Every June, job boards get a little more colourful. 

Company logos swap to rainbow versions. LinkedIn fills with posts about inclusion. Hiring managers dust off their diversity statements and schedule them for the first of the month. 

Then July arrives. The logos go back. The posts stop. The statements sit in a folder nobody opens until next year. 

For LGBTQ+ candidates, this pattern isn’t invisible. It’s exhausting. 

The gap between the ad and the door 

Job descriptions have become fluent in the language of inclusion. “We celebrate diversity.” “Bring your whole self to work.” “An equal opportunities employer.” 

Repeated often enough, they stop being promises and start being punctuation. 

A candidate who has spent years navigating workplaces where “whole self” had an asterisk attached knows better than to take the copy at face value. The problem isn’t that companies are lying, necessarily. It’s that the gap between what gets written in a job ad and what exists on the other side of the door is rarely verified by anyone. 

The statement gets drafted. It gets published. Nobody checks whether it’s true. 

That’s a recruitment problem. And one the industry appears to have been comfortable ignoring. 

“Culture fit” does a lot of heavy lifting 

Few phrases in hiring carry more unchecked power than “culture fit”. 

On paper it sounds reasonable – you want someone who’ll gel with the team. In practice, it functions as one of the most reliable mechanisms for filtering out people who don’t look, sound, or present like whoever’s already in the room. 

LGBTQ+ candidates are not naive about this. 1 in 5 have experienced discrimination directly during a job application. A 2025 Stonewall UK study found that nearly 39% of LGBTQ+ staff feel they must conceal their identity on the job – and that’s once they’re already through the door. The editing starts long before that; during the process itself, in the language they choose, the details they omit, the version of themselves they decide it’s safe to present. Not because they’re ashamed. Because they’ve learned that visible difference can tip a decision. 

That’s not a candidate problem to solve. That’s a structural failure in how hiring works. 

Verification runs both ways 

TYP Group exists because the recruitment process is disjointed – on both sides. Employers can’t always trust what they’re seeing. Candidates can’t always trust what they’re being told. 

When a candidate sees an inclusion statement, they have no mechanism to verify it. No way to know whether it reflects a genuine culture or a paragraph copied from a template. No way to know whether the team they’d be joining has ever had a difficult conversation about belonging – or whether it just hasn’t come up yet. 

Real People. Real Roles. Verified. For that to mean anything, the verification has to run both ways. 

What good actually looks like 

Inclusion in hiring isn’t a logo filter or a one-line statement. It shows up in specifics; 

Interviewers trained to recognise their own bias – not just avoid protected characteristic questions. 

Job descriptions that describe the role, not a personality type built around whoever last held it. 

Workplaces where the inclusion conversation happens in October and February too, not just June. 

None of this is complicated. Most of it is just discipline. 

Pride month is worth marking. But the candidates who need the recruitment process to work for them aren’t checking the calendar. 

They need it to work in August too. 

That’s the standard we’re holding ourselves to – and the one we think the industry should be held to as well.