Who: A Welsh social housing provider commissioned this session as part of their commitment to embedding equality, diversity and inclusion across their employment practices — a commitment named explicitly in their own EDI policy. The audience was managers involved in recruitment decisions.
The brief: A three-hour in-person training session on unconscious bias in recruitment, for up to 16 managers. I was brought in as an associate trainer and handed materials from a previous trainer who had retired.
What I did: I used the materials as a starting point to build my session. I structured the content around a clear spine: what unconscious bias is and where it comes from, how it shows up at each stage of the recruitment journey (advert, shortlist, interview, decision, and promotion), what mitigations look like in practice, and what participants could commit to doing differently. I developed additional content, and designed activities that asked participants to do the thinking rather than receive it. The session was titled Hiring with intention.
What happened on the day: Seven of the sixteen invited managers attended. Of those, two pushed back consistently throughout the session, though other participants were engaged which led to some rich conversations.
It was one of the more challenging rooms I’ve worked in, and it was also one of the most instructive. Training on unconscious bias can only do so much: it works best when the organisation around it – the culture, the accountability, the visible commitment from leadership – is doing its part too. A half-empty room of managers sends its own message about how seriously EDI is being taken, and no amount of good facilitation can fully compensate for that. If organisations are investing in this kind of training, they need to invest in the conditions for it too. Mandatory attendance, visible senior buy-in, and a clear link to actual recruitment processes aren’t just nice to have: they’re the difference between training that shifts practice and training that ticks a box.
Photo by Vince Fleming on Unsplash