Steps To Remove Unconscious Bias From Your Recruiting Process

Unconscious bias exists everywhere, including in workplaces. Companies have become more aware of biases at play leading to certain groups being underrepresented in workforces. We are now seeing top companies across the world put in practices and guidelines to remove unconscious bias in recruitment.

Most companies are aware of the advantages of hiring a diverse staff, but they may not be mindful of implicit biases that exist among senior management, the human resources team, hiring managers, and even a candidate’s potential coworkers. To reduce hiring bias, employers must standardize their procedure, make it fair, and simplify it. The foremost step in understanding unconscious bias is becoming conscious of it. They need to deduce how to get over these biases, especially when looking for new employees.

What is Recruitment Bias?

Recruitment bias or unconscious bias in the hiring process is unintentional and subconsciously motivated by assumptions about candidates who have applied for a position. Such biases lead to the rejection of candidates because employers allow their interests or preconceived notions to cloud their logical judgment. 

According to a 2019 survey, minority ethnic job applicants in the UK submit an average of 60% more applications than applicants from white Western backgrounds to achieve the same level of response.

In some situations, bias is understandable; for example, you will inherently favor applications if the candidate possesses a greater number of the skills you need. But, recruitment bias based on protected characteristics, including gender (sex), ethnicity, age, disability, pregnancy and maternity, and sexual orientation, is a problem that employers need to address; not doing so can hurt the company’s image.

So how can employers adopt practices in their recruitment process to overcome recruitment bias? Let’s find out.

Conduct an Audit of Your Hiring Process

Employers that consistently neglect to examine their recruitment process run the risk of repeating bad hiring habits, wasting money, and alienating potential employees. If your company engages in regular recruitment at any level, you should take the time to learn what works, what doesn’t, and how to get better results. A recruitment audit can help you identify areas that require improvement. 

While qualitative data will give you insight into why individuals did not choose your firm over your competitors by analyzing recruitment techniques, quantitative data will give you a solid indication of the trends indicating the collapse of your hiring process.

The best way to do a recruitment audit is to start by looking at your most recent hires. What were the results? Were they hired from diverse groups? What was the candidate’s feedback? To eliminate bias in recruiting and selecting applicants, sketch out the candidate’s journey. From sourcing to onboarding, you will find out if there are anomalies that require work.

Look at how many people leave during their first year of employment with your company — what percentage of new diverse hires stay past their probationary period (if there is one)? If this number is low (less than 50 percent), then there might be something wrong with your onboarding process that’s causing people not only to leave but also preventing them from staying longer than they otherwise might have.

Train the Hiring Team to Identify and Address Bias

Recruiters are the main line of defense against external candidates, and it’s possible that sometimes, their decisions about who they recruit into an organization are driven by some biases. It can lead to problems if not managed well. According to Laura Berger’s Forbes article, unconscious bias has an impact on many aspects of business, from lowering retention and diversity rates to fostering a disjointed culture.

The first step is to make sure everyone on the hiring team understands what unconscious bias is, as well as its impact on the applicant pool and workplace. Then, you can work together to create a plan for removing this type of bias from the interview process. For example, hiring teams can be trained to consider their reasons for preferring a candidate while they review their résumé. They shouldn’t merely skim a resume for keywords and skills before discarding it. It’s necessary to quantify skill requirements, years in the business, certificates, prior experience, or tech prerequisites.

Teams can be trained through workshops, seminars, or even one-on-one coaching sessions with an expert. By providing this training, you can ensure that everyone on your team understands how they might be unconsciously biased and what they can do about it.

After you have trained your hiring team on unconscious bias, you should also consider providing them with tools and resources for identifying and addressing any biases that may be present during interviews. This could include providing them with a checklist for identifying potential biases during an interview or giving them guidance on how to identify and remove bias from interviews.

Bring Diverse Perspectives Into the Hiring Process

When a job candidate and the interviewer have similar backgrounds, the interviewer may feel more at ease and assume the candidate is more qualified than their qualifications and experience indicate. Having a diversified hiring team that is diverse in terms of roles (freshers, executives, or corporate leaders), generations(baby boomers, Gen Xers, millennials, and Gen Zers), cultures, faiths, backgrounds, strengths, genders, and personalities. It can help avoid recruiting decisions from being based on this fictitious sense of familiarity. It is a simple step to manage unconscious bias, which may result in a more diverse employment pool.

Because of the diversity of the interviewers, diverse candidates feel more welcomed by the organization. The candidate may feel less anxious throughout the meeting, which can help your company’s reputation as a possible employer and raise the likelihood that they will have a successful interview.

Implementing Standard Interview Format

A standard Interview format is a great method to guarantee that all candidates are treated equally and fairly. It makes it effortless to compare applicants against each other and enables you to remain focused on the fundamental questions.

The Standard Interview Format is a four-part structure that includes:

– Introduction and icebreaker questions

– Behavioral questions (behavioral interviewing)

– Questions about the candidate’s resume or background

– Open-ended questions

Leverage Technology to Make the Hiring Process More Inclusive

A candidate’s name or CV profile image, two seemingly little details, can have a huge impact on how a recruiter views them and whether they are recruited or not, but this shouldn’t be the case because perceptions and preconceived notions can lead to bias. 

This is where AI can take the leading role. Companies are under pressure to make their hiring processes more inclusive. AI is the right solution for a bias-free hiring process.

So what can organizations do to make sure that they are bias-free and hiring the right people? Here are a few ideas:

Automate the process – Automation can help in picking candidates on the basis of skills and requirements and not based on private details such as name, gender, race, etc. The first step is to automate as much of the process as possible so you can scale it up and down over time. For example, if you want to hire software engineers, there are AI tools out there that will automatically scan thousands of resumes in minutes and rank them based on how well they match your company’s criteria and preferences. This will greatly reduce the time you would have to spend completing the task manually.

Screen candidates using AI tools. Once you have identified potential candidates through automation, you need to screen them using artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as Talent500s AI automated tool, IBM Watson Assistant, or the talent experience platform like HireVue. These platforms allow you to swiftly screen candidates and obtain substantial results by automatically analyzing their responses and comparing them with thousands of other applicants who have applied for jobs with your organization.

Build a data-driven hiring process aligned to job requirements

Data has become such an important part of our lives that it’s now essential in the hiring process. Why build a data-driven hiring process? Simple, Data doesn’t discriminate. It is reliable information and educates employers about the talent pool. With so many candidates applying for jobs, employers can swiftly sift through each applicant using data-driven methods.

How to use data to build a smooth bias-free hiring process:

1) Use applicant tracking software (ATS) to streamline your hiring process and automate the candidate screening process

2) Collect and track metrics via surveys.

3) Prioritize recruitment marketing ROI and advertising expenditures.

Measure diversity in the candidate pool and hired employees

Measuring diversity in the candidate pool is important because it allows an organization to track the diversity of the pool of applicants that it is considering for open positions. This can help the organization identify any potential barriers or biases that may be preventing it from attracting a diverse pool of candidates. For example, if the organization is only attracting a small number of candidates from underrepresented groups, it may need to examine its recruitment processes or job posts and determine whether there are any changes that could be made to make the process more inclusive.

Measuring diversity in hired employees, on the other hand, is important because it allows an organization to assess the diversity of its workforce, and to track whether it is making progress in increasing diversity over time. It can also help an organization identify any issues or challenges that may be preventing it from hiring and retaining diverse employees.

The following key indicators for diversity recruitment will assist your team in tracking diversity and determining whether unconscious prejudices exist that inhibit your business from achieving its diversity and inclusion objectives.

• Candidate demographics: The proportion of employees who belong to a particular group.
• Candidate outreach: This metric help you to find out if you can reach out to diverse groups.
• Candidate selection: Track how many candidates from target groups are employed relative to those in dominant groups.

To measure diversity among the current employees, read KPIs To Measure Diversity And Inclusion In The Workplace.

This will give you a better idea of how the recruitment strategies are working. And how you are managing diversity and inclusion objectives in the workplace.

Do blind resume review – removing the image, name, age, sex, location, etc.

A blind resume review is a process of reviewing a resume without knowing the applicant. This allows the reviewer to focus on the content of the resume. In general, blind resumes are used in recruitment efforts to avoid discrimination based on gender, race, age, and other factors. They are a great way to eliminate bias from the hiring process, which can help increase diversity within an organization.

The benefits of blind resume reviews include:

Eliminating discrimination: Blind resumes help the hiring teams to dodge discrimination while screening applicants. Without knowing the applicant, reviewers can construct sound judgments based exclusively on their worth and qualifications. This guarantees that everyone has an equal opportunity of being employed regardless of race or gender.

Increasing diversity: While making hiring decisions, removing private details such as name, image, gender, and location from blind resumes allow recruiters to concentrate on qualifications. This can help make a more diverse workforce.

It is necessary to be explicit about the abilities and attributes you require on your team and why those qualities are crucial. This communication needs to go out before you start recruiting and conducting interviews. To remove bias and focus on the essential skills and attributes your team needs, be willing to confront your and your team’s perceptions.

 In the end, eliminating unconscious bias from your recruiting process is an essential step toward building a fair and inclusive workplace. By following the measures outlined above, you can take substantial action to address and eliminate bias in recruiting and selecting applicants. 

These steps include conducting a bias- audit, implementing diversity and inclusion training for your team, using structured interviews and objective criteria to evaluate candidates, and actively seeking out diverse candidates. By taking these steps, you can create a more diverse and inclusive workplace, which can lead to a more productive and innovative team.