Inclusive Talent Attraction - An Experiment at Worley
By guusje lindemann and Katryn wright
The way organisations attract talent can lead to gender disparities in applications, especially in male-dominated industries (Gaucher, Friesen, Kay, 2011). There are still few evidence-based recruitment strategies that companies can deploy to prevent this type of exclusion (Taniguchi et al. 2023). Together with Worley, a global professional services organisation with over 50,000 employees, we set out to change that…
A core part of a company’s recruitment strategy is their Employee Value Proposition (EVP) - the things that make the organisation special to its employees and why people might apply to work there. Yet, companies are often forced to choose between EVP messages as they communicate with audiences in short, pithy communications (e.g. headlines on careers sites, social media assets, or descriptions on LinkedIn). These choices are often based on judgment calls, or focus groups or surveys about what appeals to people. This will always yield limited results because what people say might not be what drives their behaviour.
To bring the most inclusive and data-driven approach to their talent attraction materials, Worley decided to go further. Together, we ran an experiment measuring the impact of four different pillars from their EVP on over 3600 peoples’ job-seeking behaviour, as well as how they felt about the organisation. We tested the pillars to see if there would be any demographic differences in how people responded based on their gender, ethnicity, age, the type of work they engage in (e.g. manual trades or white collar), level of seniority, and country of residence. The four different messages all are a true representation of Worley but have a different emphasis. The different messages were as follows:
evp Pillar 1: the organisation frame
This message stressed how the applicant can become a part of the organisation and its purpose of delivering a more sustainable world.
evp Pillar 2: the work frame
This message had a more vocational angle, highlighting work impact, innovation and ambition.
evp pillar 3: the career frame
This message highlighted how the Worley is a place where people develop their personal skills and advance their career.
evp pillar 4: the culture frame
This message stressed how Worley is a community, with a strong emphasis on support, enjoyment and well-being.
The Flexibility Bonus
This message emphasised Worley’s commitment to flexible working.
what we did
MoreThanNow specialise in running randomised control experiments in organisations. This method allows us to causally determine what effect our interventions have. In our Harvard Business Review article, you can read in more detail why bringing this scientific approach is so essential to DEI decisions and processes. The research question of this study was how different EVP messages impact prospective candidates in two ways:
1. Their likelihood of engaging in job-seeking behaviour (either accessing Worley’s careers site or choosing to access more information about the company).
2. Their sentiment towards the company (including perceptions of Worley as a good employer and wanting to work at Worley).
The experiment followed the below flow: All possible job candidates, which came to over 3600 in total, were shown one of the four EVP messages. Then they were either shown a message that emphasised Worley’s commitment to accommodate flexible working or not. Prospective applicants were then asked some questions about how they felt about work in general, and what they valued and wanted, before being asked whether they wanted to apply or get more information about Worley.
the results
The data analysis showed a clear message: people from all backgrounds were more likely to engage in job-seeking behaviour when shown the culture message and this effect was statistically significant with a 6% difference in comparison to the other messages. Whilst this effect was mainly driven by men, the culture message evoked the strongest effect from women of all the messages. This result was in line with a famous field experiment conducted by behavioural scientist Professor Elizabeth Linos. She also tested the impact of different messages in recruitment materials of the U.S. police force, another traditionally male-dominated field. Her research showed that women and people of colour were more likely to apply when they received a message that focused on individual benefits (Linos, 2018). We classified the culture messages as one with an individual frame – alongside the career message - as it highlights personal benefits.
Job-seeking behaviour by EVP message (%)
When looking at just the impact of sentiment towards the company we saw that both of these individual messages, career and culture, led to the most positive impact with an increase of 16%. Between these messages we found no significant gender differences, or on any of our other demographic variables (e.g. seniority, type of worker). We would typically consider this a medium to large effect but it paled in comparison to the impact of flexibility across the board, which everyone responded well to, but especially women. Interestingly, we did not see a similar impact on flexibility on job-seeking behaviour, but this may show up at later stages of the application process (i.e. offer stage).
Positive sentiment towards Worley as an employer (1-7 Likert)
the conclusion
Our analysis here focuses on gender because across many of our other demographic variables - ethnicity, age, type of work (e.g. manual trades or white collar), level of seniority, and country of residence - we did not see any differences in which messages attracted candidates, which we found surprising. The largest demographic difference was in women’s willingness to engage in job-seeking behaviour as compared to men, regardless of EVP message.
Recruitment materials are an essential part of a company's hiring process and should be examined properly on if they are not (often unintentionally) creating a gender gap in applications. It might seem like a small driver of such a big problem as workplace inequality, but attraction materials can make a big impact and this needs more exploration than gendered language in job descriptions (where most organisations seem to focus their attention). Our experiment revealed a simple means to attract thousands more women to Worley over the course of an annual hiring cycle, and this could only have been discovered through experimental methods. We applaud Worley for their bravery in this work - their commitment to making the organisation accessible to all shines through in the research.
references
Axt, J. R., Yang, J., & Deshpande, H. (2023). Misplaced Intuitions in Interventions to Reduce Attractiveness-Based Discrimination. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 49(4), 527-540. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672221074748
Castaneda, L. W. and Ridgeway, G. (2010). Today’s Police and Sheriff Recruits. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation.
Ciminelli, G., C. Schwellnus and B. Stadler (2021), "Sticky floors or glass ceilings? The role of human capital, working time flexibility and discrimination in the gender wage gap", OECD Economics Department Working Papers, No. 1668, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/02ef3235-en.
Gaucher, D., Friesen, J., & Kay, A. C. (2011). Evidence that gendered wording in job advertisements exists and sustains gender inequality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(1), 109–128. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022530
Linos, E. (2018). More than public service: A field experiment on job advertisements and diversity in the police. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 28(1), 67-85.
Taniguchi, T. A., Rineer, J. R., Hoogesteyn, K., Wire, S., & Mangum, L. (2023). Recruiting women into policing: Experimentally testing the effectiveness of recruiting materials. Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, 17, paad049.