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Recruiting great people is a challenge, to do so consistently, and in significant volumes requires the right technologies, data and methods informed by the latest in behavioural science.
When it came to finding out how analytical our candidates are, we just did not feel the current products on the market were filling our needs for a few reasons- namely:
1. The effect they had on diversity was troubling -on some tests, for example, the pass rate difference between men and women was as much as 24%, despite Maths GCSE A/A* grade attainment gap being a tiny fraction of that (0.8%).
2. We noticed that our candidates absolutely loathed them -and that was not just because they were being tested, but from a user experience, lack of feedback and perceived lack of relevance. In fact, 94% disliked them in our survey, despite our network containing far more STEM subject studiers than average.
3. They didn’t seem to test what count -to create challenge, and differentiate candidates they either relied on specific maths knowledge in almost a “who can remember more from school competition”, or imposed huge time pressure for relatively simple questions. Calculator speed use is not interesting; rapid mental calculation is more so, but not enough by itself.
In light of these challenges we considered dropping testing altogether – but frankly we:
a) Needed to know how analytical people were
b) Didn’t want to be limit ourselves to only people who did quantitative degrees
c) Sometimes need tools to objectively help us distinguish between thousands of similar applications in the large-scale recruitment we conduct on behalf of clients.
Instead, we decided it was the right time to make our own. We linked up with Applied– A spin-off from the Behavioural Insights Teamand world leaders in understanding how unconscious bias affects recruitment processes. They know exactly how to create elegant, user-friendly recruitment tools whilst shrinking that troubling gender gap, as well as ethnic and socio-economic recruitment gaps. Using our combined expertise in graduate recruitment solutions and technology we were then able to create a product to address the problems and that works for candidates and clients.
Last year we piloted with 4 businesses in the finance and consulting world and the results across the board were promising; the gender gap shrank, on average candidates on average hugely preferred it (citing variety, nature of questions, UX), and perhaps most importantly it was predictive of who was ultimately hired.
Learning from the thousands of hours of testing data accumulated we have rebuilt it from the ground-up alongside the feedback from the clients and candidates that actually used the platform.
We are now hugely excited to officially launch Mapped as a revolutionary new product in joint partnership with Applied and make testing fairer and better for everyone.
To find out more and start your journey with Mapped as a partner solution within your own recruitment, visit the website at www.get-mapped.com and request a demo.
