Contextual recruitment

What is contextual recruitment

Contextual recruitment tools look at the context in which students receive their grades. This helps recruiters spot candidates they might otherwise miss. It can highlight people from disadvantaged backgrounds who outperformed their peers and have the qualities to do well at the Bar.

What does it mean for applicants?

During the Pupillage Gateway application process, you will be given the opportunity to complete a contextual recruitment questionnaire. This form is optional and asks you questions within three categories:

Educational background – eg the school you attended

Personal background – eg if you have care experience, caring responsibilities or have sought asylum

Socio-economic background – eg if you qualified for free school meals, your parent or carer’s occupation, if you are the first generation to attend university, and if you had to work to support your studies.

The response to these questions will be sent directly to our partner, Rare, who process the data and attach ‘flags’ for each of the categories to your application. Recruiters will get to see if you have an ‘education’, ‘personal’ or ‘socio-economic’ category flag. There may be further developments to the portal which allows recruiters to see the detail in which this ‘flag’ was allocated. For example, if you received a socio-economic flag as you are the first generation to attend university.

If you do not receive any ‘flags’, this does not put your application at a disadvantage. If your application meets all the criteria required by the AETO, you will still be included on their shortlist.

Contextual data is optional for recruiters to use during the pupillage application process. Some may refer to it during initial shortlisting, some may look at it at interview stage, whereas some may look at it at offer stage.

What does it mean for recruiters?

If you choose to use the contextual recruitment data in the Pupillage Gateway it will give you consistency, objectivity and some valuable data points that you can use to introduce contextual recruitment into your process.

Contextual recruitment data helps to take away some of the subjectivity that may be taking place within current recruitment process. It can support you to make decisions by providing well researched data points for you to consider by understanding some of the background factors to an application.

When looking at your applications in the Pupillage Gateway you will have the opportunity to access a candidate’s contextual recruitment data. You can decide how you would like to use this data as part of your recruitment process. From speaking with chambers and organisations who already use contextual recruitment in their process, we feel this data can have most impact in the shortlisting stage when deciding on your borderline and ‘maybe’ candidates.

We will be producing guidance in the new year around how to use contextual recruitment in your recruitment process, and will be updating our fair recruitment guide and fair recruitment training.

The cost to advertise and manage your pupillage recruitment through the Gateway, which includes access to contextual recruitment, is £1,100 (+VAT) per year.

Partnering with Rare

We’re working to improve the diversity of the pupillage intake at the Bar, and contextual recruitment helps in some way to achieve this. We’ve partnered with Rare to give all recruiters on the Pupillage Gateway the opportunity to use contextual recruitment as part of their application process.

How Rare's system works

Rare’s contextual recruitment system measures two things; academic outperformance and disadvantage. It uses data from all schools in the UK to compare the applicants' grades to the grades in their school in their year. The data is processed by an algorithm to generate a ‘flag’ system, along with performance index data, which indicates a relative level of disadvantage or an indication of where an individual has outperformed their peers.

Read our blog: Contextual recruitment explained