Unconscious bias can wreak havoc on a hiring process. It may cause qualified applicants to be disregarded due to their race, gender, age, or another factor that shouldn’t be relevant.
While acknowledging the presence of unconscious bias is a critical first step. It empowers you to examine its potential influence and take active steps to correct the issue. After that, making changes is a necessity. If you want to eliminate bias in your hiring process, here are some tips that can help.
Review Your Job Descriptions
Certain words or phrases may influence your talent pool. For example, if you refer to your ideal applicant or the person who will ultimately perform the duties by gendered pronouns, individuals who don’t identify as that gender may feel discouraged from applying. Similarly, terms like “competitive,” “fast-paced,” or “determined” tend to skew male, while “collaborative,” “cooperative,” and “family-oriented” skew female.
Certain descriptions, like job titles using words like “guru” or “ninja,” are also problematic. They are culturally insensitive and could cause some job seekers to bypass your opportunity.
Review your job ad for potentially gendered or culturally insensitive words. If you find any, replace them with neutral terms.
Try Blind Resume Reviews
With a blind resume, all details that could identify a person’s demographic information is removed. At a minimum, this includes the applicant’s name and contact details, which could reveal their gender or connections to specific communities.
However, some go further. For example, by removing dates, you may not be able to tell an applicant’s age. Since some colleges are all male or all female or are connected to racial or religious backgrounds, removing the names of the institutions can also be a smart move.
By using blind resumes, your hiring managers have to focus on a person’s credentials. Only work experience, skills, and similar details remain, making it easier to eliminate hidden bias from the decision-making process.
Use Skills Tests
With a work sample or skills test, you can evaluate how candidates perform when asked to handle an assignment that mimics one of the role’s core duties. This gives you a neutral point to assess, making it possible to examine the quality of a person’s work and use that to decide whether a candidate is worth pursuing.
Standardize Your Interviews
When an interview is unstructured, it’s hard to evaluate whether a candidate would outshine another. Your main points aren’t aligned, making a comparison of their capabilities challenging. When this occurs, hidden biases may have more space to influence a decision.
By standardizing the interviews, instead, there’s consistency. Every candidate is being asked the same questions, so you can compare them, practically line-by-line. This allows hiring managers to focus on the quality of the responses above all else.
If you want to go further, implement a scoring system in advance. That way, each question represents a value on a scorecard, and the candidate’s final “grade” becomes a major factor in who receives an offer.
Ultimately, all of the tips above can help you remove bias from your hiring process. If you’d like to learn more, let the skilled team at GSG Talent Solutions be your guide. Contact us today and how our hiring expertise can benefit you.