Published on February 4th, 2023
It doesn’t sound natural either. Most of our decisions are influenced by bias, a common tendency for us to make a decision solely based on a few relatable, palpable or antagonizing aspects of the situation. As recruiters and HR managers, you are quite aware that this invariably happens in hiring processes.
“I’m not, only facts influence my decision”, you say. But, you may be subtly influenced by several biases that drive your judgement more than others, but you may not recognise them consciously, unless a pro points it out to you.
Since your function brings the bloodstream to the company, it’s crucial that you hire on capabilities, and not let bias or favoritism take the reigns.
That’s why we’re here. We will take you through how bias can affect your company, what forms it can take, how to identify your own bias, coach biased hiring managers and concrete steps to significantly reduce bias in your hiring process.
Hiring only a particular set of people with certain attributes or credentials or qualifications doesn’t inspire the existing or incoming workforce, or do justice to your mission.
It does the opposite, actually. It threatens their psychological safety. Your ultimate aim is to create a safe space for your employees, to make them feel engaged, offer room to grow and cater to their aspirations.
Bias stands in the way of all that you strive for. It can have the following effects:
Creates a glass ceiling By hiring and promoting only certain members of the society, and denying opportunities to others, you are creating a glass ceiling in the company for those who don’t to your favoured group of employees. This immensely disturbs mental peace, career aspirations and creates frustration on your employees.
Talent Drain
If you don’t hire inclusively, you are losing out on abundant talent that can bring unique value to your table. You’re limiting your candidate pool, which can otherwise be populated with diverse skills that can up your company’s performance. You never know how much potential each candidate has and when it will blow up. Having a diverse workforce means they balance each other and complement their strengths, which makes for an excellent team. In fact, teams with culturally and ethnically diverse composition tend to reap 33% more profits.
Brand Name Gets Tarnished
When word gets out that you’re a biased hirer, it can damage your goodwill. Discriminative hiring can project your company as an insensitive employer and can drive away good talent you can bring onboard.
People are highly sensitive to patterns. When your existing workforce sees how you and your company treats a section of the workforce differently, it’s likely to cause a ripple effect, which may turn chaotic for your company. Employees won’t feel valued, they are likely to begin quiet quitting, thinking one day they will be discriminated against too.
Bias can be significantly reduced by deploying proactive human resource strategies that leave no room for subjectivity, or unstructured evaluation. Futuristic planning and coaching can save you a lot of cost, get you good hires and make your workplace psychologically safe to all employees.
Before the Hiring Process
You need to set the fundamentals right, before diving to the actual hiring. Here are the best practices to keep in mind, before the hiring process:
Map out the business process, find where a job holder can add value and ascertain competencies, experience, knowledge and attitude the right fit needs to have. Once you’re armed with this information, figure out the ideal candidate persona, without any implicit or explicit citing of gender, or other demographic details. Use inclusive pronouns like ‘they’, and a combination of assertive adjectives (powerful, determined etc, which may be perceived as more masculine) and mellow adjectives (supportive, coordinating etc, which may be perceived as more feminine words) so as to make it gender neutral.
91% of companies, start-ups, emerging businesses and large corporations want to invest in recruitment tools that save time, cost and effort.
Before you start your next hiring spree, consider investing in a powerful AI-driven all-in-one recruitment tool like Hire Quotient,that: Frames inclusive, accurate job descriptions Uses advanced technology to find diverse global talent Pre-screen and assess candidates using strong job-oriented metrics Deploys laser sharp personality assessments that focus on behavioral, cross functional and functional competencies Utilises vast skill library and job simulation exercise to determine who is adept at the actual work the candidate is being interviewed for.
Hiring Team Training The key people in your hiring: hiring manager, recruiter, panelists etc need to be trained on interviewing etiquettes, scope for bias, how to stay focused and objective in hiring etc.
Structure the Evaluation Process The evaluation process needs to strictly have all essential job parameters that will ensure that the candidate is an excellent hire. The scoring and weightage for each parameter, ranking of scores etc needs to be determined and the hiring team needs to be thoroughly trained before the hiring process. Studies show that structured interviews and assessments reduce bias significantly.
Equipped with an amazing recruitment tool, and strong, neutral fundamentals in place, with a team willing to work on their differences, you can be sure to bring home your diverse dream-team.
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