Inclusive Hiring Audits for Fair, Skills-Based Recruitment

Comprehensive, evidence-led Hiring Audits that help organisations understand how fair, effective, and skills-based their hiring practices truly are.

A few of the employers we’ve audited

  • Red text displaying the word 'AON' on a white background.
  • Logo for Adam & eve with black and yellow design elements.
  • Logo with a stylized blue keyhole shape and the word "global" written below in black lowercase letters.
  • McCann Worldgroup logo with the text 'McCann' above 'Worldgroup' on a white background.
  • Chatham House logo with blue globe icon and text.
  • Logo with a stylized dark blue dog figure and the word 'hippo' in lowercase letters.
  • The Baringa logo featuring a cluster of colored triangles to the left of the word 'Baringa' written in blue text.

Recruitment Audits

Our audits go beyond surface-level reviews to examine how decisions are made in practice, where bias and barriers emerge, and what will make the biggest difference.

Each audit provides a clear, credible view of your current state, alongside practical, prioritised recommendations you can act on with confidence with scalable impact.

What Our Audits Do

Our Inclusive Hiring Audits are designed to:

  • Identify bias, inconsistency, and risk across the hiring lifecycle

  • Assess how hiring processes operate in reality, not just on paper

  • Evaluate candidate experience across diverse groups

  • Strengthen fairness, accessibility, and decision quality

  • Support compliance, governance, and defensible hiring outcomes

Audits can be delivered globally and adapted to local legislation, policy, and cultural context.

“Jennie at Balance successfully led the discovery phase of the inclusive hiring transformation project with clarity of purpose and excellent business partnering. With her brilliant experience and hands-on, collaborative approach, she gained a rich understanding across the business, distilled it into clear insights, and championed tailored, actionable solutions.”
— Laura Yeoman, Head of HR adam&eveDDB
ARRANGE A DISCOVERY CALL

Our Audit Framework

Our audits are built around six core pillars, developed through years of real-world audit and advisory work.

Talent Attraction and Reach

How roles are designed, advertised, and positioned, and who they are likely to reach.

Process and Policy and skills

The structure, consistency, and clarity of hiring processes, policies, and guidance.

Candidate Experience and skills

How candidates experience the process at each stage, including fairness, clarity, and feedback.

Bias Mitigation skills

Where bias enters decision-making and how effectively it is mitigated through structure, tools, and behaviours.

Accessibility and Equity


How well processes support and remove barriers for disabled and neurodivergent candidates.

Leadership Commitment

The role of leaders in setting expectations, accountability, and culture around hiring decisions.

Your Questions, Answered

  • An inclusive hiring audit is a structured review of how hiring decisions are designed and made in practice. It examines attraction, assessment, interview and selection processes to identify bias, inconsistency and barriers, and provides practical recommendations to improve fairness, decision quality and candidate experience.

  • Inclusive hiring audits are designed for organisations that want to improve their hiring processes, reduce bias, and strengthen decision-making. They are commonly used by Talent Acquisition teams, HR and People leaders, and senior leaders responsible for hiring outcomes and governance.

  • An audit supports skills-based hiring by identifying where decisions rely on proxies such as experience, background or employer brand rather than evidence of skills. It helps organisations redesign criteria, assessment methods and scoring approaches so candidates are evaluated more consistently against the skills required for the role.

  • Yes. We work with organisations operating across multiple regions and adapt audits to local legislation, policy and cultural context. This ensures recommendations are practical, compliant and relevant, while maintaining consistent principles for fair and inclusive hiring globally.

  • The length of an inclusive hiring audit depends on the size of the organisation and the scope of the review. As a guide, audits typically run for a minimum of three months, with more complex or global audits taking up to nine months to complete.

  • Audit fees are tailored to the size, complexity and scale of the engagement. Fees typically start from £15,000 (US $20,000) and increase depending on factors such as organisational size, geographic coverage and depth of analysis.