How de-identified recruitment is improving the diversity of our team

In the days and weeks after posting a job ad for a role in my team a couple of months ago, my LinkedIn inbox was flooded with people sending me their CVs and asking if they would be a good fit for the role.

People were generally pretty surprised when I responded telling them we don’t look at CVs at Future Super.

So how do we hire?

At Future Super, we’re working to deliver a future free from climate change and inequality, and our actions need to match our words. However, our track record with the diversity of our own team hasn’t always been great.

At the beginning of 2019, more than 60% of our team were men and, even without any tracking of the share of our team who identified as people of colour, it was easy to see we were overwhelmingly white.

In just under two years, we’ve transformed these figures. Of the 15 new hires we had in 2020, 53% are women (we recognise this doesn’t speak to gender identities that sit outside the binary, and we hope to explore that over time, too), and 73% self report as being a person of colour.

We made this improvement in the absence of any specific policies or quotas - it’s been a result of a shift in our recruitment platform and approach.

We adopted a new recruitment platform, Applied, in February 2019. The theory behind the platform is simple - to reduce the risk of unconscious bias, and improve the quality of hiring decisions. This is done through features which include building application screening and interview questions based on testing the skills required for the job rather than a candidate’s CV, de-identified application screening, and assessing applications by question rather than by candidate.

It definitely took us a bit of time to get used to the new approach. It’s really tempting to ask someone where they’ve worked in the past instead of crafting questions which test for the skills required for the job, but we’ve gotten used to sticking to the theory over time.

We recognise that diversity can’t exist without inclusion (otherwise it’s just tokenism), and improving the diversity of the people who walk in the door is only part of the puzzle. We are on the on-going journey of making Future Super more accountable for the inclusion of our team, and we acknowledge that we’ve still got a huge amount of work to do.

As an impact superfund that strives for a future free from inequality, I was shocked to see how much change the switch in approach had on who we brought into our organisation.

However, making the change has transformed the diversity and quality of the people we bring onto our team, and we haven’t looked back.

So don’t send us your CV! Instead, encourage your employer to consider making the switch to deidentified recruitment - it’s a no brainer. For any businesses wanting to talk to us about how to start this process, we’d be happy to put you in touch with our wonderful COO, Leigh.

This was originally published on LinkedIn.