Ensuring Fairness and Diversity in Candidate Shortlisting with Reach ATS
Ensuring a fair and unbiased hiring process is no longer a nicety, it’s a necessity. No matter how equitable we think we are, unconscious bias lurks within us all.
Using a dedicated ATS is a great way to champion diversity and inclusivity within your organisation. It helps promote a fair and equitable recruitment process, letting you build a team that reflects our diverse workforce.
Reach ATS is designed to fit your business needs, it has a range of tools to help remove unconscious bias, whilst simultaneously streamlining and optimising your recruitment process. Want to know why you should Reach for a better ATS? Of course you do!
How does Reach ATS facilitates fair and diverse candidate shortlisting?
Reach ATS has a range of features to help ensure an equitable hiring process, here’s just a few:
- Blind shortlisting – our smart ATS hides candidate’s personal details from hiring managers whilst they are shortlisting, which removes the possibility of bias.
- Hidden scoring – If you shortlist using panels (multiple shortlisters), Reach will hide the shortlister’s comments and candidate scores until the shortlisting process is complete, at which point a full shortlisting report will be visible to the entire panel.
- Additional accessibility – utilise the Recite Me toolbar in your candidate and recruiter screens to allow candidates and users to customise their journey and consume it in ways that work best for them.
- Flexible applications and workflows – set up your own rules to skip candidates straight to interview if they meet certain criteria, or any other trigger stages that facilitate your ideal fairness standards.
- Customised automated communications – ensure equity with automated, personalised communications, ensuring no one falls through the gaps due to human error and that each individual applicant receives identical treatment.
What are the criteria for shortlisting candidates in a fair and diverse manner using Reach ATS?
When it comes to shortlisting candidates, Reach allows you to tailor your application and shortlisting process to match the job role. This means you can adapt your process to shortlist based upon your DEI requirements.
How does Reach ensure candidates are fairly shortlisted after an interview?
No one knows your business, it’s values, purpose and culture like you. Our software is brilliant, but you know who will fit your business best. And no matter what ANYONE tells you. AI is still a long way off being up to the job on that.
So this is where we let your team take centre stage, and we become the support team. Once we’ve done the first screen for you, this is what happens:
- Your HR and hiring teams review the shortlist and invite them to interview
- We offer self-select interview slots to save the endless email back and forth and can even facilitate online interviews via trusted third party software.
- We store all your interview guides and questions (so you’re all singing from the same hymn sheet)
- We support allow collaborative scoring/feedback through our hiring manager portals for an open and transparent process
You get to do what you’re great at, and we are there to support you every step of the way.
How does Reach ATS promote diversity in the recruitment process beyond shortlisting?
Our flexible ATS offers so much more than just smart and fair shortlisting. It has templates and guidelines to help you craft job descriptions and design ads that will attract diverse candidates. And of course there’s our unrivalled candidate attraction team. They’re on hand to help you target a broad range of job boards and networks, allowing your job ads to reach diverse talent pools.
How can organisations monitor and measure fairness and diversity in their hiring and shortlisting process using Reach ATS?
Have we mentioned our amazing analytics tools? Each Reach ATS comes with general and custom DEI reporting. Meaning you can measure any data you put into the software. It’s all there at your fingertips whenever you need it.
Use it to:
- Track diversity metrics – monitor the diversity of candidate pools, shortlists and successful candidates.
- Analyse your hiring trends – identify patterns and areas for improvement, spot potential skills gaps.
- Compliance reporting – create reports in minutes to demonstrate compliance with diversity and inclusion policies
- Refine and inform your DEI recruitment strategies.
What steps does Reach ATS take to continuously improve it’s capabilities for fair and diverse candidate shortlisting?
As the saying goes – ‘none of us is perfect’ and whilst our simple but smart ATS is pretty close, we’re not resting on our laurels.
When you buy a Reach ATS you can expect regular updates – we’re constantly refining and optimising our system based on feedback and industry best practice. We’re also investing in new technologies to improve the accuracy and fairness of candidate evaluations. But, we also don’t make the jump to new tech until we are absolutely certain it will work well for us and for our clients.
And of course, we provide ongoing training and support for you and your team, which means you can recruit in confidence, fully leveraging Reach’s capabilities.
Building a fair and diverse recruitment process with Reach ATS
Unconscious bias is a part of being human, we are our lived experiences – but that doesn’t mean we should inflict that bias on others if we can help it. Using an ATS to ensure a fair and diverse candidate shortlisting process is great way to provide bias-free hiring. Using Reach ATS means we’ll also streamline and optimise your hiring workflows, automate your communications and free you up to focus on finding the people that fit your diverse workforce.
Why not Reach for a better ATS and book a demo today.