How Maersk Tankers built a more inclusive recruitment process

What Maersk Tankers solved with Develop Diverse

“At the start of this project, we set ambitious goals to improve our gender balance,” Kathrine says. “But as we learned more, we shifted our focus to fostering inclusion across our whole company. As a result, we completely redesigned our recruitment process.“

Inclusive language in job adverts

Implementing Develop Diverse helped Kathrine and her team make more conscious language choices in their job adverts, and meant that hiring managers at Maersk Tankers felt more equipped to write more inclusive job adverts.

More inclusive recruitment process

“Our hiring managers now lead our screening interviews and start that initial conversation with our candidates instead of HR. They’re voice-only calls, meaning there’s no room for beauty bias — and managers can more accurately assess skills, and if it feels like a good dialogue.”

“We have also standardised our interview questions so that each candidate is consistently assessed on the same criteria. When we run assessments, we don’t provide hiring managers with the results until they get into the interview room so that it doesn’t skew their opinions of a candidate’s level of skill or knowledge.”

“Our candidates love the process, because they feel like they’re able to make a connection with our managers — and our managers do too, because it gives them clearer and fairer criteria on how to assess competencies.”

In short, Maersk Tankers revisited their DEI policy and now they are much more robust in embedding diversity and inclusion throughout their recruitment process. 

Over half of the company’s new hires were women

Over time, this larger cultural transformation has yielded some impressive results. Maersk Tankers saw a significant increase in female applicants, which led to increased female hires. In 2021, over half of the company’s new hires were women.