Insights by Chris Langan

The Cobalt Group (featuring Cobalt Recruitment and our renewable energy recruitment specialist arm, Comanos), has once again featured in Recruiter’s prestigious Hot 100 list for our 2024 activity.

This report looks to understand the diversity of the real estate sector, and in particular, across those organisations that are part of Real Estate Balance and those that haven't yet joined. It also includes a guide for those on their diversity journey to improve inclusive hiring practices.

The UK government has introduced a new Flexible Working Bill aimed at empowering employees with greater flexibility and autonomy in managing their work-life balance. See how the Bill has changed workers' rights, and the opportunities that this change presents for organisations to recruit and retain the best talent.

Building upon our previous research into diversity in the Real Estate and Construction markets, this full-length 2023 edition features insight into the age, caring status, disability status, ethnicity, gender identity, marital status, religion, sexual orientation and socio-economic background of those who make up the sectors we recruit into.

At our latest Cobalt Conversations event, we explored the concept of ‘widening the gate’ to improve the recruitment part of a Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I) strategy – not the idea of offering handouts of interviews or box-ticking based on characteristics, but of looking at recruitment and onboarding processes to make sure that the sector can develop, access and retain diverse talent within it. This will ultimately make our workplaces better, fuelled with greater creativity and productivity from a broader pool of talent. 

​We want to alert our candidates to a current scam that preys on job seekers. Primarily on WhatsApp, this scam involves individual or business accounts pretending to be one of Cobalt’s team of consultants contacting candidates with potential job opportunities or offers to extract personal information or ask for payment.

This 2nd Cobalt Conversations event aimed to analyse and understand the impact of using inclusive language in the workplace, in job descriptions and in general, and discuss the challenges people are facing in approaching the ever-changing discourse around diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Cobalt Recruitment hosted their first Cobalt Conversations event, starting conversations about the challenges faced when driving diversity and inclusion within real estate.

​Cobalt's 2022 Mental Health & Wellbeing Survey reveals three-quarters of professionals in the built environment would look for a new job if their employer wasn’t looking after their mental health and wellbeing. See more about this and further insights in our Report.

At Cobalt, we know that diversity should be a priority for all organisations in the real estate and construction sectors. That's why in 2022 we developed a new diversity survey sent to candidates, capturing as much detail as possible about those who are job-seeking in these sectors, so to be able to deliver real insights to the market.

We embark on our third year of working with the award-winning education charity, Future Frontiers, and we couldn’t be prouder to be involved. See what they do and how Cobalt fits in here.