When I started Intuitive thirteen years ago, it was just me, a laptop and an ambition. I wanted to build a business where candidates were treated as people and personalities, not a list of past job titles, because a CV might be where the conversation starts, but it should never be where it ends.
Thirteen years on, and with National Inclusion Week here again, it’s been encouraging to see how much that conversation has changed in transport. Representation is discussed more openly, and there’s less tolerance for the idea that leadership should come from one narrow mould. That’s real progress, and it’s worth marking.
It also gives us a reason to look more closely at the decisions that still favour the familiar, and to imagine what could open up if we didn’t.
Representation can improve without the route into leadership changing very much, because the process around it tends to stay the same even as the people in front of it change. A brief can still describe the last person who held the role, a search can still draw from familiar networks, and an interview can still reward people who know how to present themselves in the expected way. When the assumptions underneath a process go unexamined, a business can end up looking more open while making much the same decisions about who belongs at the top.
This year’s theme, Build Trust. Navigate Change, feels made for this moment. It’s an invitation to look at the places where a great applicant can get ruled out before anyone has properly understood what they can do, and to build something better. Here are five places to start.
1. Start with the role
Most job briefs get reused rather than rewritten: copy the old requirements across, a few tweaks here and there, change the date, and the brief is done. That’s quick, but it hides a real problem, because the role itself may have moved on since it was last written. Revisit it, and you open the door to someone brilliant who might otherwise never have applied.
Someone may have been hired to build a function that now needs steadier leadership through a restructure, or to set up a team whose next job is repairing relationships. The title can stay exactly the same while the job underneath it changes completely. Start by asking what the business needs from this appointment now, not what it needed from the last one, and you might be surprised who fits.
2. The must-haves
Job descriptions have a habit of collecting requirements long after anyone remembers why they were added. By the time a search begins, the essential criteria can end up describing the last person in the role, rather than the job itself.
Some requirements earn their place. Regulatory knowledge may be essential, so might hands-on experience of a particular operating environment. Others are there simply because nobody’s stopped to question them. Does somebody really need ten years in the sector, or has that become shorthand for experience? Strip those away, and your strongest candidate might have been there all along.
There’s no prize for a longer list of essentials. If you can’t explain what a requirement will actually help somebody do in the role, it probably shouldn’t decide who gets considered.
3. Beyond transport
Moving from one part of transport to another isn’t starting from scratch. Someone who’s led a complex operation, or taken people through change, already knows plenty about making decisions under pressure, even without experience in exactly that corner of the sector.
Sector knowledge helps. But someone who’s already learned to lead through uncertainty may bring more to the job than their CV suggests, and that’s a genuinely exciting thing to bet on.
Looking to other safety-critical or transport-adjacent sectors can bring in people who still ask the questions the rest of us stopped asking years ago, and sometimes those are exactly the questions that move things forward.
At Intuitive, we’re proud that 54% of our placements have come from outside of the sector. And with over 90% of our candidates still in their role after two years, there’s a strong indication that the right leadership experience can translate, even when it comes from a different industry.
4. Help people see the fit
By the time a role reaches shortlist stage, plenty of people have already decided they’re probably not the obvious choice. Someone whose career hasn’t followed the usual route may spot the gaps in a job description before they notice how much of it they already match. A nudge at the right moment can change that.
If someone’s been approached because something in their experience caught the hiring team’s eye, they should be told what it was. “You’ve led through exactly this kind of change before” gives someone something real to think about, and something to feel genuinely proud of. “We thought you might be interested” could be sent to anyone.
Inside organisations, people are more likely to put themselves forward when they’ve already been trusted with work that stretches beyond their job title. That confidence is much easier to build long before a senior vacancy appears, so the groundwork starts now, not when the role opens up.
5. Rethink the interview
An interview is a strange test when you think about it. It uses few hours of conversation, less if the interview has fewer stages, and possibly a presentation to task to judge how somebody might lead over the next several years. It’s worth asking whether that process is really telling us what we need to know.
Some people are brilliant at this particular format. They think quickly and make their experience sound clear and compelling under pressure. It’s a skill, but it isn’t the same as showing how they’ll lead on the job.
For some neurodivergent candidates, a conventional panel can place too much weight on behaviours that have little to do with the work itself. Candidates shouldn’t have to guess their way through the format. Let them know what to expect, ask whether reasonable adjustments would help, and give their answers room to arrive. Give people the best shot at showing you who they actually are.
The conversation has moved on. Have our hiring habits?
Transport has made real progress, but the harder part is letting that progress change the everyday choices made around a senior appointment, appointment by appointment, until it’s simply how we work.
Sometimes the old habits are the easiest to miss, because they look like common sense, not bias. A job description gets carried over without anyone revisiting why a requirement is there. A familiar name feels reassuring before anyone’s worked out whether it’s right for the job as it now exists.
The next appointment is a good place to test it. Does the brief describe the job you need now, or is it quietly asking for the last person again?
People still need to meet the demands of the role. But the right person may not arrive in the shape we expect. Organisations need to be willing to recognise what they could bring, not just what their CV already tells us, and to be a little braver about who they let lead next.
Transport’s next chapter is still being written, and more people deserve the chance to help write it.
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