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Applicant Diversity Surveys for Agency and In-House Recruitment Teams

Top-of-funnel Diversity Surveys for Job Applicants

How Agency and In-House Recruitment Teams can source more diverse candidates

20^th March 2024 by Mark Holt

Divrsity is the UK's Leading Diversity & Inclusion Survey tool but, until now, we've focused on surveys that target the existing workforce; providing insights into workplace Inclusion, Equity, Bias and Belonging.

However, organisational Diversity will usually be highly correlated to the diversity of the talent pool during the recruitment process.

This article explains how the Divrsity platform enables in-house and agency recruitment teams to gather data-driven insights into the diversity of the applicant pool (per role).

Background

At Divrsity, our purpose has always been to help employers uncover data-driven insights that enable them to make measurable progress on workplace Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, Bias and Belonging.

To date, we've focused on the existing workforce, but we've had a lot of organisations ask us to survey candidates right at the top of the recruitment funnel; and provide data insights by role.

If you work in recruitment, you'll immediately understand why this is super-important, but two of the benefits are:

Improved Diversity: Clearly the key outcome is to actively improve diversity in the workplace. Understanding the makeup of our applicant pool (age, gender, race, sexual orientation, disability status, neurodiversity, socio-economic background and many more) can help us understand how different recruitment strategies impact the diversity of our applicant pool (and therefore workforce).
For example, if our applicant pool for a particular role is not diverse then perhaps we need to promote our jobs via different channels. Our friends at Race Equality Matters and Women In Tech both provide job boards that help target distinct demographics.
Understanding Bias: In our work, we've seen many examples of organisational Bias. A recenty survey revealed that one organisation had promoted 10% of its workforce in the past 12-months… every single one of whom was a man. Gaining insight into the applicant pool can help to ascertain whether our recruitment process is biased towards particular demographics.

One of the really neat capabilities is that Divrsity is designed to a multi-company/collaborative platform. So if you are in in-house team that use multiple recruitment agencies to fill roles, you can benchmark the Diversity of candidates from one agency against the Diversity of candidates from another agency against the Diversity of candidates that you're sourcing internally.

So What's New?

We've made a few changes to make it easier for in-house and/or agency recruitment teams to use the platform:

Dedicated Recruiter Dashboard View: The existing user interface assumed that we would have a small number of surveys but, in recruitment, we might have dozens of surveys in-flight (for different roles). So now we have a super-cool recruiter user-interface to manage all your roles in one place.
Recruiter Questions and Lenses: Dedicated questions for recruitment surveys that provide insights into how different sourcing strategies are impacting candidate diversity.
Longer Survey Durations: Previously the longest survey duration was 21 days. Hiring a role will usually take longer so we've extended this to 120 days. Don't worry, we can extend it arbitrarily if recruitment isn't quite going to plan.
Launch Surveys with Zero initial participants It was not previously possible to launch a survey/project without specifying at least a dozen participants. This made sense for workplace surveys but, in a recruitment scenario, we don't know the candidates up-front. Recruitment firms can now launch surveys without any participants and then...
Add Participants to a running survey This is useful for workplace surveys so was already on our request list, but now you can just click "Add Participants" and upload the e-mail addresses of any new candidates that you want to invite to participate in the survey.
You can also still use the Collective Survey capabilities if you just want to send the same link to all candidates (note that we don't recommend doing this since you'll lose the percentage participation statistics.
Manually terminate a running survey Just click the "End Survey Now" on your dashboard to mark the project as complete and generate the normal results pages.
...and a dozen more minor changes to smooth the User Experience for recruiters.

Remember that we're a data-controller under GDPR and, just as per our existing surveys, we shield you from all GDPR concerns. All our Obsession with Participant Anonymity still applies and, just as you don't need to ask candidates if it's okay to include their details in your ATS, we're part of your service so you shouldn't need to ask candidates whether it's okay to add their e-mail address to the project in the Divrsity platform.

Also, don't forget that Divrsity is a collaborative platform, so your entire recruitment team can manage roles and invite participants. If you're an agency, you can use the existing "manage organisations" functionality (on the top right menu) to create a separate organisation per client; and even invite members of the client's team to view the results.

What's the Cost?

We've always been proud of our super-simple pricing structure that charges customers for the surveys they run and nothing more. However, customer feedback tells us that doesn't really work for recruitment firms or companies doing in-house recruitment.

Consequently, we have adopted an annual subscription model for this product.

Small

(Up to 20 projects per year)

£499 per year

Medium

(Up to 100 projects per year)

£999 per year

Enterprise

(Up to 1,000 projects per year)

£1500 per year

All prices are in GBP, exclude VAT and are based on an annual up-front payment

For 1,000+ projects per year, please contact us

What about my ATS/HRIS?

We don't currently have integration with any Applicant Tracking System (ATS) or Human Resources Information System (HRIS) packages. However, most of them seem to have pretty good APIs so please contact us to discuss your requirements.

We'll update this page as we add ATS integrations...

Conclusion

We're super-proud of the feature richness of the Divrsity platform and excited about the opportunity to bring our data-driven D&I capabilities to a wider audience. If you're a recruitment agency or in-house recruitment team please get in-touch: feedback is a gift and this is a new space for us so we're open to doing whatever is necessary to make this work for your use case.