What are “Undefined” candidates in the Demographic Survey Report?

The Demographic Survey Report imports candidate-submitted data from your ATS, which we’ve broken down into three categories:

• Submitted: the candidate submitted the survey with a category chosen (ex. gender: male, female)
• Declined: the candidate submitted the survey
  • without a category chosen
  • or with “Decline to report” or similar option chosen
• Not Submitted: the candidate did not submit the survey
  • the candidate chose not to submit the survey
  • or the candidate did not receive the survey

In the Survey Insights graphs, Datapeople combines "Declined" and "Not Submitted" into a single "Undefined" category denoted by two respective shades of gray. We do this because, although they represent different response types, they both offer zero information about the candidate's identity, which is the focus of the Survey Insights graphs. Combining the two categories that represent a lack of data into the same data point allows the viewer to easily grasp how much of their data is incomplete.

Datapeople includes the "Undefined" category in the Survey Insights graphs because unreported demographic data can skew perceptions of the makeup of your applicant pools. If there is too much missing data, the resulting statistics may not be representative of the total population.

What insights can I extract from the report if most candidates are "Undefined" ?

• Unfortunately, in this case little can be interpreted about the distribution of your candidate pools, since there is no way of knowing how those candidates identify, and, as mentioned above, it is dangerous to generalize candidate information based on the defined data you do have.
• It may help to use the Country filter to limit the report to only countries where you are actively surveying candidates. For example, if you are only surveying candidates in the United States, many of your "Undefined" candidates could be from other countries. Applying the Country filter to only view US candidates may result in more complete data for that subset of candidates.
• If most of your "Undefined" candidates are from the "Not Submitted" category, using the Distribution Insights tab of the report can help you determine if you survey is reaching all intended candidates (from all intended sources and requisitions/locations)
• Datapeople's Gender Report comes in handy here as its inference model can give you a high-level idea about hiring trends around gender.