Every hiring manager’s goal is to find the best employees possible and bring them onboard. At the same time, every hiring manager is human, and humans have biases. These biases often manifest themselves unconsciously. You need to actively uncover them and work against them if you want to bring on the best staff and avoid missing out.
Eliminating bias in your hiring process takes work – and the task never truly ends. However, the benefits it brings will attract the best workers to your business. Here are three ways to standardize and eliminate biases from your hiring process.
Acknowledge Your Biases
You can’t eliminate bias in your hiring process until you name it and pledge to remove it. As a result, acknowledging your bias is step one.
Recognizing unconscious bias in your self or your programs isn’t necessarily easy. So, you’ll need tools and strategies to identify your blind spots. The University of California San Francisco suggests using an Implicit Association Test or another tool as a good first step.
You can then get to the heart of what your bias exists and have discussions with others to help understand it better.
Use Blind Challenges to Filter Candidates
While the use of LinkedIn or even a traditional resume is still pervasive, you can make a lot of judgments about a person’s ability with those tools.
To help minimize bias, consider using blind skills tests and platforms to introduce candidates to your process. Once you have their scores, you can then review resumes and set interviews.
These tools are also great for getting rid of any biases you may have around education or experience and could allow people who you might put on the ‘pass’ pile a chance to contribute to your organization.
Use Interview Panels
Interview panels are great tools for genuinely getting to know a candidate. To work, they need to be diverse and inclusive. So, you should include people of different ages, genders, socio-economic backgrounds, and job histories/education levels.
Together, a diverse panel will help point out each other’s biases and use their diverse experiences to find strong candidates.
Self-Awareness is Key to Removing Bias
Humans are products of the environment around them, which means everyone has opinions that can turn into unconscious biases. Finding and addressing your biases and putting in safeguards to standardize the process makes it easier to find candidates based on their merits and their fit for the organization.
Are you looking for your next Employee of the Month?
Energi Personnel is placing candidates now. Get in touch to learn how we connect the right people to the right jobs, every time.
