How to Reduce Personal Bias while Hiring
Every recruiter aims to choose and hire the best employees available for a role. However, hiring decisions can often be affected by unconscious or personal biases. Personal bias means subconscious attitudes that people have concerning other people’s race, gender, wealth, and age. It’s important to note that personal bias isn’t something that’s intentional or malicious. However, it can lead to unfavorable hiring results for certain employees, usually those belonging to minorities and women. Such personal biases can be hard to reveal and can lead to variations in the hiring process. This results in organizational uniformity, rather than diversity. And diversity needs to be promoted, as it not only improves the experience of workers, it also benefits the overall performance of the company. A diverse workforce effectively enhances a company's image as a great place to work. Additionally, diversity already present draws applicants seeking diverse jobs. This ensures a larger pool of good talent to recruit from. Read on for a few ways to reduce personal bias while hiring candidates
1. Educate Recruiting Managers
This may seem obvious, but one of the first and easiest measures is simply to inform the executives about what personal or unconscious bias is. Knowing something about it makes it easier to see where decisions may be clouded. Such awareness can be passed on to the hiring managers using unconscious bias training. Recognizing the issue will take some of its power away and allow those in recruiting positions to consciously challenge and reflect on their subconscious candidate assumptions.
2. Standardize the Recruitment Process
An important part of eliminating unconscious bias includes offering the same opportunity for every work applicant to demonstrate their skill. To ensure that each employee is viewed the same way, it is important that the hiring process is streamlined so that each person goes through the same procedures. However, there is no need to have the same hiring procedure for every position in your company. An entry-level job role doesn’t usually involve the same hiring process as an executive-level position. But when you recruit applicants for a single role, it is important to ensure they are assessed by the same process.
3. Look out for Bias Toward Likeability
Acquaintanceship is soothing and we all like to be surrounded by people who we feel relaxed with. For most people, the ideal candidate is the one they would like, the one they can see themselves hanging out with. But likeability isn't a predictor of how well someone in a given role will do. Structured interviews and a diverse recruiting panel help reduce the possibility of a likeability bias during recruiting. To further eliminate the likeability bias, combine the interview with a skills test or a real-life problem-solving task to give each candidate the best opportunity to show their unique strengths. This puts the emphasis on the candidate's results and not how much you've 'clicked' with them.
4. Vary Where You Advertise
If you want to achieve your diversity goals but are wondering why you aren’t getting any good results. Stop doing the same again and again for recruitment processes. Change things up a bit. Brainstorm about how you can diversify your hiring campaign. Try posting jobs on different platforms and ones you usually use. Don't just concentrate on niche pages unique to your industry. Adjust the search criteria to include possible applicants on LinkedIn who may not possess all of the unique work skill sets but have good transferable capabilities. The specific requirements for the position can always be taught. Target job boards at universities and colleges that you would usually hold back from, not all emerging prospects can afford to go to the top colleges.
5. Try a Blind Review Process
When you don't think the applications can be critically trimmed out, do so blindly. By which we say delete the name, age, and other potentially discriminatory details of the applicant from the resumes before you send them through. This would remove any subconscious prejudice that you may have when assessing the resumes by the number of applicable skills that the applicant holds, and not where they were born. Do you think you don’t hold any personal biases? Research revealed that minorities who had experienced unconscious bias against them 'touched up' their resumes. Shockingly, they earned twice as many calls back as those who did not.
Personal bias will not vanish anytime soon, so the first step to combat its influence is to become more aware of what it is and how it affects hiring decisions. The ultimate outcome of eliminating personal bias is not only to establish fairer hiring practices, but it is also to improve the probability that the candidates you want to recruit will excel at the job.