How to Overcome Bias in the Hiring Process
When adding new staff to your team, it can be easy to let unconscious bias influence your hiring choices. Could your unconscious biases be damaging your ability to build a high-performing team?
Overcoming unconscious bias in recruitment is essential if you want to establish a strong and diverse workforce with the power to lead your company to success. By challenging your biases, you can ensure that you always choose the right people to join your team.
Not sure where to begin when it comes to identifying and overcoming recruitment bias? You’re not alone. Here’s what you need to know to tackle the issue right now.
What is unconscious bias in recruitment anyway?
Unconscious biases are social stereotypes about people that we form outside our conscious awareness. Everyone has unconscious biases stemming from our unconscious tendency to organise social worlds by categorising.
The impact of bias in hiring
Unconscious biases have a powerful impact on hiring, especially if hiring managers aren’t aware of their own biases.
They contribute to homogeneous hiring and lack of diversity. They influence your hiring decisions, you can miss out on the best candidates and fail to build a strong team.
Unfortunately, bias in recruitment can also reinforce discriminatory stereotypes. These can prevent you from developing a diverse and multicultural team. It may even contribute to the marginalisation of specific people and groups.
These detrimental impacts show how important it is to learn to overcome bias in talent acquisition. When you challenge your biases, you can make the right choices to support your company’s growth trajectory.
How to overcome recruitment bias
There are many things you can do to begin challenging recruitment bias at your workplace. Here are five steps you can take to get started.
1. Be aware of your biases - Take the Harvard Implicit Test (we're serious, take it right now?!)
The first step to overcoming unconscious bias is identifying your own biases. Take the Harvard Implicit Test and get to know what biases influence you and your decision-making processes.
By becoming aware of your biases and the ways in which they affect your hiring choices, you can start to challenge assumptions. Soon, you’ll learn to look beyond your biases, allowing you to make more informed decisions.
2. Establish a diverse hiring panel
Next, it’s important to establish a diverse hiring panel at every stage throughout your job recruitment process. A diverse hiring team represents the diversity of your workplace.
While it’s not always possible to represent everyone in your hiring panel, it is helpful to utilise the perspectives and experiences of people from a variety of groups and backgrounds. A strong hiring panel should never be homogenous. Instead, it should include a mix of people from all walks of life.
When you need to set up a hiring panel to conduct your next round of interviews, ask yourself whose voices are being championed at your company. Does your panel include people from a diverse range of ethnicities, abilities, gender identities, and cultural backgrounds?
4. Set up standardised evaluations
If you’re still concerned that bias may be influencing your resume evaluation process, it is a good idea to establish standardised evaluation systems.
By using a set of standard benchmarks and questions to assess job applicants, you can remove subjectivity from the resume evaluation process. Instead, standardised systems can help you objectively judge each application in line with a clear, comprehensive set of benchmarks.
Next time you need to recruit a new staff member, identify a few standard benchmarks before you begin to look at resumes. When a resume meets your required demands, put it in the ‘maybe’ pile, regardless of other biases or concerns that may apply. This can help you ensure you’re giving all applicants an equal chance.
5. Use a skills test or sample process
Finally, if standardised evaluation methods aren’t enough to help you navigate bias-free hiring, you can develop a skills test or sample process to assess applicant suitability.
First, you’ll need to identify a list of candidates who may be suitable for a role at your company based on resume details and selection criteria. Once you’ve done this, a skills test or sample can help you ensure they have what it takes to succeed as part of your professional team.
When setting up a skills test or sample requirement, ensure that the test you use is directly related to the skills required for the role you’re hiring. Ensure that you have a fair and consistent way of evaluating results, even if this means removing identifying details for a completely unbiased evaluation process.
Your next steps
Are you still searching for ways to overcome biases in recruitment as you seek to grow your team? Contact us today to learn more about how Kingston Human Capital can support you through the talent acquisition process!
© Elizabeth Kingston 2018.
This article is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution NoDerivatives 4.0 International Licence.
This article is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution NoDerivatives 4.0 International Licence, which permits use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. If you make any changes to the work, you are not permitted to distribute the modified material. The images or other third-party material in this article are included under the Creative Commons licence unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material.
