In a perfect world, you would hire based on someone’s skills and work experience. However, this is not the reality. There are biases that come into play that will influence hiring managers to make certain decisions, which are often not related to the role fit. Any kind of bias will negatively affect the hiring process. When a recruiter brings their own preconceived beliefs or ideas into the applications review process, interviews, and shortlisting of applicants, it leads to an unfair field for the candidates and can cause the organization to overlook great potential.
Companies are acknowledging the effect bias, including unconscious bias, can have in the hiring process, so they’re adopting a blind hiring process. Organizations like Google have embraced blind hiring practices, which help bring the best talent to the company. Blind recruitment is not only for the world’s biggest companies, as it can also work for smaller enterprises.
What is Blind Hiring?
Blind recruitment is a technique that anonymizes demographic-related information about candidates from the hiring manager or recruiter that could lead to bias. Everyone has beliefs and biases about what they think a good candidate should look like. The challenge is that bias about a candidate’s gender, age, etc., can cause discrimination, as these biases don’t correlate with performance.
With blind hiring, you can increase workplace diversity, which is possible by allowing people to be objective when evaluating candidates’ skills, potential to succeed, and knowledge. To ensure the process is clear of any biases, a recruiter is advised to remove identification details from a candidate’s resume or applications. What you’re left with is information about the candidate’s skills and abilities, so you can do a fair assessment, not influenced by any biases. When you remove details that could lead to bias, you raise the chance of hiring the best talent for the open position.
However, introducing principles to the interviewing process is quite difficult, but you can use anonymized written responses to conduct blind interviews. However, this method fails to pick up characteristics and key skills that are important to the open role. Here’s how to go about blind recruitment.
What is Unconscious Bias?
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One’s background, personal experiences, and cultural environment can influence their thought patterns and how one perceives the world. Humans are wired to have such perceptions, which play a role in decision-making. It’s natural to be in a state where you make conclusions in an unconscious manner. This is what entails unconscious bias, so you’re not deliberately trying to follow a thought pattern. While some biases can be useful in navigating life, they can also lead to unfair decisions about other people. A blind CV can be the perfect opportunity to eliminate unconscious biases and make the hiring process fair.
Therefore, it’s vital that you should educate your team on unconscious bias and the kind of damage it will do to the hiring process or your organization as a whole. Give them examples of the different biases that may arise, and when a bias is unintentional. You can include access to training on how to recognize common biases, in themselves and in coworkers.
In addition, you could encourage your employees to embrace substitution. This includes asking themselves if they would feel the same way if another person was replaced with another. Would their response be the same? Most importantly, teach your team how they can eliminate or reduce these biases in the interviewing and hiring processes.
What is a Blind CV?
A blind CV also called a blind resume, does not include personal details highlighting the applicant’s age, gender, or ethnicity. Generally, the idea is that the information that does not relate to the candidate’s work capabilities should not be included in a CV.
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So, How to Get Rid of Bias for This Type of Hiring?
- Don’t Consider College Pedigree
It’s often tempting to judge a person’s qualifications based on the college they attended. However, coming from a top-tier university does not always translate to being a perfect fit for a job. When you obscure the education section of the candidate on their resume, you let other things like experience do the bidding for them. You can pair this strategy with skills assessment and other blind resume screening assignments.
- Create Inclusive Job Descriptions
To increase diversity in the workplace, you should start at the beginning of the recruitment process. This means designing a process that encourages candidates from all backgrounds to apply. Age and race-related terms may also appear in job descriptions and can push candidates from applying for positions. Only highlight the skills needed, instead of placing a cap on the number of years of experience you prefer. Pay attention to the use of feminine and masculine words in your job postings. Listings with gender-neutral language attract more responses.
- Disregard Demographic Information
The demographic information that is often included in resumes can give off identity cues that make blind hiring impossible. Although at some stage you might need demographic information, you should try to avoid it as much as possible. Review your process to understand the type of information the hiring process can do without, and remove the data from resumes. You can identify different semantic and lexical differences in resumes of female and male job applicants. While the data is visible, it’s good to acknowledge the bias it could introduce in the recruitment process.
- Focus on Skills and Competence
With all the data removed from the resume and the entire screening process, you might be wondering what to base decisions on. The answer is in getting the right data for the process. Doing pre-employment assessments helps you collect data about the candidate’s abilities and other skills like integrity and collaboration. When candidates complete these assessments in the early stages of screening, you can make less biased hiring decisions. If you’re dealing with high recruitment volume, you can use a matching framework that helps you choose a candidate based on characteristics and skill sets.
Blind Candidate Screening
Reviewing a candidate’s social media presence is among routine practices many recruiters perform in the hiring process. However, if you’re scanning their online presence, you’ll get a lot of information that could trigger bias. You don’t need to remove social media screening from the hiring process, but it’s a good idea to move the process further along the screening process. While there’s a chance checking their social media could lead to unconscious bias, you still want to know if they have potential red flags before you extend an offer to the applicant.
An ideal time for screening social media accounts would be after the interviews. This helps you know about the candidate’s skills without bias and also comes as an opportunity to eliminate a candidate if their social media does not align with your organization’s values.
Blind Interviews
There are different ways you can host blind interviews, some of which are easier, as companies embrace remote working. During the blind interview, the candidate’s identity is obscured. You can achieve this using technology or by customizing the interview format, so the interview is not in-person or live. There are tools you can use for blind interviews. Chat tools are an option that will help you keep candidates anonymous, and the other option is sending the candidate anonymized Q&As. Also, chatbots are becoming a popular choice for interviews. These conduct initial interviews and provide detailed reports.
Blind Recruitment is Not Sufficient by Itself
Issues about diversity at your organization cannot be solved using blind hiring as the only tool. While this can help you get strong candidates regardless of their backgrounds, it’s not always realistic to make the hiring process blind. So, you will eventually have unconscious bias. This means it’s crucial to undertake steps that can remove bias from the whole process, especially closer to the end of the hiring process.
Besides doing blind hiring, you should focus on other strategies like building a diverse interview panel and using scorecards to evaluate candidates. Work with your teams to help them get the tools they need to spot and deal with unconscious bias, which is one of the reasons they might overlook the right candidates in the hiring process.
Conclusion
Blind recruitment is an easy way to deal with bias in the hiring process. However, in general, this is not a straightforward process. It takes a bit of creativity to integrate blind hiring into the recruitment process. If included intelligently, blind hiring can improve your outcomes when hiring. In addition to this option, educate your employees, so they know what unconscious bias is and how to deal with it.
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