Affirmative action?

[millymollymandy988]

Is it considered ok these days for employers to tell recruiter that they are only interested in interviewing female or diverse candidates?

It depends on the role, but usually not. There are obviously some roles where specifying female-only would be lawful. I suppose there could potentially be a very tiny number of roles where specifying a certain ethnicity could be lawful.

But otherwise, no.

What can happen is that companies trying to improve their diversity will make sure that there are a minimum number of female and diverse candidates interviwed for every role, but this doesn't mean that only female/diverse are considered.

However what I have seen is where we have loooooads of male candidates for a role, and we struggle to find interested/qualified females for example, that a point comes in the recrutement process where, because we have more than enough qualified male candidates, we ask recruiting to only send us through female candidates