Digitas

London

BACKGROUND

Did you know that personal details on a CV can lead to different types of discrimination? Things such as name, age, gender, cultural background and career gaps can impact the likelihood of getting invited for a job interview.

INSIGHT

We conducted an investigation showing how bias can impact inviting the right candidate for an interview. As part of this research, we sent out CVs of high-performing and successful employees to the recruitment teams at the companies they work for.

Before we sent out the CVs, we changed a small personal detail such as age, gender or cultural background, with their skills and experience remaining untouched. Some of the CVs were sent in response to open job ads and some were sent as open applications to recruitment teams.

Only 3% of the applications we sent out passed the CV review stage and were invited to the next stage. Even though the same employees with the same skills and experience are already working at the company.

The work

Anonymising CVs has been shown by research to improve the selection of candidates from underrepresented groups and our HR team had been doing this manually when recruiting new talent, spending at least 20 minutes per CV.

Looking to expedite and simplify this process the team enlisted the our tech experts to develop such a tool. And so Anon CV was born. The tool integrates with the Smart Recruiters platform and is open source so that developers can adapt the tool for their platform and modify the source code. Once set up, it automatically and quickly anonymises the parts of a CV that could trigger recruitment bias such as name, education, gender, ethnic background, age and career breaks. The tool then reformats the document, ensuring it is still easy to read and comprehend, allowing recruiters to concentrate on the key factors in hiring candidates – skills, experience, and achievements.

As we didn’t want to keep this just for ourselves, we made the Anon CV tool completely free and available for hiring employers and recruiters via GitHub, helping them to find the right candidate for the job based on skills and tackling recruitment bias together.

“We created Anon CV to streamline our recruitment process, and ensure we’re bringing in the right talent to help our clients future-proof their businesses. Candidates should be hired on their skills, experience and the contribution they can make, it’s a no brainer. With this brilliant tool we’re finding the right talent quicker, and without bias. And we wanted to share that with employers everywhere.”
Dani Bassil, CEO, Digitas UK

The results

Since the tool launched, we saved more than 500 hours on recruitment so far. With such a positive result, we can focus on what truly matters - spending more time finding the perfect candidate for a job role.

Hover over to the Anon CV website to find out more and download the free tool here.