On the shortlist: Legal and General

Legal & General has been shortlisted for the 2025 Inclusive Recruitment Award in recognition of its data-led approach to improving gender representation and embedding inclusion across the hiring process. As a proud signatory of the Women in Finance Charter, the organisation has set ambitious goals to achieve 50% female representation company-wide and 40% at middle and senior management levels.

To drive progress, Legal & General has enhanced its data capabilities to track gender representation at every stage of recruitment — from application to offer — enabling precise, insight-driven action. This approach has powered targeted initiatives such as Project Suzie, Beat the Benchmark, and its partnership with Career Returners, which together have strengthened pipelines for female talent in underrepresented areas.

By combining analytics, accountability, and inclusive training, Legal & General is building a recruitment model that ensures opportunity is equitable, measurable, and sustainable.

We asked the team to tell us more…

Why did Legal & General decide to take a data-led approach to inclusive recruitment, and what has it revealed about representation across the hiring process?

At Legal & General, inclusion has long been at the heart of our recruitment strategy. Over the past few years, we’ve made meaningful progress toward our diversity goals, embedding inclusive practices across our hiring processes and building stronger connections with underrepresented talent communities.

However, we recognised that to truly close representation gaps – particularly within teams and disciplines where diverse talent has historically been harder to attract we needed to go further. That meant moving beyond broad initiatives and taking a more targeted, data-led approach.

By leveraging data, we’ve been able to identify specific stages in the hiring process where representation drops off, and pinpoint areas where our outreach, attraction, and selection strategies needed refinement. This insight has allowed us to channel our efforts more effectively whether that’s tailoring sourcing strategies, partnering with specialist organisations or investing in inclusive hiring training for Recruiting Managers. This ensured our initiatives are aligned to the pockets of the business where the need is greatest and, by leveraging data trends and insights, allowed us to gain backing from key stakeholders within our business.

Ultimately, this approach has enabled us to make smarter, more inclusive hiring decisions and improve representation in those challenging areas.

Project Suzie, Beat the Benchmark, Career Returners and Leadership Succession Planning are all standout initiatives – can you share how they came about and the impact they’ve had so far?

Project Suzie was launched as a pilot to address underrepresentation in specific job families, particularly among female talent in niche or technical roles. Using insights from our workforce and recruitment data, we identified roles where representation was lagging and brought recruiters together in focused strategy sessions. These sessions were designed to explore how we could better reach diverse talent pools, leveraging platforms like LinkedIn to identify passive candidates and engaging with diversity partners to strengthen our pipelines. The initiative helped sharpen our sourcing strategies and fostered a more collaborative, intentional approach to inclusive hiring.

Beat the Benchmark introduced a clear, measurable challenge: to meet or exceed external industry benchmarks for female representation in applications across targeted job families. By comparing our internal application data against market benchmarks, we were able to identify where we were underperforming and take action, whether through proactive sourcing, referral campaigns, or deeper engagement with hiring managers to widen the candidate pool. This initiative created greater accountability and encouraged recruiters to think creatively and strategically about how to improve representation.

Career Returners has been an important and valued partner to Legal & General for the past three years, helping us create meaningful opportunities for individuals who have been out of the workplace for 18 months and often face barriers to re-entry. Using our internal recruitment and workforce data, we identified job families where demand was expected to be high in the coming year, and where representation had historically been low. We then worked closely with Career Returners to specifically advertise opportunities within those areas ensuring our outreach was both targeted and inclusive. This partnership has enabled us to tap into a highly skilled but often overlooked talent pool, while also helping to address gender representation gaps in key disciplines. It’s a great example of how data-led decision making, paired with the right external partnerships, can drive real impact in inclusive hiring.

Together, these initiatives have helped us move from reactive to proactive recruitment, using data not just to diagnose gaps but to drive targeted action. They’ve also fostered a culture of shared responsibility across our recruitment teams. The positive progress we made in improving gender representation among new joiners, particularly among more underrepresented and niche skill sets is testament to these initiatives.

What role do recruiters and hiring managers play in driving these changes, and how have you supported them to build more inclusive practices?

Recruiters have been central to driving inclusive recruitment at Legal & General. As the first point of contact in the hiring process, they play a critical role in shaping how roles are positioned, where they’re advertised, and how diverse talent is engaged. We’ve empowered our recruitment teams to act as strategic advisors—guiding hiring managers on inclusive selection channels, refining job copy to remove bias, and taking proactive steps to ensure shortlists reflect a broad spectrum of talent.

To support this, we’ve embedded inclusion into their core objectives, invested in targeted training and upskilling, and encouraged the use of data – particularly individual performance data – to inform and improve sourcing strategies. This has helped create a culture of accountability and continuous improvement, where recruiters are not just facilitators but champions of inclusive hiring.

Hiring managers also play a vital role. Their openness to challenge traditional thinking, reflect on the diversity within their teams, and act as advocates and allies has been key to driving change. We, alongside our HR colleagues and leadership teams have worked closely with them to build awareness, share insights from our data and encourage inclusive decision-making throughout the recruitment journey. Their engagement has helped shift the conversation so that inclusion forms an important part of our conversations when recruiting.

What hurdles did you need to overcome when implementing this strategy, particularly around data, training, or candidate outreach?

Fortunately, gaining buy-in from stakeholders and senior leaders was not a hurdle as our leadership has consistently shown strong engagement with inclusion and a clear understanding of the value that diverse teams bring to performance, innovation, and culture.

The more complex challenges lay in the technical aspects of the strategy, particularly around data. As anyone who works with data knows, collating it, gathering it from multiple sources and presenting it in a way that is both digestible and insight-led can be difficult without the expertise to help. We needed a clear and accurate view of representation across the hiring process to inform our decisions and drive targeted action.

To overcome this, we collaborated closely with our technically minded colleagues who helped us build intuitive tools and dashboards – most notably using platforms like Power BI. These tools allowed us to visualise trends, identify gaps, and tell a compelling story with the data, making it easier for recruiters and hiring managers to act on insights.

In terms of training and outreach, we’ve worked hard to ensure our recruiters are equipped with the skills and confidence to engage diverse talent proactively. This has included upskilling in inclusive sourcing techniques, building partnerships with specialist organisations, and encouraging recruiters to reflect on their own performance data to drive continuous improvement.

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