What You Need to Do to Reduce Unconscious Bias in Recruitment

Recruiters are human beings. That means they’re prone to human weaknesses. Unconscious bias is one of them. Even if you don’t realize it (hence the term “unconscious” bias), biases can be affecting your decision-making when considering job candidates.

Unfortunately, unconscious bias is unavoidable. Everyone experiences it to some degree. Luckily, there are steps you can take to ensure it doesn’t cause you to overlook qualified job applicants. They include the following:

Undergo Training

Limiting the effects of unconscious bias is much easier when you can identify what your biases are, and recognize when they are affecting your impression of someone. That’s why it’s a good idea to undergo training programs designed to help in this capacity.

In fact, it’s smart to make sure all managers and major decision-makers at the company undergo such training. Doing so will provide a foundation for reducing the effects of unconscious bias throughout the organization.

Use Blind Resumes

Unconscious bias can strike in many ways during the recruitment process. Unfortunately, it often causes problems even before a candidate has the opportunity to meet with you. Something as simple as their name can trigger an unnoticed reaction. That reaction may not always be positive.

For example, studies have shown that people tend to have a better first impression of someone if they find their name easy to pronounce. On the other hand, if someone has a name that’s particularly long or difficult to pronounce, people may subconsciously dislike them before getting to know them better.

You obviously don’t want such factors influencing your hiring decisions. That’s why you may want to consider using software to “blind” resumes and job applications. These programs simply remove all resume details that aren’t directly related to an applicant’s qualifications. This prevents you from letting an unrelated factor affect how you perceive a candidate.

Emphasize Diversity on Your Hiring Team

Recruitment doesn’t always involve one individual. On the contrary, it’s common for multiple people to be involved in the final hiring decision. Thus, to as much a degree as possible, you should emphasize assembling a diverse hiring team. Having multiple perspectives helps you avoid making decisions based on biases you didn’t even know you had.

Give Tests to Applicants

It’s not uncommon for recruiters to ask the top job candidates for given roles to take work tests before they choose who to hire. These tests should mimic the kind of work the candidate would likely perform in their role if they were to be hired.

Experts recommend using these tests because strong work test performance tends to correlate with strong overall job performance. Additionally, tests can eliminate bias, as you’ll be less focused on irrelevant details about candidates, and more focused on their performance.

Don’t Let Company Culture Become Too Homogenous

It’s important to develop a positive company culture. Employees are more likely to stay with organizations if they feel the culture is supportive and enjoyable. Thus, it’s also important to consider the degree to which a candidate will fit in with your organization’s culture when making hiring decisions.

However, you also have to consider how your culture may be a reflection of inherent bias. For instance, perhaps you’re handling recruitment for a company that was founded by young people. In an effort to maintain an energetic and enthusiastic company culture, they may have prioritized hiring other young people in the early stages of growth, resulting in a workforce consisting primarily of younger employees.

This can cause problems during future recruitment. You wouldn’t want to reject a qualified candidate simply because they were older than many of the other employees at the company. In fact, their experience could be a significant advantage. Thus, while you absolutely should prioritize culture fit in recruitment, you should also honestly assess whether your current culture could do with more diversity.

Stick to Interview Templates

Odds are good you won’t ask the same exact questions of every single candidate you ever interview. That could restrict the process and limit the insights it’s supposed to yield. You need to be flexible, allowing an interview to go in new directions when necessary.

That said, you should still use interview templates to standardize the process. You still need to plan and prepare for each interview the same way. You are of course free to divert from that plan if a response interviewees give to a question indicates a good reason to.

For example, they might mention something about their qualifications that you’d like to know more about. In that case, it’s fine to ask different questions from those on your template.

You simply don’t want to start out each interview differently. Bias could impact what questions you ask if you didn’t prepare for each interview identically. Luckily, by using templates, emphasizing diversity, and focusing on ways to continue identifying unconscious bias, you’ll be able to decrease its impact on your hiring choices.