To our community

To our community,

We work day and night to help people to do work that matters to them and the world. Every week we send you updates, inspiration, and advice to help you to make that leap for yourselves. It’s a mission we believe in. We have dedicated 10 years of our lives to making it possible. It’s something we’ve seen the positive effects of thousands of times. And if there is one thing that we are sure about, it’s that people doing work that matters to them can change the world.

And yet at the same time, we have to recognise that this privilege to think about doing work that really matters to us, is just that, a privilege. One which is not necessarily available or accessible to everyone. Not everyone has the ability to think about meaningful work, they’re focusing instead on getting by, on fighting the inequalities they have faced their whole lives. And when they do have space to look for work, their access to opportunities, networks, education, experience, and lifestyle is not equal.

Let’s be clear, helping anyone to do meaningful work is important, regardless of who they are. But to fail to acknowledge that access to doing so is not equal would be wrong. We live in a world of vast inequalities, of feast and famine, of fairness and injustice. And so the question has to be asked - what can we do to adjust the imbalances in the system? And this starts on our own front door. This is something we must address.

Work is such a major part of our lives. We spend more time at work than we do at home, more time with our colleagues than our families. And so how do we ensure that access to better opportunities is more evenly dispersed? How do we highlight the organisations who are walking the talk, and not just including diversity and inclusion as a byline? How do we acknowledge the biases that individuals face when applying for jobs?

We first have to acknowledge that all of these things are true. It’s where we are. It’s a problem. And it’s a problem that we have not always prioritised fixing. But as we move forward, we know that building a more inclusive and fairer world means practicing this every single day. It means taking responsibility for the impact we can have and taking action to do what we are able to. So, what does that look like for us?

For employers

• Working with employers to help highlight, educate, and ameliorate biases in the recruitment process. Often large organisations have training and support to make this possible, whereas smaller organisations do not. 
• Building a platform that reduces bias in the hiring process. Supporting ‘blind hiring’ through our applicant tracking system, where the best candidates sift to the top based on potential and aptitude alone. 
• Creating a new category in our Escape 100 campaign, to measure diversity of team and to highlight organisations who are walking the talk.

For jobseekers

• To help job seekers to navigate biases that exist in the recruitment world, and help educate them as to how they can tackle these biases when they are applying to jobs. 
• Providing better access to the educational side of Escape we’ve built up over 10 years. Making this more accessible to people regardless of location, background, or ability to pay.
• Supporting the creation of better job descriptions, to remove subconscious barriers to applying and helping to improve access to opportunities.
• Supporting ‘blind hiring’ by employers. Enabling this in our platform so that you can feel confident when you’ve applied that your application has been judged on merit and not anything else.

We recognise that we have a lot to do. And there are bigger and more radical actions we could take, but as with all things, we must start where we are and do what we can. And so we will.

This is our commitment to you, our community, that we will work hard to change the industry for the better, to make meaningful work more accessible and achievable for as many people as we are able to.

We will need your help. We will need your support. We won’t always get it right, but we are going to try. We're listening. We're learning. We're unlearning. We’re ok with being wrong. We’re getting curious about how we can be truly supportive of those whose experiences we can’t really know as our own. If we’re going to build a fairer and more inclusive world, it’s a practice we’ll have to do every single day. That’s something we can get behind. We hope you can too.

A few extra bits:

Check out this essential reading list for fighting racism.

Support one of the many UK anti-racism causes with a donation.

Activate your anti-racism with this brilliant advice.

Read about British colonialism and Black British history.

Learn more about white privilege. 

Understand how hiring bias can affect your organisation.