Employer Brand and Diverse Hiring: What Actually Moves the Needle

Most diversity hiring strategies intervene at the application stage — reviewing CVs, training interviewers, adjusting shortlisting criteria. Nerida Rooney, Head of Employer Brand and Strategic Resourcing at Keir, starts much earlier and works across a longer timeline: from school engagement to flexible working design to people-led content that changed the way applicants see the business.

Nerida Rooney has spent five years building employer brand infrastructure inside one of the UK's largest construction businesses, with a particular focus on inclusion, authentic storytelling, and the structural changes to hiring practice that actually shift demographics over time.

The pipeline problem starts in schools — and the fix has to start there too

• When Keir visited secondary schools, students said they wanted to be architects — but the construction industry still doesn't register as a career destination for most young people, and teachers aren't positioned to change that without active engagement
• Scrapping grade and degree requirements for graduates caused the candidate pool to "explode" — people from different backgrounds who had been excluded by the criteria surfaced immediately
• Degree apprenticeships are significantly underused as a diverse hiring tool: candidates earn while they learn, graduate with experience, and avoid the cost-of-living pressures that make traditional university routes inaccessible for many families
• The pressure on 16–18-year-olds to know their career destination is counterproductive; the message needs to shift to possibility rather than certainty

Structural changes to the hiring process matter more than policy statements

• Keir moved from competency-based to strengths-based interviews, removing the format that rewards preparation and recall over authenticity and actual capability
• Two mandatory questions appear in every interview: one on diversity and inclusion (a core value), one on health and safety — non-negotiable, regardless of the role
• Unconscious bias training was delivered across all TA, HR, and hiring manager populations, with explicit emphasis on the fact that everyone carries it — the point is not to feel accused but to become conscious enough to act differently
• Collaborative challenge of manager shortlisting decisions is embedded as normal practice — "you might have missed this person" is a standard prompt, not an escalation

Diversity is a much broader canvas than most organisations are painting on

• Neurodiverse candidates, veterans, people with custodial experience, refugees, people with different religious or cultural backgrounds — all are effectively invisible to standard hiring processes designed around a default profile
• Making Ground: Keir's prison programme brings people into construction work on temporary licence, giving them a reason not to reoffend and a route into employment on release
• Gold Covenant with the Armed Forces: internal networks of people who have served — or whose families are serving — support the transition from military to civilian employment
• The Refugee Programme: qualified engineers and professionals arriving after displacement frequently end up in unrelated work because doors aren't opened; Keir has built a structured route in

Authentic people-led content outperforms curated employer brand content

• "This is Keir" shows employees in their work gear alongside their outside-of-work identity — a highways operative who fishes for England, a site worker who is a professional skateboarder, a head of employer brand who is also a competitive netballer
• The campaign produced a 98% increase in applications in its first month alongside a significant rise in Google searches and careers site views
• Teachers reviewing the new careers site flagged the People Campaign unprompted — students believe starting work means giving up the things they love; this campaign directly challenges that belief
• Authenticity is a retention tool, not just an attraction tool: what is presented externally must reflect what is genuinely true internally, or none of it works

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