Want help with your hiring? It’s easy. Enter your information below, and we’ll quickly reach out to discuss your hiring needs.
The latest research has found that a company that makes a wrong hire based on hidden bias could have to pay a cost equal to 75% of the hire’s annual salary. The costs come from having to fire them, losing productivity, and going through the entire hiring process again.
This shows how critical unconscious biases in hiring can be and why you need to eliminate them in your recruiting process.
While it might seem challenging to get rid of all unconscious biases, there are things you can do that will help set your recruitment process up for success. Keep reading to discover a few strategies that might help.
Benefits of Reducing Unconscious Bias in Hiring
If you have hiring bias, you might only be selecting a specific type of employee for your company, and they may or may not even be the right fit. What’s worse, if someone finds out that you are purposefully discriminating against certain types of employees, your company could also find itself in legal trouble.
However, there are many other benefits to reducing bias in the hiring process. For example, when you focus on diversity and inclusion, you’ll have a better recruitment process overall. Eighty percent of candidates say that they prefer to work at a company that prioritizes diversity, so it’ll be easier to attract candidates and make the process easier. However, if you focus on hiring more diverse employees, you’ll also have a wider talent pool to pull from.
Diversity and inclusion can also improve employee morale and engagement. Many employees feel more engaged with the right diverse leadership and workforce. For example, if you have gender inequality at your company and your employees notice it, they may not take pride in working at your company.
Diversity and inclusion can also help your company be more profitable. Some statistics show that having a diverse workforce leads to more profits compared to companies with similar employees.
One of the reasons it can help your profitability is because it’ll bring out more creative ideas and solutions. When you have diverse leaders and employees who come from different backgrounds and think differently, they’re likely to come up with other solutions that you may have never thought of!
1. Define What Diversity Means for You
Now that you know why having a diverse workforce is essential, you’ll need first to define what diversity means to you. You’ll need to understand what you’re looking for and use it as a guiding post for your recruiting process.
This will be different for each business as you analyze what age, gender, sexual preference, and ethnicity are not represented at your company. This will help you learn where to focus your recruiting efforts.
You’ll have to set metrics to ensure you follow this new diverse recruiting process. You’ll want to set up metrics at every critical step in the recruiting process, like interview conversion rates, acceptance rates, time to hire, and applicant funnels.
2. Utilize Standard Questions
Before you start the interview process, the hiring manager and recruiter should have a standard set of questions they can be prepared to ask the candidate. When you have a list of questions to stick to, you’re more likely to reduce the chance of bias, and you won’t forget to ask the candidate an important question.
You could always start with a phone screening as well. This will give recruiters a chance to screen someone without biases about their body language or appearance. With these standard questions, you also help to ensure that each applicant has the same candidate journey and gets the same opportunities.
3. Be Careful of Gendered Wording
When writing a job description, it’s straightforward to include gendered wording that might make someone not want to apply to that description. When you don’t have diverse candidates entering your funnel, it’ll be hard to improve your hiring process.
For example, you may be using more masculine words, like “confident,” “driven,” or “aggressive.” These words can deter female candidates from applying. However, if you have more feminine words in your job description, like “support,” “confident,” or “active,” then you may not have as many male candidates applying for the position.
If you aren’t sure if your job description has gendered wording or not, you can always use artificial intelligence (AI) to scan your job description and help you identify any places where you might need to reword the posting so that you can achieve gender equality at your company.
4. Have Multiple Interviewers
When going through the interview process, you should have multiple interviewers or an interview panel who can listen in. They may or may not ask the candidate questions, but it can be helpful for them to listen in and analyze the candidate from a more objective point of view.
They can also analyze if you’re asking any questions that lead to bias. A recruiter might ask biased queries or want to make a decision based on those biases. Still, having someone else, there can help challenge that bias and make decisions on the actual qualifications of each candidate.
5. Analyze Recruiting Stages
It will also help if you go back and analyze each stage of your recruiting process because bias isn’t present in just the interviewing process. You could find built-in biases at any stage of your recruiting process.
If you take the time to analyze your process objectively and find any flaws, you can find solutions to fix those so that you have a better chance of hiring more diverse candidates.
6. Use Blind Hiring
Resumes are still one of the most common ways hiring managers and recruiters will screen candidates, but these resumes can include information that could lead to unconscious biases. One way to help with this is to have a blind hiring process.
This way, all hints of age, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity are removed from the resume and application so that decision-makers don’t have this information and can make decisions based on the qualifications.
7. Use AI in The Hiring Process
One way you can have a blind hiring process and make decisions that aren’t based on bosses is to use AI sourcing software. Recruiter.com’s AI recruiting software can remove unconscious bias and help you source candidates using unbiased data. You’ll create an ideal candidate profile based on the job qualifications, and then the tool will rank candidates based on unbiased data.
Xuan Smith, CTO of Recruiter.com, said, “This software identifies people based on their work history, how long they were at their job, and what their company does. However, we don’t consider education in our algorithm because we don’t find it to be a huge predictor of success.”
This software can also help hiring managers identify any bias that they might have. For example, if a candidate comes up through the AI software as a good match for the open position, but someone continuously insists they don’t want to hire them, you can start to ask questions as to why. This will help you identify any areas where there might be unconscious biases that are hurting your recruiting process.
Create a Bias-Free Recruiting Process Today
These are only a few ways to create a bias-free recruiting process, but it can still be challenging! Thankfully, at Recruiter.com, we’re experts in creating a bias-free recruiting process, and we have spent a lot of time and resources on ensuring that we help our candidates as well.
Whether you need recruiters trained in hiring biases, help writing your job descriptions, or a powerful AI sourcing software that will automatically reduce the biases for you (or help you point out your own), we’ve got you covered.
Contact us today to discover what recruiting solution would be best for you so that you can start hiring diverse talent!
Get the top recruiting news and insights delivered to your inbox every week. Sign up for the Recruiter Today newsletter.