Raphael Mokades: A Rare chance to get rid of inequality
FROM OCTOBER 2015'S RECRUITER MAGAZINE
In keeping with the name of his company, Raphael Mokades, founder and managing director of Rare Recruitment, has an unusual approach to his chosen profession. So when, near the end of a long interview with him at Rare Recruitment’s offices in London’s Clerkenwell, he announces, “I would love to put myself out of business”, it hardly comes as a surprise.It may appear an odd ambition for a man, who after setting up Rare Recruitment in 2005, and growing it into a seven-figure annual turnover firm with an enviable client list, clearly continues to relish what he is doing. But in fact, there is absolutely no mystery about it.
For the fast-talking and erudite Mokades, recruitment has never simply been about placing people into jobs. He has always had at least one eye on the bigger picture: the greater goal of eliminating inequality in employment in the UK. “I would love to say there is no inequality anywhere and basically we have done our job, let’s wind up,” he says. However, he adds: “I think that day is some years off.”
Government statistics from May this year that 37% of people from a black and ethnic minority (BME) background aged 16-24 are unemployed, compared with 20% of white people, bear out the continuing extent of the problem. Yet for Mokades, disadvantage on the grounds of ethnicity and social background not only covers employment, but education, the gateway into good jobs and satisfying careers.
So what gets him out of bed in the morning? He cites a 2014 statistic from education charity the Sutton Trust. “[The fact that] five elite schools sent as many students to Oxbridge in one academic year as 1,800 state schools put together isn’t a bad place to start,” he says.
Rare tools
Further evidence of Mokades’ continuing commitment to the cause of eradicating inequality comes from a new product launched at the beginning of September. Rare Recruitment’s contextual recruitment system (CRS) is designed to redress what Mokades sees as the inherent unfairness in the way employers recruit.
Tailored for graduate recruitment and undergraduate work placements, Mokades says the idea is to help employers identify candidates who don’t necessarily shine on paper, but who, when their background is taken into account, turn out to be the “jewels” that would otherwise be missed. “If you want to have the best people, you have to give people from different backgrounds an equal chance to succeed by creating a level playing field,” he says, summarising his philosophy.
He invents two fictional graduates, Sarah and Mary, to explain how if using traditional paper-based recruitment methods, Sarah may lose out. This is not because Mary is brighter, but because of Mary’s privileged background, education and “snazzy work experience”, he explains.
Even though both achieved AAB at A-Level, the CRS flags up that Sarah actually outperformed the rest of her school by 40%, whereas Mary underperformed her classmates. “If you can see that Sarah outperformed by that much, and you can see the personal context, you can say she is a) smart and b) resilient. I want to interview her, and I don’t care if she has no snazzy work experience because looking at her social background, it is not a sign of anything except that she is working class, which this software tells me.” In addition to the candidate’s school, other pieces of data used to flag up applicants that would otherwise not have made the cut include whether they were eligible for free school meals, and whether they were the first person in their family to attend university.
After successfully integrating Rare’s 5,000-strong candidate database, including contextual data with seven different applicant tracking systems (ATSs) in the market, the new tool is being marketed completely separately to the firm’s retained services.
The system has already been used by a number of Rare Recruitment’s law firm clients, who have been provided with contextualised data for the candidates that Rare has been sending them since last year. So far, among eight law firms there has been a 44% year-on-year increase in the number of Rare’s candidates taken on, with most of those coming from disadvantaged backgrounds. “You can’t prove causality, but any normal person looking at that would conclude that some people who are being brought through to interview would otherwise not have been seen,” says Mokades.
A spokesperson from City law firm Ashurst agrees the contextual data helped it to spot “how totally exceptional certain candidates were” and led it to interview candidates “it wouldn’t have seen otherwise”.
Mokades is aware of the argument that the use of contextual data moves away from the principle of recruitment on merit. However, he is forthright in its defence. “No one will get rejected because of contextual data,” he says. “The yeses will remain yeses and the nos will remain nos. This system helps recruiters make decisions on borderline cases. This is extra information that helps you make a decision… It’s about a true meritocracy — colour blind, class blind, access blind.” He points out that the use of contextual data is nothing new, with many universities using it as part of their student admission process.
Perhaps it is no surprise that Mokades, who when writing about his own background in the Guardian, described himself as “I’m black and I’m brown and I’m a brother and I’m Indian and I’m Jewish and I’m Muslim”, has managed to combine the business of recruitment with the quest for social justice. “I have always been interested in social justice,” he says, recalling how at Oxford University, he worked on a scheme to get inner city and ethnic minority pupils into higher education.
Rare career path
After starting his career as a management trainee at the Financial Times, Mokades moved to education publisher Pearson where, as diversity manager, he doubled the proportion of employees from ethnic minorities from 5% to 11%, achieved in part by his insistence that recruitment agencies provided data on the ethnicity of the candidates they submitted.
When one of Pearson’s four agencies suggested that the reason for their 3% figure was because “we know what kind of people are successful here”, Mokades pointed out that the success rate of their candidates was far inferior to that of the other three agencies. “I suggested to them they should think again. Lo and behold,” he continues, “three months later they were at 17%, which tells you that they were deliberately holding people back on the grounds of race. I am sure that sort of thing is unusual, but I have seen it and I think it’s not right.”
It was also at Pearson, where Mokades says he came to the realisation that more needed to be done to help young people, particularly from black and ethnic minority backgrounds. “I could see that there were a lot of very good people from under-represented groups coming out of universities and that firms were keen to improve their diversity but for one reason or another at that time the two weren’t connecting.
“I could see there was a role for somebody to really listen to these young people to help them work out what they want to do, and to connect them with employers.”
However, after setting up Rare Recruitment in 2005, he began to realise that simply connecting disadvantaged people with employers wasn’t enough. The next phase was to help address what he describes as “deficits in social and cultural capital and knowledge” that can make all the difference between a candidate being selected and not selected.
Rare environment
To help them feel at home in a working environment, candidates accepted onto Rare’s books spend time in client companies, he says, while Rare is “very big on giving people things that lawyers, techies or civil servants actually do”, such as a real case study or a real coding exercise. “They start to feel not only that they can be in a place like this but they can ‘do’ in a place like this,” he says. Candidates also go through gruelling one-on-one interview-type sessions.
Every candidate is provided with one-to-one personal development sessions and given a coach. To help prepare them for their applications, they also receive help with everything from numeracy tests to applications forms and interviews, to group exercises and assessment centres.
A closely related strand of the firm’s work is Target Oxbridge, a programme that helps pupils from under-represented groups get into Oxbridge. “If you have severe under-representation of a particular group at those universities, it is almost inevitable that you have this same under-representation in the top echelons of employment and public life,” argues Mokades. The 40% success rate of those on last year’s programme compares favourably with the pro bono initiatives of top independent schools, he says.
While development programmes remain a vital part of Rare’s work, Mokades has come to believe they are not enough to overcome the biases within recruitment resulting from candidates’ backgrounds. Although “the best firms are now bending over themselves to be fair” to candidates, and things “have got much better” at the entry level since he started the company. “It remains difficult to have a completely fair process,” he says.
“Despite working very hard and having very good grades, many candidates weren’t getting interviews, which is why we became involved in our clients’ assessment processes, understanding why people were and weren’t getting through, and that is where the idea of contextual data came from.” With a new tool in his armoury, and his passion undimmed, it is unlikely Mokades will be realising his ambition to wind down Rare Recruitment any time soon.
Raphael Mokades
2005 to present Founder and managing director, Rare Recruitment
2002-05 Diversity manager, Pearson
2001-02 Management trainee, Financial Times
1997-2001 Oxford University
Rare Recruitment
Founded 2005
Staff 23
Around 70% of staff from black and minority ethnic backgrounds
5,000+ candidates on firm’s database. 95%+ from ethnic minority backgrounds and 80% from state schools
Makes more than 900 placements graduate and undergraduate placements a year
Clients include Slaughter & May, Boston Consulting Group, Civil Service Fast Stream , Teach First and KPMG
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