Improving the inclusivity of DWP Digital job adverts
DWP Digital asked Scroll to improve their job adverts in order to help users understand whether they should apply and how.
The challenge
Job adverts in large organisations are often not ‘owned’ by any one particular department. In the case of a government department, content can come from different departments, legal advice, practices, HR, internal initiatives and stakeholders, with no one taking overall ownership of the content in its finished form.
There may be hundreds of job adverts going out in a year, with different vacancy holders, heads of role and recruitment specialists being involved to a greater or lesser extent, and no joined up way of implementing best practice.
This means that job adverts can become long, confusing and sometimes contradictory. This makes it difficult for users who don’t understand the culture of the organisation to apply, leading to a lack of diversity.
On the business side, improving job adverts means time saved in sifting candidates and improved chances of finding candidates from a diverse range of backgrounds.
What they say about working with Scroll
“Given a relatively loose brief and tight time constraint, Scroll tackled the work with enthusiasm and determination. They defined outcomes, identified a wide range of stakeholders to engage with directly, called upon external sources of information, and wove a number of different strands into a coherent approach. Scroll was able to deliver clear content and guidance, along with setting up the conditions to test their outputs objectively under field conditions.”
David Dunbar, Deputy Director, DWP
The solution
Scroll performed desk research and interviewed or surveyed over 80 people involved in some way in the creation of job adverts at DWP Digital.
We also:
investigated the data available to measure any changes that we made
spoke to and collaborated with academics and people in other areas of government who were working on similar challenges
interviewed users from outside of the organisation to understand the adverts from their perspective
This helped us to understand:
where the content on the page came from
who was involved in its creation
what a ‘good’ advert looked like
the principles behind creating a good advert
We then created new guidance for vacancy holders, HR teams and heads of practice and ran a workshop to test the principles behind it, onboarding key people into the new way of working.
User-centred evidence was presented to teams outside of DWP Digital in order to change the content that we had no direct control over.
Finally, we worked closely with vacancy holders and recruitment specialists to implement the guidance into upcoming recruitment campaigns, and advised on measuring their impact.
Results
Our guidance went from research to implementation in under three months
The organisation has a clearer understanding of the challenges, data, wider changes taking place and editorial process required in best-practice job advert creation