Hiring Framework
How to avoid discrimination in the hiring process
S. Connie
Published on 16th November, 2022
6 min
Do you believe hiring discrimination is a thing of the past? If so, we’re sad to say, you’re wrong. Both Harvard Business Review in the US and HR Magazine in the UK found that bias is prevalent today, despite most employers making active efforts to reduce it at every opportunity.
Recruiters agree, too, with 79% of HR professionals agreeing that unconscious bias is a problem.
Here’s how to avoid discrimination in the hiring process.
Quick tip - along the way, note the action points, so you know exactly what you need to do and when.
Types of recruitment bias
There are two types of recruitment bias: conscious and unconscious.
- Conscious bias: involves deliberate actions that specifically result in prejudice and discrimination.
- Unconscious bias: a more common form of bias that manifests unconsciously.
The impact of recruitment bias
Bias is not just an ethical and legal issue; it also massively affects a business’s growth and performance. Studies of different businesses find strong connections between diverse workforces and business performance. Forbes describes how bias is costly, leading to a negative spiral of disenfranchisement, disengagement, rebellion and sabotage.
Diverse businesses draw upon the wider pool of their workforce’s skills and talents (this extends to both hard and soft skills).
Bias in the hiring process
Building a bias-free recruitment pipeline is a critical first step towards building a diverse workplace.
1. Recruitment ads
Before anything, you need to check employment adverts. There are tonnes of examples of job ads appealing to one demographic, thus discriminating against others. See some examples in our job ads post here.
Be exceptionally careful with how recruitment ads are worded. Subtle wording and imagery can discriminate before candidates even apply.
For example, asking for a ‘barmaid’ is fairly explicit. But, less obvious phrases run the risk of being discriminatory too.
Asking for a ‘head-strong leader’ or ‘strategic leader’ also risks female discrimination and male stereotyping. And on the flip side, asking for a ‘considerate leader’ or ‘cooperative manager’ risks male discrimination and female stereotyping.
Be aware of gender-coded words. These can arise in recruitment ads or practically any other stage of the recruitment process.
Your action points:
- Make sure ads are checked by multiple team members and analysed for unconscious bias and gender-coded terms.
- Keep ads inclusive and neutral to select talent from all socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds.
Traditional recruitment tends to involve a series of manual screening processes ranging from questionnaires and aptitude tests to interviews. Also, roles in industries such as software sometimes involve specific screening tasks, such as code challenges.
While traditional recruitment practices work well for most, issues can creep in if they’re not properly maintained or checked for bias. For example, some forms of interviews that promote competitiveness have been found to magnify stereotypes, e.g. Forbes found that Asians felt stereotyped as “good with numbers”.
Quieter individuals with specific soft skills can be marginalised, and those with superior skill sets to louder members of the group don’t always shine.
As a result, there’s a growing appetite to focus on individual interviews rather than group interviews. If your business uses group interviews and focus groups, discuss whether they could be creating unconscious bias.
One alternative is using psychometric tests that objectively screen candidates for skills and abilities that aren’t culturally, socioeconomically or racially/ethnically placed.
Your action points:
- Interview questions should be neutral and non-invasive into personal information not relevant to the role.
- You should be aware of how interviews mask essential soft skills.
3. Recruiter education
Recruiters should educate themselves and their team members to audit forms of unconscious bias. Various online training platforms are designed for that, and you can find free tests such as Harvard’s Project Implicit
Project Implicit is a non-profit group dedicated to “understanding attitudes, stereotypes, and other hidden biases that influence perception, judgement, and action…for addressing diversity, improving decision-making, and increasing the likelihood that practices are aligned with personal and organizational values.”
Many larger businesses and enterprises organise specific initiatives to ensure they’re meeting diversity and inclusion targets. But smaller businesses and SMBs should take an active interest too. It’s essential to document recruitment processes and audit data regularly to ensure that unconscious bias isn’t seeping into processes.
Your action points:
- Recruiters should be educated with diversity and inclusion information.
- Develop strategies to inform hiring staff of their potential unconscious bias.
- Conduct tests and assessments to screen recruitment processes for bias and discrimination.
Boost productivity while saving time and money
4 fundamental principles to eliminate inefficiencies from the recruitment process.
4.Organise the recruitment process
You need to properly organise the recruitment process and educate personnel with anti-discrimination codes of practice and protocols.
Professional recruitment software like Hiringmaster helps teams organise recruitment and HR resources to keep team members informed of bias and inclusion strategies.
Applications are managed from a central database, or ‘single source of truth’, that ensures everyone is treated fairly regardless of where they applied, etc.
Your action points:
- Proper organisation in the recruitment process ensures that protocol doesn’t slip.
- Keep everyone informed of codes of practice.
- Use recruitment software to form a unified ‘single source of truth’ that helps recruiters apply diversity and inclusion strategies.
Businesses should create standardised policies. Criteria should be set ahead of recruitment and passed on to everyone involved in the recruitment team.
For example, it might be handy to inform HR personnel of common unconscious biases to avoid in their communications with individuals.
Building a robust, standardised recruitment strategy for diversity and inclusion keeps everyone informed of the same principles.
Your action points:
- Standardise policies and protocols to ensure continuity across the recruitment pipeline.
- Continually update and modernise policies based on recruitment data.
- Maintain a tight circle of accountability to ensure each team member is doing their bit to tackle discrimination.
Summary: How to avoid discrimination in the hiring process
Discrimination hurts business growth, deters top talent and risks legal and regulatory non-compliance.
Developing a strong diversity and inclusion strategy is not optional, hence why many of the world’s biggest businesses are going to great lengths to audit their recruitment processes to clamp down on bias in all forms.
With a robust strategy in place and proper staff education, businesses can create the diverse talent pool they need to thrive.
Hiringmaster supports that process by equipping teams with the software they need to organise recruitment from a single source of truth that centralises all applications and screening data.Get started for free, today
Contents
- Types of recruitment bias
- The impact of recruitment bias
- Bias in the hiring process
- Summary: How to avoid discrimination in the hiring process
