I recently chaired a panel in Manchester on behalf of the Manchester Health Series, alongside four
other medical and life science recruiters. We were there to talk honestly about recruitment challenges
in the region: how effective we are at attracting good people, what is really happening with retention,
and whether we are doing enough to hire with diversity, equity, and inclusion genuinely in mind.
Of all the topics we covered, the DEI conversation generated the most heat. Not because anyone
disagreed with the principle. Every recruiter on that panel was supportive of DEI initiatives. The
frustration came from somewhere more uncomfortable: the gap between what we all believe and what
actually happens when a hiring manager is under pressure to fill a seat.
That gap is where I want to spend some time, because I think it is where the real work needs to
happen.
The Resume Redaction Conversation Has Moved Further Than You Think
Most people in talent and recruitment are familiar with blind CV screening. You remove the name,
the address, maybe the graduation year, and you reduce the risk of unconscious bias creeping in
before a candidate gets a fair hearing. It is a reasonable first step, and it is increasingly common.
What surprised some people in the room was hearing that one client had gone considerably further.
They had also redacted hobbies and interests from applications, specifically to avoid any
preconceived ideas forming about a person before the first conversation. When you think about it
carefully, that makes a lot of sense. Hobbies and interests can signal class background, social circles,
and cultural affiliations in ways that are subtle but real. Leaving them in is an invitation for bias to
enter through the back door.
The panel was broadly supportive of that approach. But the consensus was clear: progress is slow.
And the reason it is slow is not a lack of tools. The tools exist. The question is whether they are
actually being implemented, and how rigorously.
Because here is what tends to happen in practice. A hiring manager is three months into a recruitment
process, the business is growing, the pressure is on, and they fall back on what they know. Familiar
universities. Familiar backgrounds. Familiar routes into the industry. The intention to do things
differently quietly evaporates under the weight of urgency, and the same patterns repeat themselves.
This is not a character flaw. It is a human response to pressure. But it is also how bias perpetuates
itself even inside organisations that genuinely believe they are doing better.
Getting to the Interview is Only Half the Problem
Here is the part of the conversation that I think deserves far more attention than it typically gets.
Even if you redact everything. The name, the address, the university, the hobbies and interests. Even
if the written screening process is as clean and bias-resistant as it can possibly be. You still have to get
to the interview. And at the interview stage, the process hands control back to human judgment, and
all of that careful preparation can unravel quickly.
Some hiring managers still hold strong preferences for candidates from certain universities. And those
universities often have a specific demographic profile. So even a fully redacted CV can funnel
candidates toward a shortlist that was shaped, upstream, by a preference that was never declared or
examined.
And then the interview panel itself. If the people sitting across the table all share the same
background, the same sector experience, the same cultural reference points, you have not removed
bias. You have just deferred it. The written process was diverse. The human moment was not.
The honest answer, and this was the panel’s view too, is that a diverse interview panel is one of the
most effective interventions available. Having people with different perspectives in the room changes
what gets noticed, what gets valued, and what gets through. It is not a perfect solution, but it is a
meaningful one.
The Scale Problem Nobody Talks About
Here is where the conversation gets more complicated, and where I think a lot of the mainstream DEI
discussion falls short.
Most of the frameworks, tools, and best practices around inclusive hiring were designed with larger
organisations in mind. A global pharmaceutical company or a well-funded NHS trust has the
infrastructure, the HR leadership, and the headcount to build diverse interview panels, run structured
training, and implement process changes systematically.
A small health tech startup with a team of six does not have that luxury.
When we talked about this on the panel, the practical reality came into focus quickly. If a founder-led
company wants to create a diverse interview panel but does not have that diversity internally, what do
they do? Bring in someone externally to sit on the panel? That is a cost. That is a logistical ask. For a
company that is already stretched, it becomes another thing that gets deprioritised.
I want to be pragmatic about this, because I think it is important not to make DEI feel like an
impossible standard that only well-resourced organisations can reach. For smaller health tech
companies, the most honest and actionable starting point is to focus on what you can control first.
Start with the initial screen. Full redaction of the resume, including name, address, university, and
hobbies and interests, is a realistic and meaningful first step. It does not cost a significant amount to
implement. It does not require a large team. And it removes bias at the point in the process where you
have the most leverage, before human judgment enters the picture at all.
That is not the complete answer. But it is a better first step than waiting until you have the resources
to do everything perfectly before you do anything at all.
Culture Is the Variable That Everything Else Depends On
The panel’s broader conclusion, and one I share, is that DEI in recruitment is not purely a tools
problem. It is a culture problem. And culture has to be driven from the top.
Process changes matter. Redaction matters. Diverse panels matter. But if the leadership of an
organisation has not genuinely committed to this, the process changes become box-ticking. They get
implemented lightly, monitored loosely, and quietly abandoned when the next hiring push comes
along.
The most effective interventions tend to come from HRDs or senior leaders who have made this a
visible priority, who have ensured that interview panels reflect the diversity the business says it
values, and who hold hiring managers accountable for the process, not just the outcome.
That is a harder conversation to have than recommending a new applicant tracking system. But it is
the right one.
Twenty years of working in and building teams in medical technology has taught me that the talent
decisions made early in a company’s life set a trajectory that is very hard to change later. The teams
that get built in the first few years of a health tech business tend to shape its culture, its decisionmaking, and its ability to attract and retain diverse talent for a long time after.
Getting this right is not just an ethical imperative. It is a strategic one. And in a market as competitive
as Manchester health tech, where the fight for skilled people is real and ongoing, the companies that
figure this out earlier will have a genuine advantage.
The first screen is where you start. But it is only the beginning of the conversation.
