February 17, 2022
It’s human nature to have biases. Whether it’s consciously or unconsciously, we frequently make decisions based on our own experiences. This is fine when deciding what to order for lunch or where to walk your dog, but when it comes to hiring, teams need to minimize their own biases. Unbiased hiring allows them to bring on the best person for the role, regardless of personal opinion. As a recruiter, you probably understand the importance of reducing bias, but may need practical tips for how to actually make progress. You also might need ways to communicate these ideas to hiring managers and leadership effectively.
To help companies update their hiring strategies to eliminate bias, we asked HR leaders and business owners, “What is one way that you have updated your hiring strategy to try to eliminate bias?“ From weighted scoring to having an open-door policy, there are several hiring strategies that may help your company work towards eliminating bias in the hiring process.
Here are nine ways businesses have reduced bias in hiring:
When you’re attempting to eliminate bias in your hiring process, pay closer attention to where you post your jobs. Consider online sites dedicated to multicultural communities, so that more diverse people have access to the opportunities that you offer. This way, you can reach a much wider demographic.
Lauren Kleinman, The Quality Edit
A strategy to eliminate bias in the hiring process is weighted scoring. Rating scales come in handy for evaluating the quality of the interview and focusing on the most important skills with higher priority for the role. This strategy helped us to be more subjective and avoid unconscious bias by using a combination of quantitative and qualified assessments.
Maciek Kubiak, PhotoAiD
Recruiting with DEI in mind has become a whole new ball game, studies all agree a diverse workforce contributes to better overall performance. Of course - it makes sense - and is a worthy cause for any company to strive for.
A good place to start is to do an audit of your past recruitment adverts and make changes to speak to a wider range of candidates. Don’t rely on the same sources over and over again if you want different results when seeking out new candidates.
Instead, seek out new opportunities to source diverse candidates where they might hang out on forums or womens’ groups for example.
Saskia Ketz, Mojomox
AI isn’t prone to the same kind of unconscious biases that human beings are because it relies purely on data — and nothing else. By incorporating AI applications and machine learning, you can rest assured that the candidates you find are perfectly matched to your requirements purely on merit, qualifications, and skills, without getting swayed by preconceived assumptions of any sort.
Harry Morton, Lower Street
Certain hiring approaches include asking the same interview questions with each candidate. Instead of an off-the-cuff approach, asking the same questions makes it easier to compare different candidates. You can rate each candidate on the quality of their response with better consistency. If you perform each interview based on the same questions and agenda, it eliminates bias and gives every candidate a similar experience.
Logan Mallory, Motivosity
Learn how Fetcher’s diversity stats help recruiters better understand where to adjust their hiring communications and processes to align with DE&I goals.
Education is key when it comes to reducing bias hiring and improving workplace diversity. Start the conversation of reducing bias hiring with other internal business leaders and executives, then see how much time and money your company can invest to hold educational sessions, workshops, or events with guest speakers discussing diversity, equity, and inclusion. Taking initiative to reduce and eliminate hiring and workplace bias will put your company ahead of the competition by encouraging distinct personal growth and development for employees and a strong diversity pipeline for your business.
Rachel Roff, Urban Skin Rx
Although meant simply as a listing, simply posting job opportunities can create an innate bias based on who accesses those websites, which is why we have switched to utilizing multiple channels to advertise our job offerings in order to negate this effect. Over 80% of all job seekers search for employment through their smartphone, and nearly 90% of content viewed is video.
Utilizing services that specialize in posting an engaging video that uses a diversity recruiting metric, and then distributing our promotional efforts across multiple platforms, provides us access to a much more inclusive group of people. By using a multiple channel approach, and tailoring content for each specific platform’s audience, we have reduced bias in our hiring process, and have created more access to highly qualified and talented candidates.
Cody Candee, Bounce
Every hiring process involves interviewing a long line of candidates, and hiring managers and teams face several challenges when they reach the process of elimination. One of them is recency bias — the tendency to recall details related to more recent candidates over previous ones. In the presence of recency bias, candidates who appear in the latest interview lists hold an unfair advantage over those who have faced the process during the initial stages. Although unintentional, this bias does have substantial repercussions. The solution is to process and analyze the data collected via the interview process and rely on this analysis rather than memory alone.
Jerry Ford, 4WD Life
At Arka, we have an inclusive environment with an open-door policy for everyone to ask questions that will help them develop. This ends up helping not only the company but also, ultimately, the customers. We believe in equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. We should all have the same chance to knock it out of the park. This doesn’t mean there’s special treatment when it comes to deciding on a promotion, bonus, etc.
Phillip Akhzar, Arka
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Check out Fetcher’s other blog posts for more talent acquisition tips and insights into recruiting trends.
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Recruiting Life, Recruiting Strategies
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