Make fairness and humanity the heartbeat of your recruitment process

As people in and around the recruitment business, I believe that our purpose is to level the playing field such that people can access jobs they can be brilliant at, in organisations that care about the things they care about... Regardless of age, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or background. 

At Chemistry, this is a stance that drives the way we work with our clients. In fact it drives everything we do. 

It starts with challenging the assumption that the best talent comes from the certain socio-economic backgrounds, from top academic institutions, from the top competitors, or from the top quartile of an IQ test... 

We have a methodology called 'What Great Looks Like', a data-led profile of a 'great' hire, unique to an organisation's culture, strategy and values. 

The profile doesn't care about your background, your race or your gender, it only cares that it can identify you have the potential to succeed in a given job, in a given environment. A different lens through which to view talent, installed at every stage of the recruitment process, altering the hiring decisions of recruiters and hiring managers. 

Chemistry are about to open an office in New York, and we hope that this approach can help US organisations to solve new hiring challenges such as managing large applicant volumes, measuring cultural fit, reducing attrition, and creating brand differentiation. Most importantly, we hope to overturn notions of a "war for talent" by dispelling the myth that talent is scarce. Talent is everywhere, it is abundant, we are just looking for the wrong things.

We have a mission and commitment to create opportunities for everyone to be brilliant at work. 

We work with organisations that share our belief that continuously re-thinking the age-old approach to hiring, and using a different set of criteria to attract, identify and select talent, can level the playing field, remove bias and discrimination, and achieve better results for individuals and organisations.  

Over and over again we see that fairness and humanity breed performance, wellness, and progress. In one information services business, our hiring tools increased the number of female hires from 8% to 43% in just one year. In the same period, new product sales increased 250%. Where there is a clear definition of 'What Great Looks Like', there is less room for bias, and more room for talent.

Another FTSE 100 organisation believed that top talent had to come from a top 10 academic institution, and attain a grade in the top quartile of a cognitive ability test. New hire attrition stood at 85%. Through an objective study, we found these assumptions to be untrue, and created a new yardstick for great talent, specific to their organisational goals and culture (academic achievement and cognitive ability did not feature in the profile...). New hire attrition fell to 12% in 12 months.

Even if we are just contributing to to one part of the overall problem, hire by hire we can do our part to ensure that fairness and humanity reside at the borders of our businesses. 

We are looking forward to working with organisations who share similar passions and values, and who believe in this cause. 

We'd love to meet for a coffee to discuss these issues more if you are ever in the New York, LA or Seattle areas!