Inclusivity: How to debias job adverts

Getting started

There are two routes in:

  1. Creating an advert through Adverts in TalentKoala
  2. Pasting in your own advert

With both routes you'll end up in the same debiasing screen.

Working through your content

The Inclusivity tool gives you two scores, one for overall inclusivity and the other for readability. Both are designed to give you the recruiter the information you need to make a decision about the words you should and shouldn't include in your job adverts.

The inclusivity score

This score uses a weighting of gender based words, exclusionary terms, and other biases. To improve your score, expand any of the items in the inclusivity panel to see which words are causing a problem.

Then click on any of those words.

You will then see that instance of that word appear in the advert with a range of neutral synonyms to replace them with.

Choose the word that best fits the context of what you're trying to say.

As you do, you'll start to see your inclusivity score improve.

If at first your score gets worse, don't worry - that's more than likely because you've worsened the balance of feminine-masculine gendered words (or vice versa). As you start to even the balance and the gender tone moves towards the neutral, you'll see your inclusivity score improve.

You may feel that you don't want to change some terms. That's fine - in some instances, the words you've used might be right for the message you're trying to get across or be part of a job title for instance.

The purpose of the tool is to give you the best information about where potential unconscious bias is in your adverts to allow you to make the decision about whether to change them or not.

The readability score

Readability is equally important when trying to open up your adverts to as diverse an audience as possible.

Click on the readability score and the readability panel opens up.

The information here tells you the following:

  • How long your advert will take to read
  • How difficult it is to read (using the Flesch-Kincaid reading ease calculation)
  • How many words are in your job adverts
  • Whether your advert contains any corporate cliches that your readers might struggle to understand
  • Any complex phrases that need simplifying
  • And any qualifying phrases that need changing

As with the inclusivity panel, work through these to improve the readability of your advert, which in turn makes it more accessible to as wide an audience as possible and gives you the best possible chance of your perfect hire sending their CV to you.