In November 2023, the Young Trustees Movement undertook its first round of board recruitment. This was an important step on our journey to establishing ourselves as an independent organisation.

As a movement that champions young people becoming involved in charity governance, we wanted to share some of the lessons that we learnt along the way.

One of the pieces of feedback that we heard consistently from candidates was that they valued the human nature of our recruitment process. For example, we hosted a recruitment information event in late August, which was well attended. Multiple candidates at interview mentioned that they had watched the session and at least one successful candidate stated that they had been encouraged to apply as a result. We would encourage others to consider ways in which they can present charitable governance in a human way during their recruitment process – we feel our information event was an effective way of doing so for us.

We made a deliberate attempted to cast the net far and wide, knowing that we needed to recruit diversity in thought, experience and perspective to enable the movement to be governed effectively.

Despite our efforts, our applicant pool was limited by our identity as an organisation and the pool of candidates that existed in the sector.

A number of prospective candidates who were over the age of 30 shared with us that they did not apply as they felt that the role was not suitable for them due to their age. On the other hand, and perhaps unsurprisingly, applicants with previous experience as a young trustee were significantly overrepresented in our recruitment process (51% of applicant possessed this experience). This highlighted to us the importance of finding new and innovative ways of reaching groups outside of our network in future rounds of recruitment. We don’t know what these methods will be yet, but it’s clear that our identity as an organisation had a significant impact on the candidates who we attracted.

At the same time, we also suffered from the same challenges felt by the sector as a whole - just 3% of trustees are under the age of 30 and 0.5% are under the age of 25. We struggled to attract applications from those under the age of 25, and believe that younger young people progressed through our application processes at a less favourable rate than those young people who were over 25.

In a strange way, our own recruitment process highlighted the need for our work – younger people weren’t reached by a relatively conventional trustee recruitment process, even when those over the age of 30 were put off from applying as a result of our organisational identity. We need to reconsider how we position trusteeship as an appealing option for those under the age of 25, and how we build a pipeline of future trustees through our educational and youth work systems.

We took great care when designing our recruitment process to ensure that it was as inclusive as possible. Some of the measures that we took included:

• Anonymising all applications before they were reviewed by the appointments panel;
• Deciding not to collect educational history as part of the application process;
• Asking candidates to submit responses to questions related to the selection criteria, rather than a cover letter or CV.
• We had a young trustee leading every interview.

Our approach definitely brought benefits. We feel that unconscious bias was minimised and the standardised application format meant that only relevant factors were considered.

However, we also learnt that inclusive recruitment is a complex thing. Anonymising applications alone is not enough. A number of candidates spoke vulnerably about the intersectional nature of their identities in their response to our application questions. These responses could not be anonymised without fundamentally changing the nature of the candidates experience.

We were also very conscious that asking candidates to submit answers to application questions and to list their experience though our application form, rather than via a CV, could have placed a time burden on those who we were trying to help.

Our main learning here is that inclusive recruitment is complex, and needs to be flexible based on the needs of the applicant. By combining the procedural measures outlined above with inclusive recruitment training for appointment panels and a diversity of perspectives forming the panel, a holistic and considered approach can be crafted, but without flexibility great candidates may still be lost.