Scorecards Help Eliminate Hiring Bias

Eliminating Bias from Hiring is Crucial

42% of talent acquisition professionals told LinkedIn that bias is the top reason interviews fail to effectively select candidates for open positions. SHRM reports that bias is the number one cause of hiring mistakes, impacting everything from company productivity to the bottom line. 

Eliminating bias in the hiring process can prevent mistakes and strengthen diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), which today’s job seekers want. 79% of job seekers want to work for a company that prioritizes DEI values and initiatives, while 78% of hiring professionals say diversity is currently the top trend impacting how they hire.

Curbing Our Biases 

Two types of bias exist: explicit (or conscious) and implicit (unconscious). The Georgetown University National Center for Cultural Competence defines explicit bias as bias, “characterized by overt negative behavior”—think someone who’s openly, proudly racist, homophobic, misogynistic, or ageist. Implicit bias is trickier. They define implicit bias as bias that “operates outside a person’s awareness and can be in direct contradiction to a person’s espoused beliefs and values.” Implicit bias automatically seeps into a person’s thinking and behavior, often without them realizing it. A hiring manager only hiring people that remind them of themselves is an example of implicit bias. So is thinking someone’s “too old,” “not old enough,” or “not the right gender” for a role.

Admitting bias exists is a significant first step to ensuring you combat biases in your hiring process—we’re all governed somewhat by feelings we may not know we have. Admitting we all have biases allows you to put checks into place to ensure those implicit biases don’t interfere with hiring decisions.

How to Eliminate Hiring Biases

When it comes to hiring, experts agree that organizations can take steps to minimize unconscious bias.

Standardize the Process

Structuring the hiring process in a standardized way gives organizations the ability to compare candidates' answers or insights—if candidates are being judged on the same criteria, it leaves less room for the feelings or gut instincts where biases thrive. Ben Dattner of the Harvard Business Review also points out how humans often make emotional decisions, especially regarding other people, and suggests taking “the necessary steps to prevent emotional decisions from happening in your company.” Structuring makes the process more objective, removing those emotional decisions. 

It takes people an average of 27 seconds to make a first impression, which certainly means they aren’t confronting whether said impression is biased or not—they don’t have the time! Scorecards can help remove these biases or “gut instincts” from the hiring process. Rather than saying, “This candidate has good vibes,” hiring professionals using scorecards will have standardized data to back up their assertions.

Make Hiring Collaborative

Making the hiring process a collective effort is another way to help eliminate bias. If the hiring process is left up to just one person, you’re getting just one perspective, including individuals’ biases. A collective effort with multiple views and inputs means that colleagues have chances to counter each other's biases and help each other think outside the box.  Having each person member of the team score the candidates independently is also a best practice to eliminate the chance of groupthink.

What’s a standardized hiring process that makes recruiting a collective yet independent experience? Interview scorecards.

Recruiting professionals and professionals tasked with creating recruiting strategies are in a unique position to help others hire and retain a diverse group of talented employees. A strong recruitment strategy is the bedrock of any successful DEI initiative. We created the HiringThing Guide to DEI Recruiting to help organizations reimagine their hiring practices through a DEI lens. 

Scorecards Help Eliminate Hiring Bias

Scorecards standardize the interview process by ensuring that every individual participating in the hiring process can score job candidates using the same criteria. Ideally, when hiring managers and other stakeholders are looking over the scores, they don’t know who gave what score, ensuring that not only is the implicit bias they have for job seekers lessened but so is the implicit bias they may also have towards their colleagues. Scorecards allow for a more objective, holistic approach to discussing which candidates move forward in the hiring process. 

Scorecards can further eliminate biases by:

• Allowing the hiring team to fully understand the job criteria before the interview process begins. 
• Leading to a more fair candidate assessment in a group setting. 
• Measuring the consistency of a candidate's performance as they move along the interview process. 
• Allowing the hiring team to rely less on commonalities and gut reactions and more on the preset job criteria the scorecard ranks.
• Helping the hiring team remember job candidates by rank, rather than arbitrary details like appearance, shared experiences, or mannerisms. 

Being able to help the customers you serve to streamline and eliminate bias from their hiring process is a relevant value-add for those of you who have or are interested in a private label ATS solution.

HiringThing Releases Scorecard Feature

As part of our mission to continue democratizing the hiring process, as well as providing our customers with ATS value-adds for their customers, HiringThing has released a scorecard feature. Multiple users can now rate and provide feedback on job candidates, making your hiring a less biased process. 

Candidate experience is necessary to today’s job seekers, and one thing that can strengthen candidate experience, even for candidates who don’t move forward in the interview process, is feedback. Scorecard ratings can help your organization provide standardized, professional, unbiased feedback to the job candidates you interview.

Related Resources

• The HiringThing Guide to DEI Recruiting
• Five Ways to Eliminate Bias From Your Hiring Process
• Five Benefits of Asynchronous Videos for Job Interviews
• Speed Up Your Hiring With On-Demand Video Interviews

About HiringThing

HiringThing is a modern recruiting and employee onboarding platform as a service that creates seamless talent experiences. Our white label solutions and open API enable technology and service providers to offer hiring and onboarding to their clients. Approachable and adaptable, the platform empowers anyone, anywhere to build their dream team.