Part 3 – How to avoid unconscious bias in the recruitment processes

Employers need to break the cycle of unconsciously biased actions by thinking more strategically on how to increase their diversity and migrant representation amongst their existing and future employees and how to challenge their unconscious bias during recruitment (Egan et al., 2018).

It is especially important as it can be costly for your business to miss out on incredible talents, just because you were not aware of your unconscious bias. As mentioned earlier in this module, it is easy to be attracted to people who are alike, however diversity is a key component in your business’s success. Diversity fuels innovation, aids decision making and even has an impact on profitability. Eventually unconscious bias can lead to a higher employee turnover, which can have an impact on your business’s recruiting costs. Therefore, below you can find some detailed tips for avoiding conscious bias in the recruitment process.

1. Make sure you use the right words for the job description and job listing. Studies show that “Masculine wording in job advertisements leads to less anticipated belongingness and job interest among women” (Gaucher et al, 2011, p 119). The research also shows that the small and subtle word choices can have a strong impact and give a wrong first impression of the company’s culture. It is possible to use software programs that can recognize stereotypical or gendered words which can then be replaced in order to create a more diverse application pool (Knight, 2018). This is also relevant in terms of avoiding words that might lead to migrants feeling less interested in applying.
2. One way to mitigate different forms of bias is through implementing structural standards and changes to the recruitment process, such as Blind Hiring (Embroker, 2021). In Blind Hiring, the personal information related to the applicants are hidden, if possible, even to the point of excluding the graduation year and specific college/university they attended, making sure they focus entirely on the merits and experience of the candidate. This is a great way to choose candidates to call in for an interview without being influenced by migrant background, gender, age, culture, or similar factors.
3. It is also possible to introduce standardized or guideline questions to the interview process, by doing this we reduce the impact of halo and pitchfork bias, where we give up or decide on a candidate simply because of their early performance during the interview. And we also mitigate recruiters improperly giving more preferential questions to one candidate and worse ones to others, which might be caused by affinity or similarity bias of some sort (Knight, 2018). It is important to pick the right questions to get a clear picture of the candidate, such as the list of behavioral interview questions given by Srinivasan & Humes (2017) e.g., “Tell me about a time you tried to accomplish a task and failed” or “give me an example of a time when you showed initiative and took the lead.” Which are often better than overly specific or what if questions, since they favor candidates that can paint the most flattering picture of themselves, which may not be the skill you are hiring for.
4. Give a rating/score to likeability. This might seem counter-intuitive, but as we cannot avoid having some bias towards things/people we find likable, it is important that we are aware of it. When we give a score to likability, we try to quantify its influence, and then afterwards if it isn’t important for the position, we can dismiss it as unimportant while having addressed it. It gives us more control of our biases. (Knight, 2018)