Widen the graduate talent pool through employing a contextual recruitment system.
Project implemented: January 2017
Achieve greater diversity within our clerkship intake in line with our Diversity and Inclusion strategy to build a diverse workforce with an inclusive culture.
This project is an important step towards greater inclusion, diversity of thinking and innovation in the legal profession.
We have partnered with Rare Recruitment (a UK based company) and employed their contextual recruitment system (CRS) in our clerkship selection process. The CRS widens the talent pool and enhances the recruitment process by allowing us to understand the context for a candidate’s experience – such as schooling, economics, geography and personal life events – and their achievements against this backdrop.
Rare’s Australian system combines publicly available information, such as postcodes, with candidates’ personal responses obtained through the application process, such as their eligibility for Centrelink benefits, for example. This delivers two assessment measures: disadvantage and performance.
We have enhanced the Rare system through efforts to reduce unconscious bias in the interview process.
We have received good feedback from prospective and existing graduates around our adoption of Rare and we believe it will encourage more applicants to opt in rather than self-select out of applying for a role at Clayton Utz. Following its implementation we have hired people who ordinarily may not have applied to the firm or been offered an interview.