Recruit Diverse Candidates: Identify Your Own Biases First
Published on 29 Jul 2020
When companies have a diverse workforce, it helps them boost their revenue as well as improve their work culture, which directly has a positive impact on the company’s productivity. Businesses should not rely on just diversity when it comes to recruitment. There are laws in place to help remove discrimination when it comes to the hiring processes, but if companies recruit solely based on their diversity quota, it can put them at risk of overlooking other more qualified candidates. A more efficient approach to tackle the hiring biases for businesses is to identify the existing intrinsic biases in the hiring and recruitment processes and take various steps to address them. Companies can also seek out and implement diversity tools and software that will help in stripping away all biases and build a more inclusive working environment to hire diverse candidates.
Common Recruiting and Hiring Biases:
Confirmation Bias:
Confirmation bias takes place when the recruiters create hypotheses about the candidates beforehand and then conduct their recruitment processes in a way to confirm their biases.
Anchoring:
When recruiters focus solely on one piece of information about the candidate during the hiring process, the practice is known as anchoring.
Stereotyping:
Stereotyping takes place when the ones responsible for hiring attach expectations to the candidate being interviewed based on their characteristics.
How to Recruit Diverse Candidates: Use Software to Avoid Bias:
If companies wish to be successful with their recruiting efforts based on diversity, the first thing they will have to do is identify the biases that exist within the hiring processes. There are a few common areas where biases can creep in which can be eliminated with the help of different software and other tools.
Job Adverts:
Companies can use tools to help in the elimination of biased and gendered language from all their job adverts so that they can attract a more diverse talent pool.
Candidate Sourcing:
Organizations can expand their sourcing efforts once they choose tools that will help them anonymize all candidate information as well as apply various “diverse” filters to their candidate pools.
Interview Methods:
What all companies need to do is create an objective means of interviewing. This can be achieved by using a tool that comes with standardized as well as pre-determined sets of questions for their candidates.
Key Takeaways:
- Diversity is very important in all companies because it helps boost employee morale and improve their productivity
- There are a few biases that recruiters need to overcome such as stereotyping, anchoring and confirmation bias
- These biases can be eliminated by implementing various tools that make sure the hiring is done objectively through job adverts, candidate sourcing and interview processes
