An intelligent workforce begins with a diverse workforce. Modern corporate organizations are a harmonious blend of a diverse workforce from different cultures and locations. In the fast-paced corporate culture, diversity stems from a business necessity as organizations expand over geographical boundaries to explore opportunities for success. Businesses today understand that diversity leads to innovation, which in turn can lead to business success.
Innovative organizations promote workforce diversity as it can eliminate discrimination and prejudices at the workplace. When an organization hires from a diverse talent pool, its recruitment teams assure that they are hiring candidates qualified and best suited for their roles. This provides the companies ample growth opportunities. Even though hiring managers realize the significance of diversity in the organization, the lack of diversity roots itself in hiring biases that companies directly feel.
What Creates Hiring Bias?
The goal of every recruiter is to select and hire the best employees for their organization. However, recruitment decisions often tend to get influenced by unconscious biases related to cultural differences or stereotypes. For example, employers in the STEM sector can create gender bias in hiring by rating male candidates better than female candidates with identical resumes. Such tendencies can be challenging to uncover. They can lead to imbalances in the hiring process.
A prevalent example of hiring bias is based on the similarity-attraction hypotheses. Hiring managers sometimes get gravitated towards people who resemble them or are from the same country, state or belong to the same nationality. Recruiters and employers hire people based on their gut reactions. They begin to hire people like themselves without even realizing the underlying bias in that process.
Ways to Mitigate Hiring Bias
Elimination of hiring bias may not be an easy process. However, your company must reach its true potential. When you hire candidates from diverse cultures and backgrounds, it can open doors to new life experiences and innovative ideas. Companies with a diverse workforce can better adapt to industry changes and market expansions.
Let us now discuss ways to overcome hiring bias in the industry:
Remove biased language in job descriptions
Your company’s job descriptions may sound harmless. But the gendered language in job descriptions may seriously affect diversity. In simple terms, if the job profile inadvertently assigns the male gender to the job role, it will prevent women from applying. Hiring managers should be considerate enough to remove gender, age, and other restrictive terms from the job advert to eliminate bias. Your company job title and description should not appear so restrictive that only a select few individuals could apply. Recruiters can use AI-based software tools to write a bias-free job advert.
Structured Digital Interviews
Structured digital interviews are becoming the new hiring norm as they are much more reliable than their unstructured counterparts. When administered correctly, such interviews are twice as effective as the regular biased, instinct-based interviews. Online interviews have the potential to pull down geographical barriers so recruiters can hire top talent worldwide.
Structured digital interviews are backed by AI techniques to help you make better hiring decisions. Digital recruitment may include interview scheduling for video interviews along with audio interviewing, skills testing, and online proctoring. This process incorporates consistent interview questions and rating systems that keep interviews focused, fair, and time-efficient.
Use AI for Recruitment
AI techniques and software are now commonly being used in the recruitment process of multiple companies. For example, recruiters can use an AI-powered ATS or an Applicant Tracking System. It will help them scan through hundreds of CVs to look for role-specific keywords. They can also utilize AI algorithms to run a pre-screen for the applicants who ask objective qualifying questions aligned to a specific job role.
The significant advantage of using AI-powered pre-selection software is that it uses predictive analytics to calculate a candidate’s success rate for a role. This data allows hiring managers and recruiters to make data-driven hiring decisions instead of decisions made on their random gut instincts.
Deploy Skills Assessments
Hiring teams need to deploy a wide range of skill assessments to evaluate job candidates. These tests help to know whether the candidates have the required skill set for the job role. They can add a quantitative measure to the candidate assessment process as they assign a clear score, rating, description, and category to each candidate taking the test. These tests can define, as well as to measure, and evaluate candidates’ skills and abilities objectively. They can create fairer evaluations of candidates and reduce the effects of hiring bias.
Create Weighted Evaluations
An unbiased way to find the right candidate is a weighted scoring method. Sometimes, hiring managers or recruiters may judge and select a candidate based on just a single quality. A good interviewing process focuses on a subjective assessment of a candidate. One way to eliminate hiring bias is to list down your behavioral interview questions. And pair them with rating scales. A sound combination of qualified and quantified assessments will remove any hiring bias from your recruitment process.
Summing Up
There are many ways to remove hiring bias from your company. You can work upon them to create an unbiased and diverse work environment and employee culture in your company. Online hiring tools have digitized the hiring process and have simplified the various stages of hiring seamlessly.
