Biased and broken: is this the end of the CV?

Good recruitment has always been hard, but the pandemic and the subsequent ‘Great Resignation’ has created more challenges. With vacancies to fill, it is important to find effective ways to discover  the best talent in a competitive environment. In addition, a more diverse and inclusive workforce brings multiple benefits for businesses. To help with the solution, Better Bankside has partnered with innovative hiring platform Applied to help businesses in Bankside find the best candidates for  jobs in the most inclusive way.

Traditional recruitment methods don’t work:

• Someone with a non-white sounding name must submit 70% more CVs to get the same number of interviews as an equally qualified person with a white-sounding name
• Under-employment affects more Black and ethnic minority candidates: over 40% of all Black African employees are overqualified for their current jobs
• Brexit and the pandemic have intensified recruitment challenges – there are currently a record 1.2 million job vacancies in the UK

If that’s the case, why are we still using the same CV and covering letter style of recruitment used since the 1950s? We’ve changed, and there are better ways of doing things now.

What can I do?

Join our new Bankside Recruitment Pioneers project to help level the playing field and uncover the true potential of all candidates.

We’re offering 10 members the opportunity to use the Applied platform for free for 12 months to recruit three roles. You will see the difference the system makes in your business as we’ll measure the platform’s impact on the diversity and quality of your candidates throughout the recruitment process.

We’ll also be offering de-biasing recruitment training and webinars with Applied, which will be open to all Better Bankside members.

Why Applied?

Applied is an innovative hiring platform designed to disrupt traditional recruitment processes to tackle unconscious and implicit biases.

Despite our best intentions, humans are less than perfect at making decisions. Studies show that the tools traditionally used to aid recruitment decision-making – like CVs, unstructured interviews and network connections – only exacerbate embedded biases.

By anonymising applications, using a skills-based approach, and building transparency and analytics into every step of the process, Applied finds vital talent that could otherwise have been missed.

The platform makes the hiring process efficient as possible. Applied users see the time they spend on recruiting drop by up to two thirds!

Compared to a national average of about80% across the UK, 96% of candidates hired through Applied are still in their job a year after joining.

How to get involved?

Join our launch and panel discussion on 27 January to find out more and sign up to the project. Or get in touch with Charlotte Stanley, CS@betterbankside.co.uk and Rachel Nicholson. rn@betterbankside.co.uk.