18% of those job seekers identified as disabled
Skills-based inclusive hiring platform, Clu, has announced that it has helped almost 7,000 job seekers from marginalised groups to find work in the UK job market.
Amongst the 6,838 who have secured work, 18% identified as disabled, 14% as non-binary, 10% as neurodiverse, 5% as refugees and 2% as veterans, proving that employers can build high-performing teams inclusively with the effective use of AI driven recruitment technology.
According to the company’s annual Impact Report, 88% of the placements secured were retained for 12 months, showing the long term positive social mobilisation for these underrepresented groups. A report by The Sutton Trust revealed that closing the UK’s social mobility gap by just 2% would add a substantial £40 billion to the economy by 20301, highlighting the importance of prioritising skills over experience to support underrepresented groups in the hiring process which will ultimately fuel the UK economy.
The report revealed that the most successful job roles matched by the software included customer service, account management and data analyst roles. According to the data, an underrepresented job seeker is skills-matched to a job opportunity every 20 seconds in Clu, with 86% of candidates saying they felt more confident applying for work when they understand their skills-alignment to a role, demonstrating the mental health benefits to successfully matching candidates to roles they would be great at.
Clu’s offering is said to remove long standing barriers to the job market using proprietary ethical algorithms and unparalleled data sets across skills, demographics, and geographies to match candidates to jobs based on what they can do, not where they learnt to do it.
By leveraging its newly launched Clu’d Up toolkit, employers using Clu can now also identify weak points around recruitment inclusion and accessibility and correct them before they impact the selection process, ensuring that every candidate is evaluated fairly and based on their skills and suitability for a role. Ultimately giving them access to skills-aligned diverse talent, quicker.
Disabled himself, Joseph Williams CEO of Clu, commented: “There is so much untapped talent sitting in diverse groups that are overlooked and underestimated before they even get to interview stage.
“By removing arbitrary barriers to entry and relying on effective ethical AI and better-quality data to hire based on what a person can do, not where they are from, we can get thousands more back into work and kick start the UK economy.
“However, to truly prioritise inclusion, we must embrace systems that empower every skilled job seeker to excel in jobs they’d be great at, not just a select few. The urgency for better hiring data is clear: we risk perpetuating and even worsening systemic inequalities without it. Everyone deserves to feel valued, included and set up for success in the hiring process and we won’t stop until we achieve this reality.”
