50,000 candidates have now applied for jobs through Applied! And thanks to our new seed investment, we’re going to tackle the world!
We built Applied with a remarkably simple mission:
To help organisations find the best person
for every job
irrespective of their background
It all started in 2015 when — working at the Behavioural Insights Team — we became frustrated by the massive gap between the science on how unconscious bias affects who we choose to work with and day to day recruitment practices. We sketched out what a hiring process that was built on the best evidence on smarter, fairer and easier hiring would actually look like. One that focused on what you could do not what you looked like.
We even re-tested a bunch of the evidence ourselves, to make sure it really made a difference. Everything from whether candidate judgements are affected by how they’re sequenced, to how many people you should have on your hiring team. And then we ran a huge experiment — comparing Applied’s methodology to traditional CV sifting — to prove that we could make hiring decisions smarter, fairer, and easier.
The results astounded even us. We learnt (amongst other things) that over half of the candidates hired through the platform would never have been hired without the platform. And that these candidates were more likely to have come from a diverse background.
Confident we could stand behind it, we opened the platform up to users.
Just two years later we’re thrilled to announce that over 50,000 candidates have now been assessed — fairly — for 2,000 jobs through Applied.
Every 20 minutes a candidate submits an application.
More than 2,500 people have used our debiased sifting technology to assess potential new recruits, generating more than 400,000 objective data points on their skills and fit for the role.
What this ultimately means is that every day 4 people get hired into jobs through Applied. Or about 2 people who might otherwise have been overlooked were it not for the platform.
From graduates at Hilton to behavioural scientists at the Behavioural Insights Team, media executives at GroupM to advocacy directors at ActionAid, ministerial officers for the UK Government to editorial assistants at Penguin Random House. We’ve been proud to work with pioneering firms across industries and around the world that are genuine about hiring without bias. From tech to construction to investors.
And proud as we are, 50,000 is just a dent, this is just the start.
So that’s why we’ve just secured seed funding of £1.5 million to scale. The raise is being led by Blackbird Ventures supported by Skip Capital, Angel Academe, Giant Leap and Impact Generation Partners, as well as a number of angel investors. They’ll join Applied’s existing shareholders, including amongst others the Behavioural Insights Team, gender advocate and businesswoman Carol Schwartz, and award-winning Wharton Professor Adam Grant, to accelerate the business. We’re also grateful to have worked with Nesta who have helped to take the business to this stage.
Our raise will help us to scale the speed at which we can onboard new organisations but also invest in new product development including our revamped inclusive job description tool and more data science on application design.
We’re honoured to work with over 50 organisations who are practicing what they preach on diversity, inclusion and better hiring practices, and we’re excited to take the mission of Applied to the next level.
We’re hiring!
We’re also hiring and looking for people who share our passion for improving the world of work — whether it’s diversity and inclusion or culture, we want people who love what they do and want a world where everyone is free to be their true selves in a job they love.
Our current roles are:
