Britain and Finland fighting recruitment discrimination.

A lot of the complaints from job seekers originate from the initial application process. Too many websites. Poor search results. Job adverts out-of-date or poorly written. The applicant doesn’t hear back from the company because she has fallen into the recruiting “black hole”. Many applicants feel that the recruiting process is unfair and that they have been discriminated against. These are women returning to work after maternity or when their children are in school, young talent and university graduates without experience, the over 50s age group and people simply with names that don’t fit. This latter group are made up of people who are not native to the country in question, are the offspring of immigrants or immigrants themselves, or they have names that are simply difficult to pronounce. So the question needing to be answered here is how can the application process cater fairly for these groups?

As reported in an article which appeared on the Guardian’s WorkBlog in April 2013 Britain and Finland are taking steps to reduce discrimination in recruiting practices. The Runnymede Trust suggests anonymous applications, which German research (article only in German) and pilot schemes found last year contributed to improving some groups’ chances of finding jobs.

The City of Helsinki’s pilot scheme to use anonymous CVs in recruiting their staff, and Britain’s “social mobility business compact”, designed to “encourage behavioural change in business”, appear to be a step in the right direction as far as some are concerned, although to date only 150 companies have signed up to participate in the British compact. Anonymity produces mixed feelings. The social networks promote identity transparency because of the nature of being a social network, but job seekers are divided into active and passive, unemployed or employed, whether just curious or actvely disengaged.

At JANZZ Ltd, we feel strongly that the initial anonymity of our subscribers is the key to efficient and effective job and skills matching. We have developed an online platform called JANZZ.jobs over the last 3 years based on the internet’s latest technology, semantic web 3.0. For JANZZ.jobs, those passive seekers, already employed but either curious about the opportunities on the market or who are disgruntled with their current job, are protected with anonymity and a means of excluding the email addresses of particular parties, e.g., their current employers, from contacting them about job search criteria they may have filled out on the platform. Of course, at some point identity has to be disclosed for the selection process to be completed, and JANZZ.jobs provides that with gradual disclosure during the contact phase which occurs once a match has been accurately calculated by the system. The emphasis for JANZZ.jobs, though, is on creating a level playing field for applicants to be shortlisted based on their experience and skills and not on their gender, age and national origin.

We admit this is a courageous strategy which basically disrupts the global trend in using social networking to find talent or jobs, but we remain confident and totally convinced that when more and more seekers realise the same, that a movement will be created to force a change in the way jobs and talent are sought. And one additional point to stress about the benefits of JANZZ.jobs: it’s not just the job seekers themselves who benefit from anonymity. Companies too have found exceptional talent by purposely hiding their brand and focussing on the requirements of the job itself. By creating a means for applicants to promote their key qualities and abilities and for companies to promote the job and not themselves, we believe that JANZZ.jobs will not only erase the existence of the black hole but that the right candidates will find the right jobs and reduce the costs that companies face when candidates either reject their offers, or leave during the probation period or who the company realises are not right for the job.

See also this article on the labor market topic