• PiC (Performance in Context) wins £50,000 to help make graduate recruitment fairer
• Open data helps businesses consider candidate background when short-listing applicants

A tool to improve the social mobility of graduates has won Nesta and the Open Data Institute’s (ODI) Jobs Open Data Challenge - one of seven prizes to use open data to solve social challenges.

PiC (Performance in Context) helps recruiters consider performance in light of a candidate’s background using publicly available data. It also responds to businesses who want to increase social diversity.

The winning service works by comparing a candidate’s information to a range of open data sets relating to social background and academic attainment. These include the Department for Education’s school performance tables and KS4 and KS5 destinations data, and the Index of Multiple Deprivation. Using this data, PiC produces an overall ‘achievement score’ and ‘deprivation score’ for each candidate calculated using 11 measures indicative of disadvantage and relative performance. These include the performance of their school nationally, the number of people from their area who attend university and their A-level grades compared to their peers.

For example, two A-Level students might have the same grades, but whereas one may have performed moderately at a high achieving school, the other may have been top of their class at a failing school. PiC reveals to recruiters the candidate’s relative performance.

The team behind PiC, who are based in London, has won the Jobs Open Data Challenge prize of £50,000 to launch it this year. It will be available initially to graduate recruiters on a subscription basis, with a view to expanding into the university market.

Ed Parkes, Senior Programme Manager for the Open Data Challenge Series, comments: “PiC is an example of how open data can help people to make better informed decisions. The tool has the potential to grow the talent pool of the UK workforce while improving social mobility for thousands of people across the UK.”

Henry Morris, Founder & CEO of PiC comments: “At PiC we’re passionate about improving access to jobs. The prize will support us to put tens of thousands of applications into context this year, and hundreds of thousands in 2016.”

PiC was one of three finalists in the Jobs Open Data Challenge. You can read more about PiC and the prize here.