Breaking Down Job Market Bias & Barriers to Help 30M Job Seekers Get
Hired
Commitment to Society
Help 30 million people facing barriers in the labor market
around the world get hired ― barriers such as education,
criminal records, disability, military experiences and
others*2
The only requirement to be hired for a job should be that you have
the skills and abilities necessary to perform it. However, bias and
barriers in hiring can make it harder for many job seekers to find,
get and keep a job.
At Recruit Group, we are committed toward breaking down these biases
and barriers through making advancements in our platforms,
partnerships, and our own efforts at our organization. By increasing
access to quality opportunities, we strive to make a positive,
equitable and sustainable social impact through connecting people to
better work to create better lives.
To make progress toward this goal, in FY2022, we focused on and
worked to reduce five barriers: education, criminal records,*3
disability, and prior military service experience,*4 as
well as not having access to technology and transportation necessary
for job search.*5
Reducing Educational Barriers
Education should not be a limiting factor to employment. However,
according to one survey in the U.S., approximately 60% of employers
have rejected a candidate because they did not have a post-secondary
education, even though the candidate had sufficient skills and
experience.*6 These barriers to the job market based on
education have a tremendous impact on working people, not only in
job opportunities but over their lifetimes, such as in terms of
wages and lifelong earnings.
1 US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2 National Bureau of Economic
Research, 3 Georgetown University Center of Education and the
Workforce
Advancing Our Platforms
In order to break down the barriers of education, we conducted a
small-scale test where we stopped recommending education
requirements as one of the screener questions employers populate
when they post jobs. As a result, we observed more employers
advertised jobs without an education requirement, and more job
seekers applied.
Since this has been fully rolled out in the U.S. after successful
product testing, we observed a 37% decrease in the share of jobs
requiring a college degree.*7
In addition, we found that job postings that do not require a
college degree received about 10% more*8 applications
than similar job postings with a college degree requirement and are
more likely to lead to successful hires.
Percentage of Job Postings Requiring a College Degree
To help make it easy for job seekers to find jobs that do not
require a college degree, we have placed an additional filter.
Search Filters to Help Job Seekers Find Jobs without College
Degree Requirement
Initiatives with Our Partners
In the United States alone, more than 5 million people participate
in government-funded workforce training and apprenticeship programs
each year.*9 These programs provide skill-building
opportunities to those who do not have traditional higher education
backgrounds. Despite this, it has been found that they face
challenges in effectively showcasing the skills gained from these
programs in their Indeed profiles/resumes. According to several
workforce training program development organizations, websites that
help people build their resumes are often designed with four-year
college graduates in mind, making it difficult to clearly
demonstrate to employers the work experience and skills gained
through practice and through skill-building programs.
We therefore partnered with four workforce development organizations
in three countries to launch a pilot version of an initiative called
SkillConnect to create scalable connections between program
graduates and employers. SkillConnect uses Indeed’s platform to
onboard job seekers coming out of the workforce development programs
directly onto Indeed. It eliminates the manual process of converting
job training curriculum into skills that appear on Indeed Resumes —
they simply select their program, and their education and skills are
automatically populated.
With this skills information saved to an Indeed Resume, Indeed’s
matching technology can work better for these job seekers and for
the employers who need their skills. Job seekers are matched with
jobs and employers search for candidates based on the skills that
they have acquired. While this initiative is still in its pilot, we
have seen positive feedback from job seekers and partners that the
new function resulted in appropriate hirings. We envision that our
SkillConnect will help tens of thousands of job seekers
participating in these types of programs put their skills to work
and find the job they want.
Efforts at Our Offices
Last year, under its mission to help people get jobs, we removed
college degree requirements from all eligible job profiles we post
at Indeed. We established an internal taskforce and our
cross-company team worked together to review each of our job
profiles, ensuring degree requirements were only included for
positions where a degree was truly required. This change has
impacted 700+ job profiles, accounting for the vast majority of job
profiles across all of Indeed’s business functions.
Other Priority Barriers
Criminal Records
Job seekers with criminal records are over 50% less likely to get a
call back or offer.*10
Veterans who are looking for a new opportunity or transitioning from
service to civilian life; they may have difficulty matching their
skills and experience to the job market.
Recruit, which operates mainly in Japan, has arranged the "WORK FIT"
employment support and career education program for justice-impacted
people for the first time in 2022. The program has been offered at
schools and local employment support organizations since 2011. To
solve the issue of preventing recidivism, Recruit is conducting a
program for justice-impacted women to encourage them to prepare for
life after release from prison.
Staffing SBU has launched a global social program that supports
underserved people with education, training, and employment
opportunities called “RGF Connect”. For example, Florida, where one of our staffing companies CSI
Companies is located at, has a large population of racial and ethnic
minorities and, like many other states in the U.S., struggles with
ongoing disparities in education and job opportunities. Against the
backdrop of these disparities, CEO Chris Flakus and CIO Melissa
Fulmore-Hardwick of CSI Companies, are working to provide job
opportunities and career development support in the tech industry
for college and high school students who are relatively
disadvantaged in the region.
While our challenge is just beginning, through making product
advancements and partnerships, we are proud to have been able to
help 3.9 million job seekers*11 facing barriers get
hired. We will continue to respond to the growing needs of employers
for Inclusive Hiring*12 by further improving our
platforms.
On this webpage, the number of years stated are reflective of the
number of Recruit Holdings fiscal years, which begin on April 1
each year and end March 31 of the following year. All figures
displayed here are approximate.
The initiative as of today includes providing assistance through
the Company's online job platform, and through partnerships with
NPOs and other organizations with whom the Company collaborates.
The Company may also aim to reduce other various barriers,
including newly emerging issues in the labor market by FY2030.
In the United States, approximately 70 million people have a
criminal record (source: The Sentencing Project), and the
unemployment rate of job seekers with a criminal record is
approximately five times higher than the US average (source:
Prison Policy Initiative).
A U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation study from 2016 found that
53% of veterans are unemployed for four months or longer after
leaving the military. We recognize that veterans who are looking
for a new opportunity or transitioning from military service to
civilian life may have difficulty matching their skills and
experience to the job market.
This indicates barriers that hinder job hunting, such as being
unable to connect to the Internet, and a resultant lack of access
to a job platform, and/or lack of transportation to interviews and
work.
Source: Accenture, Grads of Life, Harvard Business School (2017),
“Dismissed by Degrees: How degree inflation is undermining U.S.
competitiveness and hurting America’s middle class.”
Hosted jobs on Indeed in the U.S. that included a college degree
as at least one of the screener questions decreased from 22% in
May 2022 to 14% in January 2023, a 37% decrease.
Analysis revealed that within specific job titles, jobs that
indicated that no college degree was required received 10% more
applicants than jobs requiring college degrees.
Source: Employment and Training Administration, United States
Department of Labor (2019) “Workforce System Results.”
Source: Wendy Sawyer, Peter Wagner (2020), “Mass Incarceration:
The Whole Pie 2020”
Represents number of hires made on Indeed reported from both job
seeker and employer sources through our Hired Signal measurement,
from May 1, 2021 - March 31, 2023 globally for job seekers who
faced at least one of the following barriers: education, criminal
record, military experience, disability or lack of essentials such
as a computer or internet access.
Inclusive hiring indicates a company’s efforts to realize improved
fairness in recruitment in order to achieve a workplace that
reflects the diversity of society, as well as ensuring all people
have access to economic opportunities.
