Inclusive spaces: bridging the parenting gap

B+B R+D has commissioned this article as part of our ‘test’ and ‘reflect’ inclusion action research. All of the articles in this series represent the views of the author and not of B+B R+D or our partner organisations.

Some of the articles describe experiences of discrimination that readers may find upsetting.

Laura Evans argues that to tackle recruitment bias, we need to look at alternatives to the CV.

Imagine for a moment you’re a stay-at-home parent. (Maybe you are! In which case, hi.) Your children, on whose account you’ve been out of the workplace the past few years, are old enough and in regular-enough childcare or education that you’re thinking, finally, about going back to work.

You start to picture yourself at a desk, or if yours isn’t a desk-based career, on your feet, doing the things you used to back when Pom-Bears and Hey Duggee were nothing but combinations of syllables in the mysterious vernacular you occasionally overheard drifting down the pureed-food aisle: making decisions, I mean, or managing projects or collaborating with colleagues or meeting deadlines. Exercising parts of your brain you haven’t in a long while. You look for jobs, find a few that sound interesting. You dig out your CV.

If you’re anything like me you haven’t touched it since you last did this, years before child no.1 – so you read it over, blow off whatever the digital equivalent is of dust. You sit down to update it, and remember all the things you were good at. What you achieved. Like muscle memory, it starts to come back. You think, maybe this won’t be so hard.

Then – a gap. The last time you were in paid employment was 2016. And suddenly you know it will, in fact, be hard.

Not the job – you can do that, you’ve done it before – but getting one. You’ll be competing against people who haven’t been out of the office for six years. Non-parents, and working parents, many of whose CVs will be consistent escalators of career advancement. Most of them will already be in work – and everyone knows there’s nothing more desirable than being off the market.

You picture your application doing the digital equivalent of whizzing through the air and dropping, plop, into the waste-paper bin. Doubt sets in. Even if they somehow, miraculously, call you in for interview, they will smell the desperation rolling off you, realise hiring you would be an act of charity. Maybe aiming at the seniority you used to work at is too bold, too much of a stretch. Maybe you’d be better off retraining; starting from scratch, but at least you’d be on a level playing field.

If you do screw up the courage to apply, you go into it apologetic or defensive or both, and feeling as if that gap on your CV, not the years of experience preceding it, is what defines you as an applicant.

The CV-jeebies

I’m not saying parents and other primary caregivers have it uniquely tough. Of all the reasons for stepping off the career ladder, parenting’s a big one (and often not a choice but economic necessity; sending an under-two to nursery full-time costs, on average, £263 a week) – but plenty have different caring responsibilities, or take a break for health reasons, or are made redundant (as many have been due to the pandemic alone) and struggle to find another post.

Nor are people who step off the career ladder the only ones disadvantaged by the CV format, which is needlessly prescriptive, places disproportionate emphasis on early accomplishments and makes little allowance for non-typical backgrounds. This blog is about my experience of returning to work after caring for two small children – but in reflecting on this, and why I think the prevalent CV-centric model of recruitment is no longer fit for purpose, I hope I can also represent the experiences of others who find that model working against them.

I never used to have a problem with CVs. I was lucky enough, pre-children, to have a good career, in which I held multiple jobs, almost all of which I got through an application process that began with a CV and cover letter. The system worked well for me, a person who knew how the system worked. I never thought to question whether it worked more broadly.

When I began to look for a job after six years as a stay-at-home parent, I still didn’t question it. I was acutely conscious of the gap in my work history, and of it widening with every month I wasn’t back in employment – but it didn’t occur to me that the system was, in this respect, stacked against me.

Even if it had, I couldn’t have told you what I thought should change. All I really felt was frustration, and a growing lack of confidence in my own ability. Advice to reframe the childrearing years as relevant experience – look how good you are at prioritising! Multitasking! Performing your role effectively on agonisingly little sleep! – was well-intentioned but demeaning. Being out of the workplace for a year or two, or in my case six, doesn’t mean you’ve lost the aptitude and knowledge you’ve devoted well over a decade to acquiring. (Obviously, there’s an exception for areas where continuing professional development is very important, such as medicine – but even then, returnees shouldn’t be made to feel they need to go back to square one.)

A new approach

The lightbulb moment for me – and the impetus for this blog – was when I applied for a job that didn’t ask for a CV at all. Instead, the application involved answering a series of questions, all capped at 250 words (which, incidentally, meant I felt able to throw my hat into the ring without needing to carve out vast swathes of time from family life – a bonus).

The questions were a mix of ‘tell us about yourself/your interests/why you want the job’ and ‘what would you do in x situation’ – in other words, designed to understand who applicants were, what they were good at and whether they would be a good fit for the role. As I was applying for a comms position, there were a couple of short writing-based tasks. And only one question that asked me to summarise my previous experience – yes, in 250 words. No dates. No employers or educational establishments, unless I wanted to give them. It was the first time in a very long time, possibly ever, that I’d actually enjoyed an application.

I didn’t get the job, but it was eye-opening to take part in a recruitment process that cared more about who I was and what I could do than what I happened to have spent the past few years doing. I started to wonder why we aren’t doing more of this sort of hiring – that works equally well for all candidates, regardless of background; that unlike CVs doesn’t funnel out at an early stage (or discourage from applying altogether) non-typical applicants who would be brilliant at the job. That is much more likely to result in unbiased recruitment across the board.

Moving with the times

Compare it with the CV, a relic of the days when people chose a career and stuck at it, climbing the ladder and occasionally stepping sideways onto another, equally respectable, one. (In most cases these people were men.) We don’t work like that anymore. We take time out – not just for family or health but to travel, to develop new skills. We change direction – in such numbers, after two years of Covid-19, we’re apparently in the middle of a Great Resignation. We develop portfolio careers, diverse income streams. The CV presupposes a linear working life that for a significant proportion of people just doesn’t reflect reality.

It also props up a hiring culture in which bias, unconscious or otherwise, continues to be a real problem. It normalises continuous working, and demands justification for any departure from that pattern; like school attendance prizes handed out only to those fortunate enough never to have been off sick, it penalises people for factors beyond their control. And then there’s the issue that while prospective employers aren’t allowed to ask if you have children, for women in particular that gap in their work history answers the question regardless. No matter how skilled you are at massaging a CV (and it is a form of privilege to know you’re even allowed to massage it, much less how) there is no disguising a gap of six years.

Even so, the CV, along with the cover letter, is so entrenched a recruitment tool that most businesses don’t think to question it. Some would no doubt argue there isn’t anything wrong with it, or that while it’s flawed there isn’t a viable alternative. And I’m sure there are any number of employers who’d swear blind they can see past gaps on a CV, not realising they’re only perpetuating the attitude that gaps are disadvantages; that they need to be overlooked.

Thankfully, that attitude is gradually being revised. Last year LinkedIn made ‘stay-at-home parent’ a valid job description, and earlier this year introduced the option to explain gaps in work history, with categories including ‘full-time parenting’, ‘health and wellbeing’ and ‘personal goal pursuit’. As the site says, “Experiences outside a linear career path can make people better colleagues, thought partners, and leaders.”

Well, yes. But there’s talking the talk, and there’s walking the walk – and while I’m not saying there aren’t plenty of fair, inclusive employers who’d welcome talented, experienced applicants (who are at worst a little rusty), the problem is, unless they make that explicit applicants won’t know. And in the absence of other information, faced with the dinosaur that is the double CV-and-cover-letter whammy, non-standard applicants are going to carry on assuming the things that make them non-standard will be perceived as negatives.

Moving away from this route, and investing time, effort and budget in a new approach to recruitment that aims at being as close to unbiased as possible, says: we are interested in you, who you are, what you can do. It says: we recognise that not everyone fits the same mould, and that hiring people of diverse backgrounds and experiences benefits us as an organisation. In my case, it says: we don’t believe taking time out to parent makes you any less good at your job than you were before.

What if?

As far as I can see there are no downsides that don’t apply to any new way of doing things. Effort. Cost. Perhaps a little nervousness (understandably! Developing a genuinely unbiased approach to recruitment is something a lot of organisations agonise over.) But when the system is palpably broken, even small changes can make a difference.

I’m a long way from an HR expert – but imagine what might happen if businesses took CVs and cover letters out of the equation. If they asked themselves, in an ideal world, how would we find our ideal employee? If they thought about what they wanted to know about an applicant, instead of what they were supposed to.

What would happen if they asked questions designed to gauge how a candidate would perform in the job, rather than interrogating their credentials and past experience? If they considered using a third-party platform geared towards removing bias from the recruitment process? (I can’t name names here, but the skills-based assessment platform I used as an applicant was excellent – and states, incidentally, that in a randomised trial 60% of hires made through its platform would have been missed in a CV-based sift. Interesting, right?)

What would happen if, in a small recruitment round, they interviewed every single candidate?

What if they said, here’s someone you can talk to before you even begin applying, or, here’s a place to anonymously post questions, and we’ll answer them? What if they said, we recognise it’s hard coming back to the office, so we’ll offer induction sessions that remind you how to use the photocopier/what all those technical terms are you’ve forgotten?

What if they made an explicit statement that they cared about passion and aptitude, not what degree a person has or where they’ve worked before?

What if they said, loudly and often, if you think you don’t fit in, you’re welcome here? If you’ve a history of debilitating depression, or you’ve had a patchwork career. Or you’ve taken time out to bring up two small children.

None of these changes are impossible. Most aren’t even that big. All of them, to me, seem revolutionary.