“We hire on quality, not on diversity.” A common line that overlooks how hiring channels are already a filter. If you only hire through your own network, you select for whoever happened to have access to that network.
Why does hiring through your own network produce less diversity?
According to research, personal networks are homogeneous: people have more contact with people who resemble them. A widely cited review article in the Annual Review of Sociology shows this holds for many sociodemographic characteristics, with the strongest divides in race and ethnicity, followed by age, religion, education, occupation and gender [1]. Hire structurally through personal connections and you mostly reach people who resemble those already working with you. That says nothing about good or bad intentions.
Do CV requirements unintentionally favour certain candidates?
They can. A preference for a well-known student association or a prestigious internship favours whoever had access to those opportunities. An internship allowance, for example, is not mandatory by law: in March 2024, 42% of secondary vocational students received one, an estimated 75% of students at universities of applied sciences and 65% of research-university students with a compulsory internship [2]. CBS points to a 2021 SER advice in which students whose parents did not study, with a secondary vocational background, with a non-Western migration background and with a functional impairment experience barriers in or on the way to higher education [3]. If you select on signals that presuppose access, you partly select on who had that access.
What can you concretely change in your hiring process?
- Hire through a broader community instead of exclusively through your own network or personal connections
- Look at motivation and working style alongside CV signals that assume access to particular opportunities
- Frame vacancy requirements as “nice to have” instead of hard requirements no candidate fully meets
- Use multiple assessors in a selection interview, so one person's preference doesn't decide the outcome
Why this is what VOIDS exists for
VOIDS works with a community of 4,000+ students and starters [4], meant to give companies access to talent they may not reach through their own network. Looking at motivation and working style alongside CV signals is our starting point. The size is that of the community, not of a talent pool.
Sources
- Annual Review of Sociology (2001): Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks (McPherson, Smith-Lovin & Cook), Annual Review of Sociology 27, 415-444, accessed 11 October 2026.
- Rijksoverheid (2025): Stijgende lijn stagevergoedingen voor studenten, accessed 11 October 2026.
- CBS (2024): Afgestudeerden in het hoger onderwijs (inleiding verwijst naar SER-advies 2021), accessed 11 October 2026.
- VOIDS: Community & jobboard, accessed 11 October 2026.
Transparency: VOIDS connects working students with organisations and therefore has an interest in this topic. We back up facts with sources and connect research and trends to our own experience from practice.
