Anonymous Recruitment: Opportunities and Challenges - Business in the Community

Anonymous Recruitment: Opportunities and Challenges

This Business in the Community factsheet considers the opportunities and challenges of anonymous recruitment.

Opening Doors is Business in the Community’s (BITC) inclusive recruitment campaign. Launched in 2022, we have an ambition to make two million jobs more accessible to diverse talent by 2025, by asking employers to commit to making specific changes to the way they recruit.

This factsheet considers how anonymous recruitment can help businesses eliminate unconscious bias during the hiring process.

Although anonymous recruitment is not a specific action identified by the Opening Doors campaign, it can be a valuable tool to help businesses implement actions under keys 4 and 5:

Key 4: focus on the essential skills needed for the job.

Key 5: prioritise accessibility and eliminate bias.

About Opening Doors

Opening Doors calls on employers to make changes to the way they recruit so that their jobs become more accessible to all jobseekers, regardless of background and life experience. Working in collaboration with a wide range of organisations supporting diverse candidates, we identified 25 actions that would improve access to jobs. The actions are grouped under five ‘keys’ to inclusive recruitment:

  1. Create partnerships that connect untapped talent to your jobs.
  2. Show candidates that you are committed to inclusion. 
  3. Use comprehensive job adverts with inclusive language.
  4. Focus on the essential skills needed to do the job.
  5. Prioritise accessibiity and eliminate bias.

Opening Doors: insight at the midpoint of the campaign

At the midpoint of the campaign, we undertook some analysis of employer commitments and their progress towards them.

READY TO BECOME AN OPENING
DOORS EMPLOYER?

The process is similar to expressing interest in the Opening Doors campaign. Navigate to the form on the link below. Complete and submit, and a team member will contact you to discuss next steps.

Express your interest and commitment at
Opening Doors for Refugees

BITC members benefit from a range of support to help them achieve the campaign asks,
including the following:

  • Advisory services – topics include inclusion, partnerships & social impact
  • Employment programmes
    ● Job Coaching – (national)
    ● STEP programme supporting Refugees (Yorkshire & Humber, Bristol and
    Coventry) Y&H – Leeds, Sheffield and Bradford
  • Content – Inclusive Employment toolkit, case studies and best practice guides
  • Events – webinars, peer learning forums, leadership roundtables
  • Regions & nations – connecting to partners & responding to local need
    Don’t hesitate to contact your BITC Relationship Manager for more details.

    For more information, please email the Opening Doors campaign team

    Complete and submit this form


    Once you have submitted your expression of interest, a member of
    the team at BITC will share the campaign sign-up form. You will be asked to tell us:

    • which actions you will be taking forward (minimum of three from across the five keys )
    • an estimate of the number of roles that will be impacted by each action
    • the anticipated date of completion.

      We ask for this information so we can provide support to help you take action and track
      progress towards our goal of two million roles influenced by the campaign.