How To Reduce Bias In Your Recruitment Process

Source: Ecruit

Every company wants to hire the best possible talent but unconscious bias might be getting in the way. We take a look at what bias might be occurring in your recruitment process and how you can reduce the bias to ensure you hire the very best.

Key Takeaways

1. Unconscious bias is prejudice in favour or against one thing, person, or group compared to another
2. This can impact your hiring process meaning you are restricting diversity and potentially missing out on the best candidates
3. There are both human and technology focused ways of reducing bias to help you improve your hiring process

What Is Unconscious Bias

Let’s start by understanding exactly what unconscious bias is. Each of us has our own unconscious bias. This is just a part of human nature but when it comes to recruiting for your company this can get in the way of making the best decisions. A bias is when you prejudice either for or against a certain thing, person or group compared with another in a way that is considered to be unfair. These can have positive or negative consequences.

Biases or not just limited to ethnicity or race but can exist towards any social group including areas like age, gender, weight and many more. Most of the time you might not even be aware of these biases which makes it difficult to try and not let them effect your hiring process.

So, what can you to reduce bias from your recruitment process?

How To Remove Bias From Your Hiring Process

Removing bias can be difficult but advances in understanding and technology can help combat this.

Here are some specific ways you can try and eliminate bias from your hiring process.

Remove Gender Bias

When writing your job description you might be using inherent gender bias in your language and this can have a significant impact on the recruitment process. Research shows women are much less likely to apply to job descriptions that use ‘masculine-coded’ language such as “driven” and “confident”. Online tools are available to flag gender bias language and help you provide a more balanced job description.

Use Blind Skill Challenges

CVs are valuable at filtering your candidates to the most relevant, but they also provide plenty of information that can lead to unconscious bias. Consider removing details such as nationality, race, gender, and age from your applications. There are even solutions such as GapJumpers that can do this for you plus can offer additional assessments which allow you to select candidates based on performance without the introduction of bias. Making data driven decisions based on scoring can minimise the impact of your unconscious bias.

Change Your Interview Structure

Many hiring managers prefer a more unstructured interview process to get a better understanding of a candidate, but this can make it harder to benchmark candidates which allows your bias to appear. A structured process that allows you to compare candidates more directly can help address this. You should also try and include a diverse interview panel to help mitigate any personal unconscious biases and make a more informed decision.

Summary

Unconscious bias can be difficult to acknowledge as by its definition it is not something you are consciously aware of. Acknowledging that this is a factor and taking steps to reduce this bias will help improve diversity in your organisation and ensure you are hiring the best possible talent.