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.
Biases in the hiring process, whether explicit or implicit, are bad for business. Unconscious biases can limit your applicant pool, your interview process, and your hiring decisions, and result in a homogenous workforce. Diversity, which bias inherently works against, is good for business. Research by McKinsey has consistently shown that companies with the greatest gender, racial, and ethnic diversity perform better than companies that are more homogenous. Its Why Diversity Matters research found:
These findings are impressive and underscore that while eliminating bias and increasing diversity is the right thing to do, it’s also the smartest business move.
Diversity doesn’t just include race and gender. Sexual orientation, age, country of origin, socioeconomic background, level of education, and ability all play into creating a diverse workforce. This detailed guide dissecting what diversity entails is worth a read.
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.
When it comes to hiring, experts agree that organizations can take steps to minimize unconscious bias.
The more adjectives in an online recruiting ad, the more likely the ad is to contain subtle gender bias. For example, adjectives like “dominant” are unconsciously associated with masculinity, while adjectives like “committed” are unconsciously associated with femininity. Purging gendered language from online recruiting ads makes sense, as does limiting adjectives describing the ideal applicant. The more adjectives describe the imagined candidate, the more likely gendered language is to creep into the ad. Ensure your ads speak to all candidates equally and you’ll reach a larger talent pool. 70 Inclusive Language Principles That Will Make You a More Successful Recruiter has actionable, specific examples you can use to make your language more inclusive.
Much as everyone may be loath to admit it, names carry connotations, and those can pique underlying biases of hiring managers. In 2015, the UK government decided to avoid these biases by having the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) consider student applications with attached names erased. Companies that use online recruiting can do the same thing. Indeed, many Australian companies have taken steps to blank out other details like age and gender from job applications. Some have also removed school and geographic names as well, to further avoid conscious or unconscious biases in hiring. Glassdoor has an excellent guide to “blind hiring,” including a link to a really informative TED Talk on the subject.
While video interviewing may seem to contradict the anonymizing aspects of the online recruiting process, it can actually help reduce hiring biases. The reasoning is that video interviews are viewed by multiple people, and the presence of multiple people can act as a check-and-balance to inherent biases. While video interviewing gives indications about a job candidate’s attractiveness, accent, race, age, and other characteristics, companies can train and monitor interviewers to focus only on criteria relevant to the job being filled. Video interviews can also be far more cost-effective than transporting job candidates for in-person interviews, so you can interview more extensively.
Video interviews make the interview process accessible for more individuals. Want to make your recruiting as accessible as possible? Check out Ten Tips for Making Your Hiring More Inclusive and Accessible.
Online recruiting already benefits from technology, and many companies use computer algorithms to narrow down the applicant pool. Researchers are busy developing artificial intelligence (AI) applications that can sift through applicants, blind to gender, race, and other potentially biasing factors, and focusing only on qualifications. Apps such as Blendoor hide a candidate’s name, age, photo, and other information so that employers only focus on qualifications for a job. Keep in mind that algorithms can also reflect the biases in the data they learn from, so any AI screening tool should be monitored and paired with human judgment.
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.
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 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 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:
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.
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.
We asked HiringThing’s Human Resource Generalist, Becca Noland, how we’ve worked to eliminate bias from our own hiring. Here’s what Becca shared:
Want tips for using HiringThing’s applicant tracking system (ATS) to eliminate hiring bias? We wrote a post about that too.
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.