Inclusive job design is more than just re-working the language and copy on a page, it is the sequence of key steps you go through to design a job to create job descriptions and job ads that truly make an impact.
This is the process of job design, which sits at the heart of your ability to attract, retain and progress talent across your organisation and create more inclusive cultures.
The importance of inclusive job design can’t be underestimated, as it can:
· Increase hiring diversity by 125%+
· Increase quality of hires by 80%+
· Achieve 30% women in senior roles
· Reduce employee turnover 80%+.
We highlight the key elements of the job design process to show what conscious consideration actually means, and what debiasing and breaking down barriers looks like in the job design process.
Step one: Simplify and segment responsibilities
Make sure responsibilities are concise enough to be easy to read, but detailed enough to make responsibilities clear
Step two: Design inclusive requirements
What would a person need to have, day one, to be successful in the role that they can’t learn in the first 90 days of the job?
Step three: Use inclusive copy
Scientists have found that when you write more, people understand less. Make sure you watch the language you use, avoid gender-coded words and be mindful of the way sentences are crafted.
Step four: Design inclusion into all aspects of a job
Inclusive job design is not just about what you do in the role, it’s about the whole package.
Step five: Design hybrid and flexible working strategies
87% of candidates now want hybrid or flexible working. This is no longer a nice to have. It also has the potential to widen the talent pool, enabling around 4million candidates to enter a jobs market that previously locked them out.
Step six: Drive systemic change
Embed systemic change around how you design job and create job descriptions. As we said at the beginning, true inclusion has to start at the beginning at be at the core of the job design process. This is more than simply re-working the language and copy on a page
Want to learn more about inclusive job design?
Download our guide, Six Steps to Debiasing Job Descriptions or book a live demo of the RoleMapper platform.
Instead of a more linear approach to recruiting – education, degree by proxy and specific industry experience – organisations are now focusing more on transferable skills and capabilities to widen the talent pool and make hiring more inclusive.
We're delighted to say that we're not alone when we say you need to throw out the hiring conventions rule book, Linkedin has recently launched its Skills Path programme and has seen a 21% increase in skills-based job ads. The team at Gusto also believe unconventional hiring is the key to driving inclusion.
Instead of a more linear approach to recruiting, organisations are now focusing more on transferable skills and capabilities
The main point in all of this is to challenge the old-school ways of designing jobs based on qualifications, years of experience, industry experience.
Instead, we believe the way to filling critical roles with the best talent is to break these entrenched biases and be positively disruptive in how you define talent.
We have another trophy to add to the cabinet, Best Tech Startup from the Global Business Tech Awards.
This is another great win on the back of a really successful year so far. We were awarded Best Tech Startup at the UK Business Tech awards, selected as a Rising Star by Tech Nation and made it to the final of the Think Global awards.
The Global Business Tech Awards judging panel described the RoleMapper platform as a ‘really innovative piece of technology’ and felt that, as a startup, we were ‘impressive and gutsy’ to deliver such a technically advanced platform at such an early stage of our journey.
Sara Hill, CEO and Founder, RoleMapper says: “Winning this award really highlights our position as a truly global organisation. Working with scaleups and large organisations, RoleMapper has the ability to create inclusive workplaces regardless of where you are located or where you plan to be in the future as you scaleup.”
If you’re an organisation looking to hire more inclusively, why not take a look at our resources and learn more about debiasing job descriptions and creating inclusive job adverts.
We frequently come across organisations who are trying to solve the job description conundrum. Those organisations who know, or have heard, that job descriptions have the potential to unlock talent and diversity.
However, when we ask them; “tell me about how job descriptions are created in your organisation? Who owns this process” We are often met with a laugh and a comment along the lines of “Ha, well now that’s a question!”
More often than not, the process of creating job descriptions is a bit all over the place with no one clear owner. In many organisations it is a process that crosses multiple functions - with each group wanting different outcomes from the job description.
For example, some companies have a reward function who use job descriptions for grading and benchmarking. Managers create job descriptions to help them define and build out their teams.
At the end of the process is recruitment who try to do their best at translating hundreds of different versions of job descriptions into content that will be appealing to the outside world.
Understanding definitions is the first step to making the change
So, these organisations are correct in thinking that job descriptions are important. We at RoleMapper say that they sit at the epicentre of an organisations ability to attract, recruit and retain talent. But if you attempt to embed and scale a change to your job descriptions, without systematically changing how the process works, you will be left chasing your tail.
The start of any change initiative, no matter how big or small, should always starts with a vision of the future, defining the change and a view of the current state.
We thought it would be helpful to clarify a few definitions around the whole area of job descriptions. We hope these will help you articulate and identify the change you need to make in your organisation to write great job descriptions.
The process of designing a role
Job design is the process of actually designing a role. It is the process by which organisations define and divide the tasks that need to be done to carry out the work or service that needs to be delivered.
The job design process helps determine responsibilities, accountabilities, deliverables, and decision-making within the role. It also helps define inputs, outputs and interactions of the role, the key factors that influence the role, as well as how, where and when it must be performed.
Job design brings all these elements together to configure and create roles that motivate an employee to deliver the job successfully. It also helps attract the best candidates to the role.
The output of the job design process
A job description is a document that provides all the detail about a role. It is a critical tool that describes the purpose, responsibilities and outputs of a role. It helps us define the knowledge, skills, experience, and capabilities that a person will need to enable successful delivery. It might also include reporting lines, where the role sits in the hierarchy, grading etc.
To create an effective job description, it’s important to go through the ‘job design’ process. You might not know it – you might just think you are putting your ideas down on a page - but that’s what it is, you are designing a job.
A job description is a feeder into a job advert. It is where we define the content that can be translated into a job advert for the external marketplace. It also helps define the screening and assessment criteria for prospective candidates.
A job description describes what the candidate does for you; a job advert should focus on what you can do for them.
A job description tells, a job advert sells!
A job advert is another output of the job design process. It is a re-scripted shorter, copy-written sales version of the job description to sell the role and company to prospective candidates.
A job advert translates the essential elements of a job description, along with any additional unique selling points that can be used to sell the role through various advertising channels.
The objective of a job advert is to be a sales tool to attract the widest possible pool of appropriate candidates. A job advert needs to market the organisation and the position in a positive way. It must grab a potential candidate’s interest to encourage them to find out more.
Many organisations struggle to translate their job descriptions into job adverts. Failing to distinguish between a job description and a job advert can cause all sorts of challenges because the aim of each is different.
A consistent approach to job design is the key to creating great job descriptions and job adverts.
A high-level summary of a role
A job profile is an outline or a high-level overview of a role. It provides general information about the role as a starting point and is sometimes used as the first step when creating a job description.
Sometimes the terms job profile and job description are used inter-changeably, but a job profile is actually a summary document of a role whereas a job description is a translation of that role into a specific job or team. For each job profile, there may be multiple versions of job descriptions that align to variations within teams.
A group of job roles
A job family is a group of job roles involving similar types of work and/or requiring comparable training, skills, knowledge, and expertise. The concept can establish a robust framework within an organisation and is particularly useful when job titles for similar roles vary.
The concept of job families allows organisations to treat occupational groups differently from each other in terms of reward, career paths or development needs.
Job families may be linked to:
There will typically be 5-10 job profiles sitting within a job family.
The term “job architecture” encompasses the whole eco-system for jobs and provides the basic organising construct for aligning jobs in an organisation based on the type of work performed.
A job architecture will include job levels, job titling conventions, grades, career paths, spans of control, the criteria for career movement and can be used for ensuring equitable pay.
In summary, job design is the process; job descriptions, job adverts and job profiles are the outputs; and job families and a job architecture provide the structure.
To develop diversity within an organisation, you need to make your company treat people with respect and recognise that the history of discrimination has led to a lack of certain skills within discriminated groups. For example, women are less likely to have technical engineering skills than men.
Rather than accepting or ignoring this fact, we need to take notice, take action and ensure recruitment feeds diversity in at entry levels, and that organisations focus on mentoring and retaining people who are then able to develop those skills internally.
The trouble with language
This is where language can cause issues that are far greater than the odd bias word in a job advert and where the accepted corporate ‘speak’ of most companies forms a barrier to this.
When we de-humanise our workers by referring to them as a “resource” (a commodity), we develop a management mindset where people are simply another stock item whose levels are maintained according to market demand.
Which brings me to my next language block, “talent”.
Talent is a word that usually implies an intrinsic skill, quite often used with “gifted”. If we believe skills are talents, we demean learning and mentoring, which means we will naturally seek out “talented” people rather than unskilled people that can become “talented”.
There’s a commonplace tendency to ‘fish’ for talent outside our organisation rather than putting the hard work in to pass on learning. The “talented” people are those that have had the privilege to learn the necessary skills and where we bake in bias.
The two words that harm diversity most for me are “resource” and “talent”.
Focusing on solutions, I feel that mentoring is crucial to improving diverse candidates. In fact, this aspect of management should be the main skill associated with that role, viewing all mentees as people that can, and will, be able to develop the skills needed to advance their careers.
Finally, it is important to recruit at entry level based on capability and desire to learn new skills. If we have the mindset that all our people can develop and progress to the top, we will go a long way to removing bias.
I know we can’t change the world in a day, but I think we need to always look towards operational management and away from HR.
Tech Nation, the UK network for ambitious tech entrepreneurs, has selected RoleMapper as one of its early-stage scaleup winners of its nationwide competition, Rising Stars.
The Rising Stars competition is the only of its kind in the UK and is designed to showcase the most exciting companies at Seed to pre-Series A from all areas of the country. The ten winners in total have been selected as Rising Stars through a rigorous competition process, with more than 330 applications received.
Sara Hill, Founder & CEO, Role Mapper Technologies, says: "This is great news for RoleMapper. Our goal is to transform workplaces through inclusive job descriptions and reducing bias in the hiring process. To be seen as an innovator in the HRTech space is exactly what we want.”The virtual nature of the competition this year has also made it accessible to founders from every corner of the UK."
The virtual nature of the competition has also been credited with increasing access for women founders.
The 2020 Rising Stars winners are the most diverse cohort yet, with 50% of the winning companies having women founders and co-founders - up from 40% in 2019
Esme Caulfield, Competitions Lead, Tech Nation, comments: “The Tech Nation Rising Stars competition highlights the best-in-class companies in the UK at the seed and pre-Series A stages and shows the amazing tech companies that make-up the UK’s pipeline."It's incredibly exciting to see the 2020 Rising Stars winners across a broad mix of sectors, as well as representing the most diverse Rising Stars cohort yet, with 50% of the winning companies having women founders, while 80% of the winners are from outside London.”
Rising Stars Judges Quotes:
Stephen Kelly, Chair, Tech Nation comments: “The Rising Stars announced today are great examples of the strength of the UK tech ecosystem. The winners highlight that innovation, determination and ambition in this fast-growing sector can be found right across the UK. What the Rising Stars competition, and indeed Tech Nation, does is provide a platform to showcase these exciting and innovative companies.”
Mary McKenna, Tech Entrepreneur & Angel Investor, comments: "It's fantastic to see so many brilliant companies among this year's Rising Stars. As well as being an incredible representation of the innovation and talent we have here in the UK this year's Winners represent great diversity in terms of gender, location and sector. "
Anika Henry, Operations Lead & EMEA Partner Manager, Google for Startups UK, comments: “At Google for Startups UK, we’re always looking out for the country’s great, new emerging tech start-ups, so it’s been a great honour to be on the judging panel of the Tech Nation Rising Stars. The high calibre and diversity of companies and out-of-the-box approach shown by the nominees has been really inspiring to see and I wish them all well in their journeys and development over the next year.”
Rob Kniaz, Partner, Hoxton Ventures, comments: “As an investor, being part of the Rising Stars 3.0 judging process was a truly inspiring experience. It's fantastic to see highly investable scaling companies with diverse founders from every corner of the UK. I will be following the winners’ growth with interest.”
About Tech Nation
Tech Nation is the growth platform for tech companies and leaders. Tech Nation fuels the growth of game-changing founders, leaders, and scaling companies so they can positively transform societies and economies. We provide them with the coaching, content, and community they need for their journey in designing the future. Tech Nation has years of experience facilitating and helping UK tech companies scale, both at home and abroad. Over 20 cohorts and 600 companies have successfully graduated from Tech Nation’s growth programmes. Alumni include Skyscanner, Darktrace, and Monzo.
From January 1, 2021, the Colorado Equal Pay Act (SB19-085) prohibits all employers from discriminating because of sex (including gender identity) — alone or with another protected status — by paying less for substantially similar work in terms of skill, effort and responsibility.
In summary, the Colorado Equal Pay Act prohibits an employer from:
We’re now seeing an uptick in organizations looking to utilize RoleMapper to help meet compliance requirements, and the great news is that we’ve configured RoleMapper to help our customers fix this in a matter of minutes.
As an intelligent job design platform, RoleMapper creates job profiles, descriptions and ads that are debiased and neutral in minutes, removing the common pain points of removing discrimination from the source of the role and not a copy tweak in a job ad.
To find out more about how RoleMapper supports compliance, you can book a demo here
According to research from LinkedIn carried out during and just after lockdown 1, women were 10% less confident in their ability to get, or hold on to a job than men.
Similarly, 67% of women were less confident in their ability to progress their career than men, and 133% less confident about their ability to improve their financial situation in the next 6 months. To date, the hardest hit has been women in the 30+ age bracket.
However, out of this news, there is a spark of positivity. During the course of the first lockdown, RoleMapper users saw a continued uptick in female hiring, especially in traditionally male dominated professions, such as engineering.
It's clear that we will be facing a recession once normal business resumes. In fact, the IMF believes 30 years of gains for women could be erased as recession deepens, so it’s more critical than ever to ensure that organisations put solid frameworks in place to attract and retain more female and diverse hires.
However, moving the dial on diversity is not a quick-fix solution or something to be added at the end of the job creation process. It needs to start at the beginning and not an insertion at the instruction of D&I teams.
Intelligent inclusive job design
Inclusion starts at the point when a role is created. Not after. It is the process of designing a job in a way that ensures it will appeal to the widest and most diverse pool of potential job holders.
It gives conscious consideration to designing the job in a way that opens it up to the widest pool of talent and is also about removing any bias or barriers that might put off - or unfairly exclude - talented people from applying or excelling in a role.
During the course of the first lockdown, RoleMapper users saw a continued uptick in female applications
This means addressing a whole range of areas to help attract female candidates, such as responsibilities and requirements, which need to be clearly defined and presented in a way that encourages them to apply for a role.
To use a recent example, the RoleMapper platform has helped one global tech company achieve a 47% change in responsibilities, in one case simplifying a role with 18 responsibilities down to four, and a 91% change in requirements from an average of 16 to just 6.
Soft skills
Not only are soft skills crucial for inclusive hiring, they are also becoming vital for new ways of working, such as remote, hybrid working and tech automation.
Focusing on technical skills tends to favour more male applicants, whereas women are more likely to showcase soft skills and favour jobs ads that bring these to the fore. In fact, 92% of hiring managers say soft skills are more important than hard skills.
Technical skills give a level of control for managers and recruiters to screen candidates
in or out of the process - and actually make the job of screening candidates a lot easier.
However, by focusing on pure technical skills we are baking bias into the process and possibly missing out on talent.
Flexible or hybrid working
Research by the UK government found that jobs promoted with flexibility had a 30% uplift in applications.
However, despite all the changes happening as a result of COVID, the Timewise Flexible Jobs Index saw only a minimal increase in jobs open to flexibility from 17% – 22%, which is hardly moving the dial.
Our own studies with companies on the RoleMapper platform found that jobs designed and promoted with flexibility generate a 125% increase in female candidates and an 80% increase in quality of hiring (based on the CV-to-hire ratio).
We’re living in exceptional times right now, but once normal working patterns resume more people will want and need flexible working and why it is so important for organisations need to bake-in flex for long term inclusion.
There may well be a school of thought around letting this next wave of flexibility naturally take a more organic path; let managers work with it and have ‘tailored’ conversations at employee level.
It is absolutely right that these conversations happen between employees and managers, but you need to beware the pitfalls of letting this pan out without a systematic approach.
Embedding a systematic approach to assessing job and team flexibility will take into account all the variables that have an operational impact on varying ways to work flexibly in the role.
Mapping inclusion
The Role Mapper platform enables organisations to create job profiles, descriptions and ads that opens you up to a far wider and inclusive talent pool, and it’s why our user base has had continued success over such a challenging period of time.
At such a pivotal time for women and diverse ethnic backgrounds, don’t you think it’s time your organisation started to drive systemic change?
It’s been a busy few months for the team at RoleMapper, which has been topped-off with the announcement that we've won Best Tech Startup at the UK Business Tech Awards.
The Awards celebrate the UK’s finest tech businesses and its aim is to recognise innovation and the exceptional application of technology to transform and grow businesses.
With a judging panel made up of leading tech experts from a range of businesses and organisations - including booking.com and North West at Tech Nation - this is a great achievement for RoleMapper.
The RoleMapper platform has delivered some outstanding results for our clients, including an increase in female hiring by 125% and a 50% increase in ethnic diverse hiring ratios in the US.
Since our launch 12 months ago, we have seen exponential growth and great success helping large organisations debias roles to unlock talent and diversity.
We see job design as key to creating more inclusive cultures, and as testament to that fact, the platform has delivered some outstanding results for our clients, including an increase in female hiring by 125% and a 50% increase in ethnic diverse hiring ratios in the US.
It’s great to be recognised by the UK Business Tech Awards for all our efforts, but it doesn’t stop there either. In other news, we are now on the UK Government’s directory of Cloud hosting, G-Cloud 12, and have expanded our team with the appointment of Frank Fernandes as Customer Operations Manager.
Here’s to another year of exceptional growth!
When designing flex into roles, make sure you make the viable options fair, consistent, and open to all. People want increased systemic flexibility for a whole range of reasons. If there is one thing this pandemic is revealing, it's that people are reflecting on what is important in their lives. Many employees have reassessed their priorities, leading to a significant shift in their work preferences.
By now, many employees working from home during the lockdown will have made quite firm decisions around how they wish to operate going forward. Some will have decided that nothing in their lives is quite like their family, and for that reason, they wish to extend remote working indefinitely or move to a more flexible working arrangement. This moment of reflection offers an opportunity for organizations to rethink how they approach work-life balance.
Making Flex Work As it stands today, over 90% of jobs are designed to fit office-based 9-5pm working patterns. However, COVID-19 has helped shift preconceived notions and traditions about work schedules. This change is not just temporary; it signifies a long-term trend in how we view work.
As a Victorian premise based around factory working hours, the 9-5 is massively outdated. Modern work demands a more flexible framework. Productivity profiles are more personal; for any organization, productivity and doing a job well are key, so a job should bring out the best in an employee. For example, some people work better in the morning, while others thrive at night. By breaking these time constraints, businesses can create a more engaging environment that fosters productivity and job satisfaction. Flexibility can also lead to improved mental health and reduced burnout, which ultimately benefits the organization.
There may well be a school of thought around letting this next wave of flexibility naturally take a more organic path; however, let managers work with it and have ‘tailored’ conversations at the employee level. It is absolutely right that these conversations happen between employees and managers, but you need to beware the pitfalls of letting this pan out without a systematic approach. Plan, Tools, and Guidance are essential.
Flexible Job Design
Seize the Opportunity As we come out of lockdown, there will be a significant change in how the workplace looks and operates in the future. For example, some companies will trial moves to a smaller set of core hours so they can manage meetings and interactions while still offering flexibility for employees. Others will use technology to enhance the working-from-home experience, ensuring all employees have access to the tools and resources needed to thrive in a remote setting.
The workplace we return to will be very different. Business leaders need to develop a vision of what their workplace should look like and design systemic, sustainable flexibility into their workforce. This vision should include a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, ensuring that all employees feel valued and supported in their work environments.
The opportunity is now. But the question is, how will you challenge the traditional thinking that still exists in your organizations? How will you challenge this systematically at scale? Engaging employees in these conversations, gathering their feedback, and implementing changes based on their insights will be crucial to the success of any new flexible work strategy. Ultimately, adapting to this new way of working is not just a trend; it is a necessary evolution for businesses aiming to thrive in an unpredictable future.
Moreover, consider the role of leadership in this transition. Leaders must model the flexibility they expect from their teams, demonstrating that work-life integration is a priority. Providing ongoing training and support for managers will be essential in navigating this shift. The benefits of a flexible work model not only enhance employee satisfaction but can also lead to increased retention rates and a more robust organizational culture.
As organizations embrace systemic flexibility, it’s vital to regularly revisit and assess these policies. Are they meeting the needs of employees? Are they contributing to business objectives? By maintaining an open dialogue with employees and being willing to make adjustments, organizations can ensure that they are adapting effectively to a rapidly changing work environment.
In conclusion, designing systemic flexibility into roles is not merely a response to the pandemic; it’s an opportunity to innovate and redefine how work is perceived and conducted. By prioritizing employee well-being, fostering open communication, and embracing technology, businesses can create a resilient workforce ready to face future challenges.
Role Mapper Technologies Ltd
Kings Wharf, Exeter
United Kingdom
© 2025 RoleMapper. All rights reserved.
