Testing, Testing – Why are Black applicants not getting graduate jobs?

By Dr Claire Tyler, Professor Lindsey Macmillan, and Dr Catherine Dilnot

Last Thursday we released our Nuffield-funded ‘Inequalities in Access to Professional Occupations’ report, and an accompanying blog post showing that Black undergraduates are well represented in application pools for professional graduate roles but are almost half as likely (45% less likely) to receive to receive job offers than white applicants (Figure 1 – blue dot).

Even when we compare candidates who ‘look the same on paper’, including attending a similar university, studying a similar subject and applying for similar jobs, Black applicants are still a third (34%) less likely to receive a job offer than white applicants (yellow dot).

This  analysis is based on a large sample of 117,043 applicants (of which 9,859 reported being of Black ethnicity) to graduate schemes at 17 large UK employers, across a range of sectors including accounting, law and public sector.

Figure 1: Offer rates to graduate programmes, conditional on observable differences across applicants, by ethnicity

 

Recruitment stages

In this blog post, we delve deeper into the low success rates for Black applicants to explore which stage of the recruitment process appears to be causing the largest barriers for these undergraduates.

For our analysis, we firstly needed to create some alignment in the recruitment data we received from 17 employers, as recruitment stages varied both by employer, and over time for the same employer. For consistent reporting, we grouped recruitment activity into two key stages:

1) Screening and testing, which includes all application sifting, screening based on educational credentials and online testing. Online tests assess skills such as numerical reasoning, verbal reasoning, situational judgement, behaviours, preferences and strengths.

2) Face to Face which includes interviews (video and in person), and assessment centres (case studies, group exercises).

In our sample, only around a quarter of candidates applied to a recruitment process which included screening based on prior educational qualifications (GCSE, A-levels and/or 2:1 degree) as these criteria are becoming less popular with employers. Whereas most participating employers used online tests, interviews and assessment centres as selection methods (80-100% of candidates applied to employers who used these methods).

Screening and testing matters

Exploring success rates for each of the two key stages revealed that Black applicants are 45% less likely to pass the upfront screening and online testing stage than white applicants and 8% less likely to pass the face to face stage (Figure 2 and 3 – blue dots). Even comparing applicants on a ‘like for like’ basis , Black applicants are 37% less likely to pass the screening and online testing stage than their comparable peers of white ethnicity, and 5% less likely to pass the face-to-face stage (Figure 2 and 3 – yellow dots).

Figure 2 – Relative likelihood of passing screening and online tests for the graduate programmes, conditional on observable differences across applicants, by ethnicity

 

Figure 3 – Relative likelihood of passing face to face stages for the graduate programmes, conditional on observable differences across applicants, by ethnicity

A recent report by Black Talent Charter also shows that ethnic minorities are disproportionately rejected in the early stages of recruitment, which further supports our findings. Their analysis of 400 students shows that the representation of Black applicants falls markedly at the ‘screening & testing stage’ in financial services recruitment (Figure 4) from around 16% of the applicant pool to 10% of the candidates invited for job interviews. For professional services the representation drops from 13% to 7% and in law from 10% to 7%. In each case, more Black applicants are rejected from the process at the ‘screening and online testing stage’ than at the following ‘face to face’ stage, both in terms of raw numbers of applicants and percentage point representation. The authors of the report quite rightly highlight the drop in representation at the ‘face to face’ stage between job interview and job offer but do not draw out the implications of the larger barriers at the earlier screening and testing stages.

Figure 4 – Percentage representation of Black talent throughout the candidate journey, from university application to job acceptance, across financial services (FS), law and professional services (PS)

Note: Figure reproduced from the Black Talent Charter 2204 report ‘Why We Need To Fix The Broken Pipeline for Graduate Black Talent in the UK’ (Figure 6, page 12). Red oval added by UCL to highlight figures of interest

Widen the focus?

Our findings suggest that employers may be overlooking racial inequalities at screening and testing stages of the recruitment process. Racial inequalities may still be seen as an ‘in person’ issue, whereas our evidence highlights other significant barriers in the recruitment process. This may explain why limited progress has been made to date in removing these inequalities in access to professional careers.

These findings mirror patterns of prior education and skills inequality via online tests such as numerical and verbal reasoning, situational judgement and critical thinking (we are hoping to be working on a new project about this soon). But the fact that these gaps are still so large after accounting for university attended suggest they may also relate to lack of preparation for such tests if these applicants are less likely to have parents or networks with experience of these types of tests.

This evidence also suggests a potential conflict between outreach activities of employers to widen the diversity of application pools and the initial screening and testing processes which disproportionally reject ethnic minority applicants.

Given the huge increase in graduate job applications and a record high ratio of applications to vacancies (140:1), it is also important to recognise that recruiters are currently dealing with unprecedented volumes of applications in narrower recruitment windows. The screening and online testing stages of recruitment act as a substantial filter for recruiters, with only 15% of candidates in our sample passing this stage, with the remaining 85% being rejected before any face to face interactions with the employer. With the increasing use of AI by job applicants, ‘getting it right’ at the screening and testing stage is becoming ever more important for employers – balancing the need to process huge volumes of applications while ensuring the best talent is recruited.

Recommendations

To improve the success rates of Black and other ethnic minority applicants we therefore recommend:

• Employers broaden the focus of ethnic diversity interventions/strategies to include the screening and online testing stages of recruitment in addition to any existing focus on face to face assessments.
• Employers review the success rates of under-represented groups at each stage of the recruitment process to see where the largest barriers occur.
• University career teams and employers collaborate to share insights about which under-represented groups may need additional information or guidance to be prepared for online recruitment assessments.
• Employers share these findings with your ‘race equality’ leads to ensure these issues are considered when planning new initiatives.
• Employers challenge external providers of recruitment assessments to provide data on success rates of candidates from under-represented groups on each type of test conducted.

What’s next?

We are working on launching a new project soon to delve deeper into the barriers for applicants from ethnic minority and lower socio-economic backgrounds – please get in touch if you would like to hear more about how to participate in our research collaborations. Projects are anonymous, free of charge and full of insights for participating employers.