The importance of addressing unconscious bias in recruitment in summary:
- Unconscious bias is a cognitive trait everyone has, leading to us unconsciously categorising others: particularly by age, social background, gender, identity, ethnicity, or education.
- These biases can unintentionally make recruitment processes unfair, lead to businesses missing out on great talent, and workplaces lacking diversity.
- Luckily, HR teams are perfectly placed to help reduce unconscious biases in recruitment through staff training, improving recruitment practices and leveraging HR technology.
“Are they the right fit for our company?” This question often crosses the minds of hiring managers during the recruitment process.
From looking at applications to conducting interviews, hiring managers usually find themselves wrestling 100s of questions, trying to determine if their candidate is the perfect person for the role. The journey can be long and tiresome for everyone involved, with pressure mounting to find the perfect match.
But when it comes to making the final decision, would you be confident you’ve made the right one? Have you ever stopped to consider what’s driving your decision? And perhaps most importantly, would you make a fair decision?
You’ve probably heard people use the phrases ‘follow your gut feeling’ or ‘follow your intuition’ – when making big decisions. However, these may not be the best approach to recruitment. What if that gut feeling is influenced by something else?
Maybe we’re letting our unconscious biases take over… and these feelings can sneak in without us even realising, subtly shaping our choices in the process.
What is unconscious bias?
Unconscious bias is a human cognitive trait that can lead to the stereotyping of individuals based on background or other characteristics. This because our brains are hard-wired to categorise others: particularly by age, social background, gender, identity, ethnicity, or education.
What can be the impact on recruitment?
We all like to consider ourselves fair and treat each other equally. But sadly, everyone has biases, and we may not be fully aware of them! However, whether we act on these prejudices and let them affect our decision making is ultimately down to you.
Unfortunately, those automatic and unintentional judgments can make unwanted appearances during the recruitment process. For example:
- Gender bias: making decisions based on the candidate’s gender and favouring a certain gender.
- Beauty bias: biased based on a person’s physical appearance.
- Affinity bias: choosing someone similar to the hiring manager.
- Ageism bias: this can work both ways, either considering someone too old and not capable, or considering someone too young and not capable enough.
Studies suggest that 48% of hiring managers admit biased opinions impact which candidate they choose. These biased assumptions can in many cases be incorrect or not representative of a candidate’s abilities. If encouraged, they not only create unfair outcomes for candidates, but they can lead to a workplace missing out on great talent and ultimately, lacking any kind of diversity.
The benefits of reducing bias
Of course, by acknowledging your own unconscious biases and consciously setting them aside, you can make the hiring process much fairer for new candidates. But doing this can also have some other fantastic benefits for your business, including:
- Attracting the best talent. You’ll find it easier to find the best skills and experience for your business.
- Higher levels of employee engagement. If your workforce is happy and feels welcomed, they’re more likely to be engaged with your business, colleagues and be happy at work.
- Better company reputation. Encouraging a diverse workforce goes hand in hand with a better company reputation. People value businesses that make an active effort to create a diverse and fair workforce.
- Increased business performance. A diverse team can drive higher performances, increased creativity and ultimately, better results.
Strategies to mitigate unconscious bias
There’s a lot you can do to as a people professional to support your hiring managers in being the fairest versions of themselves. And, just small changes can be enough to help reduce bias in your recruitment process.
So, first things first: put your recruitment process under the microscope. Look at its different stages and see if there’s any potential for unconscious biases to influence decision making.
Based on what you discover, you can then look to implement targeted strategies to reduce unconscious biases, such as:
Structured interviews ensure everyone is evaluated on the same criteria and accurate comparison. For every candidate, the hiring manager should stick to the same set of questions in the same order. It allows for a more objective comparison between each answer and the candidates.
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Blind recruitment practices
Exactly what it says on the tin! By removing all personally identifiable information from an application – such as name, age, gender and educational background – evaluating decisions can then be made on more job-related factors, like skills, experience and qualifications.
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Providing bias-awareness training
Support your hiring managers with the knowledge to help recognise some of their own biases and learn strategies to minimise the impact on the decision making.
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Introduce an interview panel
A panel of interviewers may sound daunting to an interviewee; but a panel of different people can reduce biases in the hiring process thanks to a more balanced viewpoint.
A job description should focus on skills and qualifications. So, remove all objective and gendered language. You can read more about this here.
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Consider random selection
If you find yourself in a position where you cannot decide between multiple stand-out candidates, you could consider random selection as a fair decision maker.
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Levering HR technology to reduce bias in candidate screening
Lastly, a good HR system with integrated recruitment software can support your recruitment processes and also reduce unconscious bias. It can do this through automating candidate screening, standardising evaluations, and ensuring decisions are based on objective data – rather than subjective impressions.
The role of HR in driving change
As an HR professional, you’re pivotal in ensuring positive change within a company’s recruitment processes. And, while that may sound like a big statement, it’s true!
HR plays a crucial role in raising awareness about unconscious bias and fostering a more equitable recruitment process – as well as ensuring policing and practices align with diversity and inclusion goals. So, to ensure your recruitment processes remain fair and objective, here are some further actions you and your HR team can take:
Raise awareness and educate your hiring managers
As part of building positive and welcoming cultures, a major responsibility of HR is to educate hiring managers about the impact of unconscious bias. Specifically, raising awareness about what it is, why it impacts us and the effect on our decision making.
That can be done through whatever works well in your company – such as formal training sessions, workshops, or even just open informal conversations. During these sessions, make hiring managers and the wider company aware of what support and resources they have available to help them during the recruitment process. But, most importantly, educate people on what an unconscious bias is.
Providing the right tools and technology
HR teams must be proactive in supporting hiring managers with the right tools and knowledge to implement a fair and equal hiring process. It makes sense then, that a great HR system is a must to do that, and support all involved in your organisation’s hiring process at every step of the way.
Compliance with legal standards
Lastly, HR is responsible for making sure the recruitment process complies with all relevant employment laws. These laws can change over time; therefore, HR teams must ensure that all company policies and procedures are updated, accurate and communicated to the business when any changes happen.
By tackling unconscious bias head-on and promoting diversity and inclusivity from the start during recruitment and reflecting throughout the company day to day. HR will support better outcomes and help build a more successful and fairer workforce.
Kim Holdroyd
HR & Wellbeing Manager
Kim Holdroyd has an MSc in HRM and is passionate about all things HR and people operations, specialising in the employee life cycle, company culture, and employee empowerment. Her career background has been spent with various industries, including technology start-ups, gaming software, and recruitment.
