Recruitment data matters when it helps leaders decide where to act. A strong review connects attraction activity with outcomes, leadership accountability and candidate experience, rather than treating diversity as a slogan. UK employers now have official labour market data by ethnic group, but national figures cannot explain who sees, enters or progresses through a particular vacancy.

That distinction matters. An organisation may report a diverse workforce while a current campaign reaches few candidates from groups missing in a job family. It may also attract a broad audience but lose people at application, assessment or offer stage.

Start with a small, repeatable campaign record. For each vacancy, note the role, location, dates, channels used, advert changes, and any candidate engagement indicators available. Record application and selection outcomes only where lawful, proportionate data is available, and explain missing or undisclosed data. Do not treat a click as an application, or an application as a hire.

Use national ethnic labour market data to frame questions, not to set a simplistic quota or predict the applicant pool. Check whether your own monitoring categories are useful, whether groups are being collapsed into a single label, and whether sample sizes support comparison.

Outreach beyond familiar pipelines can help when an employer identifies an audience gap and tests an additional channel alongside its careers site, ATS and suppliers.

That makes decisions easier to explain and repeat across teams.

Review these findings routinely so teams can adjust future campaigns and explain their decisions.

Ethnic Jobsite can be considered as an additional channel where a vacancy needs focused ethnic candidate outreach. The decision should rest on clear objectives, comparable campaign measures and a review of what happened before shortlisting.

If you reviewed five recent vacancies, could you show which audiences each campaign reached and what changed as a result?