When do I see data in drop-off charts? Why can I not see X?

You may have noticed that some of our sourcing and reporting tools will occasionally flag that they have ‘not enough data’ or ‘you need 5+ candidates to see data’. 

At Applied, we must continually balance our clients’ need for data and insights with the candidates’ right to data privacy. This is a particularly sensitive balance in recruitment and we assure candidates that the diversity data they give us cannot be used to identify them personally or harm their chances of success. When in doubt, we err on the side of caution to safeguard candidate anonymity. 

To this end, we operate on the ‘five or greater’ principle. We believe that exposing data when there are fewer than five candidates makes it far more likely that a user could make reasonable inferences about which candidates that data refers to. In order to preempt a situation where diversity data can be traced to a specific candidate and run the risk of influencing a decision or biasing an application, whether consciously or unconsciously, we apply this 5+ rule to our reporting.