International law firm Addleshaw Goddard has announced a series of updates to its graduate recruitment processes, designed to provide a stronger focus on diversity and inclusion as the firm works to ensure it is bringing in the very best diverse talent by removing any potential barriers into the businesses.

Moving forward, the firm's Graduate Recruitment Team will be adopting a number of new initiatives, including revising its approach to how it attracts talented graduates in the first place, with a greater focus on attendance at law fairs and events that have a particular focus on diversity and inclusion.

The firm will also be actively working to reduce unconscious bias during the selection process by introducing blind recruitment at the application stage, to ensure that a person’s personal details do not create bias. It will also be replacing video interviews with voice interviews, to ensure that those who are either not comfortable on video or simply do not have the facilities to participate in a professional video call are not excluded, and introducing unconscious bias training for assessors at each stage of the recruitment and interview process.

Finally, AG has announced a new partnership with RARE Recruitment, a market leader in diverse graduate recruitment, to replace its historic recruitment process with contextual recruitment. This will allow the firm to identify overachievers by putting into context the background in which students have received their grades, considering key factors such as time in care, eligibility for free school meals, postcode, excessive work during term time and registered carer status, and uses data from all schools in the UK to compare the applicant’s grades to the grades in their school in their year. To further compliment this, AG has also removed all minimum A-level requirements to allow a more diverse pool of candidates to apply for training contracts. 

Niki Lawson, HR Director at Addleshaw Goddard, comments: "Making sure we are bringing the very best talent into the business by removing any barriers and making it more accessible to all is one of the key priorities for the firm. Whilst this work won't produce results overnight, we are very hopeful it will go a long way to helping us build a more diverse and inclusive firm."

Find out more