What is one tip you have for HR professionals to reduce bias in the hiring process?
To help HR professionals decrease bias when seeking new talent, we asked business consultants and HR experts this question for their best advice. From focusing on qualifications to conducting skills tests, there are several considerations that may help you minimize bias as you recruit new candidates.
Here are 10 ways to help lessen bias in the recruiting process:
- Focus on Candidate’s Qualifications
- Implement Blind Hiring Practices
- Stretch Outside of Your Network
- Diversify Hiring Staff and Panels
- Integrate AI Into Recruiting Programs
- Reevaluate Your Job Descriptions
- Use Standardized Interview Questions
- Define Your Expectations Clearly
- Conduct a Phone Interview
- Give a Practice Skills Tests
Focus on Candidate’s Qualifications
When you’re working through the resume review process, you can decrease biased decisions by keeping your attention on professional experience and skills instead of demographic information. Standardizing interview questions is also a great way to prioritize qualifications and ensure all candidates have an equal interview experience. Choose the right candidate for the job based on who you genuinely think has the professional skills and experience needed to help the company reach its goals.
Josh Secrest, Paradox
Implement Blind Hiring Practices
The hiring process already feels a bit mysterious and daunting for both sides of the equation. But when it comes to HR and hiring, falling into biases happens easier than one might think. One way to reduce any unconscious biases from creeping into the hiring process is to implement blind hiring. Any information that might give way to a bias, such as a name, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, is all removed by blind hiring software. This leaves you with the qualifications of each candidate and an identifying number in the system. Anyone can use these kinds of software, from small businesses to an executive search firm, to aid in diversity efforts and create more equitable hiring practices.
Ryan Nouis, TruPath
Stretch Outside of Your Network
Don’t simply rely on your immediate network for hiring. For organizations that already struggle with a lack of diversity, relying on your immediate network for prospective candidates will only help to exacerbate the problem. Also, consider recruiting for cultural additions and how to stretch your company instead of solely relying on cultural fit. These two things can make all the difference in reducing bias in the hiring process for any organization, big or small.
Rronniba Pemberton, Markitors
Diversify Hiring Staff and Panels
Affinity bias makes the interviewee favor certain candidates they feel a connection with or share similarities. To prevent it, gather multiple people from varied backgrounds to interview potential candidates during the interview stage. Our company uses diversity panels to reduce unconscious bias. Our hiring panel must have two women and individuals from the BIPOC community. We have managed to improve the diversity of our workforce by 15% in just two years.
Katherine Brown, Spyic
Integrate AI Into Recruiting Processes
Reduce hiring bias by using AI for recruiting. AI can run a pre-screen where it asks objective qualifying questions related to the specific role. It is great because it cuts out biases based on names, ages, genders, sexuality, first appearance, and more. It is simply an AI system that directly questions candidates about their ability to successfully perform the job in question.
Alex Czarnecki, Cottage
Reevaluate Your Job Descriptions
Reduce biases during the hiring process by reworking your job descriptions. A job listing is super important to the hiring process as it provides the first impression of a company’s culture. Every word choice has an impact on the application pool. Using masculine language can deter women from applying and vice versa. It is best to go through the job description and take out any gendered language. Replace the gendered words with more neutral terms.
Tri Nguyen, Network Capital
Use Standardized Interview Questions
It’s hard to completely avoid bias when hiring a new employee, but using a structured interview style can help. With a structured interview, pre-decided questions are used so that it’s easier to compare candidates’ responses. This can reduce the risk of choosing to hire someone only based on your initial impression of them.
Camille Brouard, Myhrtoolkit
Define Your Expectations Clearly
If the preliminary work is done properly, HR and the hiring manager will have clearly identified what the role is and defined what they want in metrics: education, experience, soft skills, temperament, etc. Metrics take the emotion and bias out of the equation and allow searches to find the right candidate regardless of age, sex, race, or any other factor.
Lorraine Bossé-Smith, Concept One LLC
Conduct a Phone Interview
For the first round of interviews, I recommend holding phone interviews. You are unable to see what the other person looks like, and it lessens a bias. Also, you are able to ask a lot more questions about the position than in person since it is more difficult to have a flowing conversation.
Kiran Gollakota, Waltham Clinic
Give a Practice Skills Tests
While there are a lot of ways a resume and cover letter can make us subconsciously start liking or disliking a candidate, blind skills tests remain one of our favorite ways to minimize hiring bias. By administering knowledge tests, we’re truly able to compare apples to apples. This gives us a two-fold advantage by ensuring that the candidate is indeed capable of handling their day-to-day duties. Secondly, we’re taking the most objective and data-driven approach when selecting them for the interview stage. This strategy has been an excellent time-saver for all parties involved, and I can highly recommend it to all hiring managers and recruiters out there.
Anna Berkolec, ResumeLab
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