Leading global firms will take candidates' backgrounds into account when recruiting

International law firms Baker & McKenzie and Hogan Lovells have become the first to sign up for a ground-breaking contextual recruitment tool designed to promote social mobility in the City.

The tool works by hardwiring social mobility metrics into the firms' existing graduate recruitment applicant tracking systems and will enable them to take the economic background and personal circumstances of a candidate into account.

The firms will therefore be able to assess a candidate's academic performance against the overall performance of their school, providing the context within which that set of grades was achieved - something which conventional assessment systems are currently unable to do.

The graduate diversity recruitment company Rare's contextual recruitment system (CRS) uses information drawn from two new databases: the first contains the exam results of 3,500 secondary schools and sixth form colleges in England; the second contains 2.5 million UK postcodes.

The system uses this information, together with the candidates' responses to questions asked as part of the application process, to produce real-time contextual information on all candidates.

Rare's managing director, Raph Mokades, said: 'The way people present their talents superficially in print or on paper is only part of the answer to the question of how you measure how good they are.

'Someone who gets AAA at A Level from a very high performing school may be underperforming relative to the average attainment at that institution, whereas someone who gets AAA at A Level from a school where the average is DDE, whose parents may not have attended university, and who lives in a deprived postcode, is outstanding - even if he or she does not have glistening work experience and extra curricular activities.'

It is hoped that by contextualising the performance of individual applicants in this way, City employers - including law firms - will be able to identify 'stand-out' candidates regardless of background.

Both Baker & McKenzie and Hogan Lovells plan to fully integrate the system into their own application systems in time for the 2015/16 graduate recruitment season.

Commenting on the news, Sarah Gregory, Baker & McKenzie's diversity and inclusion partner, said: 'By integrating contextual recruitment into our own graduate application processes we will be setting a new benchmark for social mobility. This underpins our vision to be a truly inclusive organisation and is testament to our determination to improve access to the legal profession; one of our key commitments as a Social Mobility Business Compact Champion.'

Meanwhile, Tom Astle, Hogan Lovells' graduate recruitment partner, said: 'We welcome this as a quantum leap in objective and reliable methods of screening applications, enabling those from less privileged backgrounds to shine through. We are therefore delighted to be working with Rare on this very important development in graduate recruitment selection which is set to revolutionise how we select candidates.'

He continued: 'Using contextual data we will now have greater understanding of the challenges some candidates have faced and overcome. This will give candidates the confidence that they have been selected on their merits by organisations that recognise their achievements in context and are keen to give them every opportunity to demonstrate their potential.'