Where LGBTQ+ Candidates Actually Look for Work

Most organisations that want to hire more LGBTQ+ people start in the wrong place. They rewrite the careers page, add a statement, put the flag up in June, and wait. Then they conclude that the talent is not out there.

The talent is out there. It is simply not looking where you are advertising, and it is applying filters you have not thought about.

What the behaviour actually looks like

myGwork sees more than a million users a month and over 500,000 job applications a month across 450+ inclusive employers. That is not a niche audience politely reading about diversity. It is a hiring market operating in parallel to the one most employers advertise into.

The reason it exists is straightforward. For an LGBTQ+ candidate, the ordinary job search has an extra step: before deciding whether they want the job, they have to work out whether the employer is safe. A general job board gives them the vacancy and nothing else. So they go somewhere that answers the second question first.

That reordering is the thing to understand. Employer research does not happen after the application. It happens before, and it decides whether the application ever gets made.

Three things that measurably work

Being findable at the employer level, not just the vacancy level. Candidates search for companies before roles. If your inclusion record only exists on your own careers page, it is only reaching people already considering you.

Meeting people at scale, in one place. Winston Taylor reached more than 7,600 diverse candidates through myGwork's WorkFair in 2025 — a volume that no amount of individual outreach replicates.

Building a pipeline rather than filling a vacancy. RWS avoided over £250,000 in recruitment costs by building a diverse talent pipeline across global markets instead of paying agency fees per hire. lululemon generated 9,050 applications across four business units by scaling inclusive hiring rather than running it as a single campaign.

Those are three different problems — reach, volume and cost — and they have the same underlying solution: go where the audience already is, with your actual record rather than your intentions.

The integration point matters more than the campaign

A partnership that requires someone to manually repost vacancies will decay within a quarter. Applicant tracking system integration is the unglamorous detail that determines whether your roles are still appearing in month nine. It is worth asking about before anything else.

What to have ready before you start

The employers who get results from this have four things in place, and they are the same four things candidates ask about in interviews:

• Written policy, particularly documented gender-transition guidance — not goodwill, a document
• Benefits that name people explicitly — parental leave covering non-birth parents, partner cover including adoption and surrogacy, health insurance without transgender exclusions
• A funded network with an executive sponsor and a remit that includes reviewing company policy
• Local reality — a global statement is only as good as its regional sponsorship, and candidates applying outside your head-office country will ask which policies actually reach them

If you cannot answer those four, the traffic will find you and then leave. Getting found is the easy half.

Where to look next

Our guide to LGBTQ+ inclusive employers by industry and country profiles 42 organisations and what each actually offers. It is written for candidates, which makes it the most useful competitive benchmark available to an employer: it is the standard your prospective hires are comparing you against.

If you want to talk about reaching this audience directly, myGwork's employer solutions cover job posting with ATS integration, employer branding, ERG support and access to WorkPride and WorkFair.

myGwork is the Inclusive Talent Platform, connecting LGBTQ+ professionals and graduates with employers who have done the work.