Natasha and Mandip from our Resourcing Team recently attended an in-house accessibility workshop. In this blog, they discuss their key learnings and how they can play a part in making the recruitment journey more accessible.

Auto Trader's Accessibility Working Group are passionate about making our products more inclusive for customers. One of their commitments is to run knowledge sessions internally to show why this is important and what we can do to improve. When we had the opportunity to join as a Resourcing team, we couldn't wait as candidates are, after all, our team's customers.

We found the session very eye-opening. Looking at it through an attraction lens made us think about the vast pool of candidates who may feel deterred by various stages in our recruitment journey.

We appreciate that it is our differences that make us all so unique. With this, we were pleased to have left the session with two ideas that could make our job adverts and social media posts more accessible:

1. Adding Alt Text in images on social media

During the workshop, we were shown memorable examples. One of these was how large amounts of information and context can get lost when the "Alt Text" feature is not added to imagery to describe the image to people using screen readers.

We use social media to share snapshots of the things we're getting up to as a team, and most of the time, we let the images do the talking.

For example, we have arrived at a local career fair and have set up our vibrant stall; we have banners detailing open vacancies, a friendly sign inviting prospective employees to 'come chat to us' and treats…lots of treats. We take a photo and upload it on LinkedIn with a simple message of 'We're excited to meet attendees at the Manchester Careers Fair today' but with no Alt Text included.

Consider for a moment the amount of information that is missing for a person using a screen reader:

• They won't know how many or what type of vacancies we have
• That we're inviting people to come and speak to us, they won't know we have treats!

With this in mind, we want to learn more about Alt Text's best practices and add this to any images we as a team post on social media.

2. Hemingway for Job adverts

With over 90 years of recruitment experience in the team, we're no strangers to writing job adverts. Even with all this experience, we're guilty of having written a complex or wordy job advert at some point, which is why the Hemingway app is a fantastic tool for recruiters. This online app highlights lengthy, complex sentences and common errors in your work.

When creating an advert, our primary purpose is to ensure candidates understand our company and the role and feel confident in applying. With the average reading age in the U.K. at nine years old, it was a no-brainer for us to begin using this tool immediately.

As a Resourcing Team, we have done so much around accessibility already. We work closely with our internal Disability and Neurodiversity network and externally with a variety of partners such as the National Autistic Society; we are also a Disability Confident Leader and ensure our careers site follows Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Over the coming year, we look forward to sharing our progress and key learnings that we have found with you.

P.S. we have run this blog through Hemingway!