A returnship that brought experienced women back to the workforce.
We wanted experienced professionals, not just resumes. Recruise understood the potential behind career breaks and consistently helped us connect with high-quality women talent ready to restart their careers.
The outcome, in numbers.
The situation
The firm wanted experienced women professionals returning after career breaks, not entry-level replacements. The difficulty was finding people whose skills were still highly relevant despite an employment gap, then rebuilding the confidence to return and aligning them to business expectations across Technology, Analytics, Consulting, and Operations.
Conventional sourcing works against this pool. Filters that screen for continuous employment quietly remove exactly the experienced, capable candidates the programme was designed to reach.
What we did
Over more than five years we built a hiring strategy around capability and long-term potential rather than an unbroken CV. The team assessed technical capability, domain depth, and career readiness instead of penalising the gap.
The work was consultative rather than transactional: sustained candidate engagement, career counselling, and interview preparation to rebuild confidence before hiring, with delivery across all four business functions to support the firm’s diversity goals.
- 01 Dedicated sourcing to reach experienced women returning after career breaks.
- 02 Assessment on capability, domain depth, and readiness, not employment continuity.
- 03 Career counselling and interview preparation to rebuild returner confidence.
- 04 Delivery across Technology, Analytics, Consulting, and Operations.
The outcome
Across a partnership spanning more than five years, the returnship became one of the firm’s flagship diversity initiatives, letting experienced women relaunch their careers through a structured internship model, with many converting to full-time on performance.
By delivering quality talent consistently across four functions, the work widened the firm’s diverse talent pipeline and showed, in practice, that a career break need not be a barrier to a long-term career.
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