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Hiring tool uses behavioural science to stop recruitment bias

By Matt Reynolds

23 February 2017

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It’s not about who I am, it’s about what I can do

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Looking for work? It might be time to rip up your CV. A platform based on behavioural science attempts to strip bias out of hiring so candidates are judged only on their abilities, avoiding any possible influence from aspects such as gender and ethnicity.

The platform, called Applied, has been developed by the Behavioural Insights Team, a company originally set up by the UK government to apply behavioural psychology to government services and policy. It is already being used by the UK Civil Service, Cancer Research UK and publishing company Penguin, and is available to any company worldwide from today.

Multiple studies have suggested that people from ethnic minority backgrounds are less likely to be interviewed or offered jobs than equally qualified applicants from non-minority backgrounds. Yet there is evidence that companies with a staff diverse in ethnicity and gender are likely to outperform those with more homogenous workforces.

To help avoid this behavioural bias, the Applied system forgoes CVs, instead asking candidates to each complete the same five questions that relate specifically to the job they’re applying for in an online portal. All answers to each question in turn are then evaluated by up to three recruiters from the employer, without them knowing which answer came from which candidate. Each recruiter is also given the answers in a different order to minimise what’s known as the “halo effect”, whereby one exceptionally good or bad answer influences how the next is perceived.

In a trial that compared the system to traditional CV-based hiring, the company found that the perceived strength of a candidate’s CV did not necessarily correspond to how well they performed in interviews and assessment centres. The system was used with 700 candidates who applied for roles in the Behavioural Insights Team, while another group of recruiters reviewed the applicants’ CVs as normal.

Applications that made it through the Applied filtering came from a wider set of universities and had a broader range of skills between them than those who had their CVs rated highly. After also completing interviews and assessment days, 13 applicants were offered jobs. “Over 50 per cent of the candidates that we hired, we wouldn’t have hired if we hadn’t used the platform,” says Kate Glazebrook, who leads Applied.

Glazebrook says that much of the conventional hiring process seems to come down to chance. In the trial, recruiters who had just read a great CV were more likely to rate the next one they read more harshly, and the ratings for the first few CVs reviewed were inconsistent as the recruiter tried to work out what a good application looked like. “Being in the first 10 to 15 [CVs reviewed] is kind of a risky business for a candidate,” she says.

No magic bullet

But anonymised job applications aren’t necessarily a magic bullet against workplace discrimination, says Rachel Marangozov, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Employment Studies in Brighton. “It might just postpone discrimination until the interview stage,” she says.

Anonymising applications may also not lead to more diverse candidates being selected. A study in France in 2010 found that when employers opted to have applicants’ CVs stripped of details such as name, gender and nationality, they were actually less likely to hire minority candidates than when this information was included. The researchers concluded that this may have been because the companies that volunteered to take part in the study were already more likely to hire minority candidates, and anonymising CVs could have made it harder to for them to take contextual factors into account.

UK-based start-up Performance in Context has built a tool that attempts to redress this problem by taking into account a candidate’s background and visualising their achievements in that context.  A privately educated person who went to a top university, for instance, might score less highly for that achievement than someone from an economically deprived area who went to the same university.

But Glazebrook says that Applied does not necessarily aim to increase diversity in teams. “It’s about hiring the best person irrespective of their background,” she says. “We’ve been quite clear in the platform that we don’t allow for positive discrimination at all among reviewers.”

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