How can I mitigate the negative effects of Quick-apply on equal opportunity?

3 things you can do to mitigate the negative effects of Quick-apply on equal opportunity:

1. Be clear about your goals and commitment to diversity with recruiters, headhunters or employees making referrals:
   
   If you want more candidates from a minority background challenge your team and recruiters to find them for you. A study conducted by The Behavioural Insights Team in cooperation with a male-dominated organisation showed that, without any further instructions, more men got referred for a job than women. But when the referrers were challenged to think of women they could refer, the gender ratio of referrals flipped (see graph below; Control = no instruction; Treatment = challenged to think of women to refer).
   
   
   
   
2. Monitor the diversity of your quick-apply candidate pool and launch further action if needed:
   
   If you start noticing that quick-apply does not serve your diversity goals because minority candidates are rarely invited for quick-apply you can consider changing the incentives for external recruiters by making the size of their payment dependent on proving they have taken appropriate steps to reach out to candidates from underrepresented groups.
   
   
3. Don’t tell your interviewers which candidates came through quick-apply:
   
   If you’re using quick-apply alongside the traditional written sift stage, ensuring that interviewers don’t know which route a candidate took helps with an unbiased judgement. Interviewers may (subconsciously) be biased against candidates that took the traditional application route, assuming that if they were good candidates they would not have to apply actively for a role.