Companies these days want to foster an inclusive environment and culture for their employees, but unconscious bias often gets in the way of that. There are a variety of options and tools that are available to help with the removal of bias from your recruiting process.
To avoid bias in their recruitment and hiring processes, many companies are turning towards technology to boost their workforce’s diversity and ensure that they are hiring the best candidates for their open positions. Here’s how you can ensure that your hiring process is unbiased.
Make your decisions data-driven
One of the most prominent ways to minimise the possibility of unconscious bias in your recruitment and hiring processes is to let intelligent data insights be the guiding force behind your decision-making. You can make use of a platform or technology, for instance, to filter candidates based on their qualifications against open vacancies – including diversity filters to ensure that you are selecting based on talent, rather than letting your unconscious bias affect your decision.
Create an interview panel
For those who are looking for a more human-based approach, then you should consider introducing interview panels into your recruitment and hiring processes. Unconscious bias can be mitigated by such an implementation.
When establishing the panel, you want to include a diverse set of colleagues – in terms of their gender, ethnicity, socio-economic background, age and so on – to best ensure that any personal unconscious biases aren’t a factor in the decision-making process. Doing so can help you consider applicants based on a wider, more inclusive perspective, allowing you to make a better, more informed decision.
Craft a structured interview process
Often, hiring managers favour an unstructured interview session, thinking that it gives them a better feel for the candidate. But problems quickly creep into this method, as it becomes difficult for a manager to accurately benchmark candidates, which makes it more likely for unconscious bias to affect their decisions. By creating and implementing a structured process, you are instead testing all applicants in the same way, ensuring that they are being assessed against the same criteria.
The best way to achieve a structured interview process is to have a ‘script’ to follow when interviewing every applicant and make sure that you do not go “off-script.” Subsequently, this will help to remove subjectivity from the process, allowing potential candidates to be judged by their specific answers and relevant experiences.
To sum up
Ultimately, unconscious bias is an inescapable factor when it comes to recruitment and hiring. However, you can work towards mitigating its effect by implementing the right tools and programs into your process. New technologies can help with providing data-rich insights that may be able to take some of the human error out of the decision-making process. But you should always be sure that your latest tech investment is paired with regular diversity training to help hiring managers recognise and reduce their unconscious bias and potential blind spots.
