge lies because you’re only ever going to attract people who want to be part of that.
I talk a lot in my training about the difference between workplace culture and social culture.
Too many organisations are obsessed with social culture and not workplace culture. Why these feed into the whole ED&I piece is because if we want to attract the missing candidates from the workplace, pressure is piling on from clients, and we need to be representative of the communities that we want to serve because underrepresented people are more likely to have faced discrimination and prejudice because of their background identity and circumstance.
They need to be confident that that recruiter understands their world and can offer empathy, support and isn’t going to knock them off the shortlist because they’re a bit nervous about the fact that they’re getting married next year, or they’ve just mentioned that they’ve got a long-term health challenge, or they need an adjustment at the interview process.
Sharon: Interesting. There’s a lot of food for thought here. Earlier, we talked about the role that perhaps the industry has in educating clients. As an industry, there’s a huge journey that we still need to go through ourselves.
What can we do to support clients in the journey that they have? We are already hearing lots of clients talk about how they are being pressed for diverse shortlists.
You do wonder how much of that is a tick box versus the desire for; I guess, cultural development and that being a diverse culture. What are your thoughts there? I know it’s a big question.
Jo: Yes, it is. I will break it down into two parts, if that’s okay.
I think from a developing our products and services perspective; we’ve got an amazing opportunity.
Our clients look to us for our consultation, expertise, insight on the market, the salaries they are being paid, the behaviour of competitors, or the latest technical skill, for example.
We pride ourselves on the fact that we are consultants and that we’re not just CV matchers.
Why not add an additional string to our bow?
Why not add an additional piece that’s going to be able to support our clients?
It might be the point you mentioned before; not all of us are there just yet.
Inclusive recruitment doesn’t take years to understand and embed. Five weeks with me, and you’ve got 30 things you can return to your desk and change.
You can pass on those changes and recommendations to your clients. We’re not talking about rocket science here; we’re just talking about techniques that make recruitment more inclusive, accessible, and equitable for candidates.
That’s as straightforward as you learning something new about your client’s industry and then feeding that back to them and embed in your process.
Ultimately, those who embed inclusive recruitment into their client offering, especially regarding the retained piece, will reap the benefits as they are prepared for that. I think another part of what you were saying is our responsibility.
It’s key if we are serious about being candidate-centric, especially as many recruiters pride themselves on their commitment to candidate experience and care. Now that can’t stop when it comes to ED&I, and I often refer to some current client behaviours that I see as the identity shopping list. Anybody listening to me here and tuning into the stuff I talk about will always hear me banging on about the identity shopping list.
This is where clients are ticking boxes. They’re looking at the optics of their business. They’re not doing any type of diversity, demographic or inclusion surveys. They’re just looking into the business and concluding communities are missing from their organisations. Usually, that’s driven by suppliers, customers, the board, or an E.R. case, for example.
They feel that the easiest way to address the solution of a lack of representation and a lack of diversity is to get the identity shopping list out when they’re briefing a recruiter. Being very specific about who they want on that group, like they are buying their groceries in Sainsbury’s.
Some clients are not prepared to look at the fundamental reasons they have an over-representation problem, and underrepresented people are not currently sitting in their business, being successful and thriving.
It’s a case of, let’s hire ourselves out of our diversity problems.
For me, where that becomes problematic for recruiters who are candidate-centric and focus on candidate care is getting recruiters to understand their responsibility, that this isn’t just shopping for vegetables in Sainsbury’s.
This is about putting human beings into environments where they are potentially the only ones, where they are possibly exposed to discrimination and prejudice, or at the very least daily microaggressions. I think candidates know suddenly they’ve never been so popular.
I’ve spoken to candidates who said I have never been so popular as a senior woman. I have never been so popular as somebody who’s openly from the LGBTQ+ community. Doors that have remained close to me have suddenly opened.
Candidates are aware. They don’t want to be the only ones. They don’t want to be going into these types of environments because we know that that can be hugely detrimental to their careers and their lived experience and mental health.
Sharon: Absolutely.
Jo: I think a part of my work is giving recruiters the confidence to be able to say to clients who are pulling out the identity shopping list to be able to qualify the work that’s been done and to verify that the client is in a position where their working environment and culture is going to be a safe one for underrepresented candidates.
It’s protecting candidates and making sure that candidates are central to their work and making sure that they’re not supporting performative behaviour.
At the same time, by asking questions and spotting the clients’ pain points, recruiters can come up with solutions for the client in the same way as they would for any other project.
That was a massive answer.
Sharon: It’s a big topic, Jo, isn’t it? We can chat all afternoon about it.
Let’s just break it down a little bit. Let’s say you’ve got some smaller recruitment companies, and they are at the early stages of looking to develop their marketing so that they can address some of the issues around DE&I.
Even thinking about ads, you’ve already mentioned people’s language.
What practical steps can companies take, Jo, when they’re thinking about their marketing other than job ads?
Jo: I think it’s a good question.
The first thing I would recommend is with any launch of any new product or surveys; you would look at it from a branding perspective. I recommend to any marketers that, to begin with, it should never just be a marketing thing. The challenge is how do we start talking about that? How do we get the confidence to talk about it? If we don’t? Nobody’s ever going to know what you’re doing.
Some folks don’t want to start the marketing journey until they’ve got all the ducks in a row, which will take them years, and then they’ll never start, so first and foremost, it’s about making sure that what you are doing is authentic. Sitting down as a team and talking about your why and motivation, why is ED&I important to us? Why are we on the journey?
It doesn’t have to be a document. It can be a paragraph, an authentic paragraph that sets out your reasons for starting on this journey.
This short paragraph can also be used internally and as an external piece.
Then rather than thinking about initiatives, I’m not a fan of the initiatives piece because I don’t think that initiatives solve problems.
Is it looking at the practical things we’re going to change in our recruitment business and across our recruitment culture in the next six months?
How do we talk about those to our external community authentically? In a way that inspires our client community to follow suit.
I’m more about if you’re going to talk about D&I, you have to talk about your why motivation, but you’ve also got to talk about what you’re doing. You’ve got to talk about your small and quick wins.
For example, if you’ve got a small team of 10, talk with them from an identity background and circumstance perspective; what is important to them?
This prevents you from going out and having an external conversation about things, and your internal team are going, “Hold on a minute, but I’ve not been part of this.” You’re making loads of noise about Pride. I’m sitting here as a member of the LGBTQ+ community in the business, and no one’s ever had a conversation about my lived experience in this organisation.
That’s why it’s important to take a team with you. Look at the things those folks are passionate about because they’re bound to support your marketing work if they’re passionate about it.
The next thing, Sharon, is that anything you do from an external advocacy perspective, and I’m talking about your LinkedIn posts and social media stuff, should always be centred around educating whoever’s reading it.
What are the takeaways from this piece of information I’m putting out? What is ultimately the impact on somebody who’s from this community? If you are drawing a blank, it doesn’t go out.
If you can see the purpose of a post and how it educates and inspires action, that’s great.
Advocacy and being clear on where you stand from an equality perspective has got to be a pillar of communication. If you wrap it around the things that matter to your team, it will not be performative.
Sharon: I think that there are so many different elements of DE&I.
Even large organisations can have challenges handling everything, but if we don’t start with some elements, and if you can take those initial elements from your team and begin working and learning from them, that makes complete sense. Otherwise, you will have a mismatch, misalignment, and unhappy staff.
Also, just picking up on something you were saying, so even though, let’s say, some of these companies may well be at relatively early stages, I think what I hear you say, Jo is to have the courage and the confidence to say, “We’re at the early stages. This is what we are doing. We’re going to do these one or two, three key things in the next few months, and this is what we want you to experience and let us know how we’re doing. Come on the journey with us.”
Have the courage to be open and public about it. I guess that means that they might make a few mistakes, and it could be a bit of a rocky road initially, but they’re on the journey, and they’ll learn from it. Am I right?
Jo: I think you’re totally right.
It’s being open and honest about where you’re at on your journey. No pointy fingers indicating that you’ve got this, that you know what you’re talking about. Instead, it’s inviting other people to give you advice, especially from your candidate community. We want to improve this for this group. We’ve thought about these four things. Are we on the right track? What would you contribute? That’s always been the approach that I take on my social media. I don’t do the pointing fingers and
suggest that I know everything.
It’s like, this is what I’ve been thinking about. I might be almost there, but what does everybody else think so I don’t end up talking on behalf of the people, and it opens up discussion?
I think it’s a really powerful thing to reach out to your community. Also, I’ll always encourage my recruitment businesses to collaborate with their clients. The one thing where there is no competition as to who gets there first is equality. It’s not a U.S.P.
Sharon: No.
I don’t think anybody can claim that. Can they?
Jo: You are all on a journey. From experience, there aren’t any clients out there that are nailing any of this. I encourage my recruiters by saying, “Please identify the people within your core client group who are doing the work and who may need the support of a round table or a networking group and build a community with which you’re on a journey.”
Sharon: Fantastic. That’s a fabulous idea.
Jo: Share everything and create a safe space for people to go, “Oh no, don’t do that. That was a total disaster.” We did this, and it worked. We’ve seen its impact on our applications or our client journey.
We’re happily building up communities of H.R. directors, talent heads, and Chief Execs.
Now let’s start doing the same for the folks within the businesses leading on this stuff. They might not necessarily be a director of D&I, but they might be internally chair of an employee resource group. It’s all about learning, perspective, sharing different experiences and approaches and not having all the answers because you’ve only got your frame of reference.
Sharon: Something that came to me as you were talking about and sharing that fabulous idea, by the way, was collaboration and partnership.
I see a lot of marketing companies saying we want to be your recruiting partner. We’ve got a very collaborative approach. Here I can’t think of a better example where a client or candidate and a recruitment company can walk alongside each other and partner on this journey. It’s just a fabulous opportunity.
Jo: We just need to facilitate those conversations. We must give underrepresented candidates an opportunity and a space to be able to advise us as an industry. Because of this, we’re not the experts.
Sharon: Absolutely not. Well, I could talk to you for ages, and I think we might have to reconvene at another time and take this conversation further.
Thank you so much for your time, Jo. It’s been so insightful, and I know there will certainly be conversations with our clients on the back of this as well. I’ve no doubt some of the ideas you shared will get a lot of people thinking and hopefully get them acting and inspire them to be more courageous with their work.
To learn more about Jo and her programmes, visit her website, Diversity in Recruitment, here.
