Unconscious bias has become increasingly commonplace in the hiring process. The problem is that recruiters don’t even realise they are doing it when vetting, interviewing or selecting a candidate.
All too often, an employer’s final decision may be shaped by a person’s race, gender or age. The longer that’s allowed to continue, the more potential top recruits they are overlooking and denying the opportunity to work for them.
It can happen at any step of the recruitment process too. From the personal details included on an application or CV to the appearance of a person when attending an interview.
This has wider repercussions in terms of companies meeting their diversity and inclusion targets also. Because they’re unconsciously excluding a certain type of person or group of people, they aren’t considering the full breadth of candidates, and the skills and experience they could bring to the role.
Such is the extent of the problem, that 79% of human resources professionals agree that unconscious bias exists in both recruitment and succession planning decisions, according to BrightTalk. It’s a growing problem that needs to be tackled as a matter of priority.
Gender-neutral focus
To ensure that we maintain a fair and transparent recruitment process, at Inc & Co, we have been working on improving how we incorporate diversity and inclusion into it. To this end, we have been ensuring that all job adverts put out are written in a gender-neutral fashion in order to emphasise the message that everyone is welcome to apply.
We have also been proactive in our hiring strategy. Building on the successful recruitment for more than 60 roles in 2021, we have accelerated our hiring process over the last year.
New partnership
A key part of that strategy has been our newly-formed partnership with recruitment platform Team Tailor to remove any unconscious bias from our hiring processes. The company’s success has been borne out in the fact that more than 4,000 companies globally use its services, and we’re confident it will enable us to continue to recruit both fairly and transparently from as wide a pool as possible, regardless of colour, creed or any other characteristics.
Our new recruitment pipeline, which we are building with Team Tailor and which goes live in November, will hide an applicant’s personal information when they submit their job application. Rather, our recruitment team will refer to them by using a combination of animals and colours unique to them, based on an anonymous pseudonym, thereby eliminating the chance of them discriminating against or being biased towards a particular candidate.
It’s a sad fact that 75% of job applicants claim to have experienced some form of bias during the recruitment process. Yet only 16% of employers acknowledge the issue.
That’s why it’s fundamental companies strive to improve their hiring processes. It means looking at how they are performing and addressing any unconscious bias issues that have previously or may arise.
They also need to work more closely with their recruitment teams to make them aware of unconscious bias and encourage them to think more carefully about it when making hiring decisions in order to avoid it. This is, however, a mindset that goes far beyond just recruitment, but which should be ingrained within a company’s wider culture.
Only by taking a proactive stance against unconscious bias can employers truly eliminate it from their organisation. And that will be to the benefit of everyone concerned: namely the job applicant that is hired and the company itself.
By Jack Mason, CEO of Inc & Co
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