‘If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got,' said Henry Ford, the American industrialist and business magnate.

So, at a time when councils and the Penna family are celebrating Black History Month, Coming Out Day and Mental Health Day, I wanted to focus on diversity and inclusion and encourage everyone to do more to be different in their recruitment attraction.

Specifically, I want to introduce you to the potential and value of targeting and re-targeting your attraction messaging to actively encourage diverse candidates, based on their social media and online activity as well as traditional advertising.

Our diversity package is used by many of our local government and public-sector clients. We are using it to effectively reach audiences, including passive candidates who aren't actively looking for roles. While such candidates can be reached via high value content across print and digital media, our package also targets via:

• Geography
• Ethnicity and gender (e.g. Black, LGBT or Gen Z candidates)
• Professional background
• Salary range

We're able to do this thanks to our programmatic expertise, partnerships with data companies and premium deals with certain publishers. Many of the online and print publishers we use – including The MJ and its sister website LocalGov – can also provide contextual advertising opportunities.

In our determination to improve diversity and remove inequalities we encourage our clients to use programmatic targeting to segment data to present the role to potential applicants who may not be alerted to a role otherwise.

This approach can work at multiple levels of hiring within organisations. For some recent social work vacancies and for a chief executive role we have worked on recently, we reached specific audience personas based on ethnicity segments. Different actions do lead to different outcomes. It's time for change.

Raja Balachandran is programmatic manager at Penna

Raja.balachandran@penna.com