Are Your Job Adverts Shutting People Out Before They Even Apply?

How small, often unintentional choices in job adverts and applications can shut out brilliant candidates, and what to change.

I have been thinking a lot lately about how recruitment processes are built, and more specifically, who they are actually built for.

Last year I ran a four-part series on neurodiversity in the workplace with the experts at Neurobox, and episode one has stayed with me ever since. We focused on the hiring process and, honestly, some of what came up in that conversation was a real eye-opener.

Here is something that stuck with me. Most barriers in recruitment are not put there deliberately. They are designed in, often unintentionally, because nobody stopped to ask whether the process actually worked for everyone. The job advert, the application form, the interview, the confirmation email: all of these send a signal to the candidate about what kind of employer you are and whether you will support them once they are in the door.

We talked about the language we use in job adverts. Phrases like “natural communicator” or “world-class delivery” might seem harmless, but for someone who processes language literally, they can be genuinely off-putting. If a candidate reads “natural communicator” and does not see themselves in that description, they may not apply at all, even if they are brilliant at the actual communication the role requires. The word “natural” does a lot of quiet damage.

There is also the structural stuff. Multi-stage online application forms. Inaccessible PDFs. Systems that time out if you pause. These are not edge cases. They are real barriers that affect neurodivergent candidates every day and, frankly, a lot of other people too.

One of the most practical suggestions from our conversation was this: involve people with lived experience in reviewing your job descriptions. You do not need a specialist tool or a big budget. If you have an employee resource group, ask them. Ask them whether the wording is clear, whether anything feels ambiguous or exclusionary, whether the process as a whole makes sense. That kind of honest feedback is worth more than any software audit.

We also talked about the interview itself. Interviews often test how well someone interviews rather than how well they can do the job. Breaking multi-part questions into individual ones, sharing the format in advance, offering a choice of setting, building in breaks: none of these are radical changes. They are adjustments that remove anxiety and allow the candidate to show you what they can actually do.

And on adjustments, here is a small shift that costs nothing. Instead of asking “Do you need any reasonable adjustments?” try asking “Is there anything we can do to support you through this process?” It is a more open question and it does not put the burden of decoding the word “reasonable” onto the candidate.

The takeaway from our conversation that I keep coming back to is this: design your recruitment to reflect the actual job. If the role does not require someone to give rapid-fire verbal answers under pressure, why are you testing for that in the interview? Think about what you are genuinely assessing and whether it maps to what you actually need.

I would love to know what your experience has been. Are there changes you have made to your hiring process that have made a real difference? And are there things you are still wrestling with? These are exactly the conversations this community exists to have.

Jacquelyn Mahoney
HR Partnerships Manager | Connecting and Supporting HR Professionals across Cambridgeshire and Peterborough