Built with a focus on diversity and inclusion, Applied is an applicant tracking system (ATS) unlike any other. “As far as I’m aware, there’s no other ATS that has that as their leading focus”, Stuart Smith, Applied’s Sales, Growth and Partnerships Manager told Recruitment Tech in a video interview.
Navigating bias throughout the whole journey
The Applied platform uses anonymised applications and predictive, skill-based assessments to identify the best talent that would otherwise have been overlooked. “We help organisations go through the whole journey of hiring, from sourcing candidates, all the way through to eventually marking the top performing candidates being hired”, Smith told Recruitment Tech.
“Unconscious biases are everywhere in hiring and we make sure that they’re not part of the hiring decisions that you make.”
But unlike other applicant tracking systems (ATS) on the market, Applied has a sole focus on increasing diversity and inclusion. “That’s the big one for us”, Smith continued. “That’s really what we do here at Applied. We help organisations to navigate bias. Unconscious biases are everywhere in hiring and we make sure that they’re not part of the hiring decisions that you make.”
Boosting diversity, efficiency and quality
So what are the three biggest benefits of using Applied? “First of all, it would be a big boost in terms of candidate diversity”, Smith said. “The second one would be efficiency of hiring and saving a lot of time. And the third one is the overall quality of candidates that you’ll see coming through your pipelines.”
“I think it’s the fact that we have been built from the ground up with diversity and inclusion in mind is what separates us from everybody else.”
“The thing that makes Applied special compared to other agencies. I think it’s the fact that we have been built from the ground up with diversity and inclusion in mind. As far as I’m aware, there’s no other applicant tracking system that has that as their leading focus, and that really does separate us from everybody else.”
From start-ups to PepsiCo
Applied finds its roots in the behavioural economics section of the world that’s gaining momentum rapidly. Moneyball and Freakonomics are the most-known cases; it simply aims to combine insights from psychology, judgment, decision-making with economics to generate more accurate understanding of human behaviour.
“We’ve been used for very small early stage start-ups all the way to some very large organisations like UNICEF and PepsiCo.”
While the company was initially founded in 2016 by the trio of Kate Glazebrook, Theo Fellgett and Rich Marr as a side project in social mobility — it soon became much more. “It’s a big mix of customers that use us, to be honest”, Smith added. “We’ve been used for very small early stage start-ups all the way to some very large organisations like UNICEF and PepsiCo. For junior roles, all the way up to C-suite roles as well.”
New products on the horizon
As far as the roadmap goes for the next couple of months and years, Smith said he had to be careful with what he said. “Otherwise the product team will get angry. But we’re always looking at adding in new features. We’re constantly getting feedback from our users, and user-generated feedback is largely what guides our product roadmap.”
“We’ve just built and we’re about to release a CV review tool, which is going to be huge at reducing biases.”
So what does it entail? “We’re looking at the uploading of third party assessments into our platform”, Smith added. “We’ve just built and we’re about to release a CV review tool, which is going to be huge at reducing biases — if people still want to use CVs. We’re also improving our interview scheduler. We have lots of plans and lots to look forward to.”
