Don’t Recruit Just Based on School

Strictly hiring based on background or school is a usual way recruiters show bias. One way we can identify this is with what schools a company focuses on for job fairs. Making sure as a company you focus on recruiting from all levels of schools is a good way to give equal opportunity across the board.

Maegan Griffin
Founder, CEO and Nurse Practitioner, Skin Pharm

Check Your Wording

Double-check the wording of your job postings in order to identify and remove any potentially biased wording. While such wording is often unintentional, it can still disrupt your hiring initiative if it drives away potential applicants before they even think about trying.

You’ll be able to find online guidelines for writing bias-free job postings that will be easy to follow and highly effective. Once you’ve removed any unintended bias, then you’re free to spruce up your posting and inject your personal style into it.

With ‌extra care, you can avoid accidentally putting off potential applicants who might otherwise be an excellent fit for your roles. It may add a few minutes of time to creating your listings, but it will be well worth it for your business if it helps you land quality hires.

Max Schwartzapfel
CMO, Schwartzapfel Lawyers

Conduct Blind Reviews

One thing I have done to identify recruitment bias is to conduct blind reviews of job candidates. Blind reviews involve removing any identifying information, such as names, genders, dates of birth, and even universities attended, so that decisions can be made on the merits of a candidate’s qualifications alone.

This process removes potential sources of bias by preventing hiring managers from making assumptions based on demographic or other non-essential factors. Additionally, I have conducted surveys among my recruiting team to understand their own personal biases and experiences before developing an interview rubric for screening applicants.

Employers can also use data analytics on the impact of different recruiting strategies. For example, you could analyze whether certain recruitment channels are leading to more success in terms of applicant quality or diversifying your talent pool, versus looking at individuals who applied through less effective channels.

Travis Lindemoen
Managing Director, nexus IT group

Use a Standardized Interview Process

Companies should judge people on their credentials and achievements. If a company judges candidates during recruitment on their race, gender, beauty, or any other illogical thing, it’s highly unethical.

You can identify recruitment bias by using a standardized interview process. In this type of interview, an employer asks candidates the same set of questions for the designated position. It strongly minimizes biases in recruitment. We can fairly judge candidates based on their performance in the interview and the quality of their answers.

Don’t forget to set the questions according to the skills and abilities required for the particular job. This way, you can easily identify whether the interviewer is trying to discriminate. It is now a highly prevalent method of interviewing to avoid any unnecessary issues during the interview.

Saikat Ghosh
Associate Director, HR and Business, Technource

Do a Thorough Job Analysis

An effective approach to uncovering recruitment bias is to conduct a comprehensive examination of our job requirements and responsibilities. By gaining a clear understanding of what our positions entail and how performance is measured, we can pinpoint any potential biases in our hiring procedures. This vigilance enables us to eliminate discrimination and ensure that all applicants are evaluated fairly, regardless of factors such as their race or gender.

Kimberley Tyler-Smith
VP, Strategy and Growth, Resume Worded

Look for Patterns

This might sound bad, so please hear me out: but diversity isn’t just about goodness; it also is an incredible strategic advantage. For example, we actively review our recruiting practices nonstop, intentionally looking for patterns of new recruits.

If our engineers seem to reflect too many males, we go back over applications looking for females who might have been overlooked. This tactic has improved our skill sets and functional capabilities within the first year.

The old days of using “it’s just business” to rationalize building a company of people, all from one demographic, are over. Diversity is here to stay because it’s more than just good—it’s good business.

Shaun Connell
Founder and CEO, Credit Building Tips

The post 6 Ways to Identify Recruitment Bias appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

Thin Slicing is a Normal Part of the Human Experience

Author Malcolm Gladwell first popularized the concept in his book, “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking,” but you see the idea come to life on a show like The Circle, where contestants competing for thousands of dollars must build alliances and make enemies based entirely on mere minutes of communication with other contestants via social media alone. Though entertaining, the downside of limited communication exposes itself immediately when alliances are formed under false pretenses and players reveal they are not what they seem.

The act of thin slicing isn’t limited to game shows. There seem to be more ways to rationalize thin slicing in our everyday lives than not. We are called to make dozens of decisions throughout our day with little available information. If your partner crinkles their nose when you suggest a take-out spot, you can assume you will have to come up with a second option. If you overhear your coworker overtly sigh throughout the day, you may suggest helping them with their workload as they seem overwhelmed.

We Put A Lot of Trust in Our Guts

These snap decisions have intrigued psychologists for decades. One psychologist at Tufts University, Nalini Ambady, Ph.D., has run multiple studies on first impressions dating back to the 90s. One of her studies published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Vol. 64, No. 3) on first impressions sought to find if students could accurately gauge a teacher’s, whom they had never met, performance based on thirty-second clips of them teaching. Students judged a teacher based on 13 variables, including competence, acceptance, and activeness. 

The scores were then compared to evaluations done by those teachers’ actual students. The researchers were astounded to find a 76% accuracy rate in judgment between students who had evaluated a teacher for just a few seconds and ones that had taken their courses for an entire semester. Ambady went a step further and exposed students to only six-second clips of teachers’ classes. The results did not vary by much. Gut intuition was proving reliable.

Many moments throughout our day call for quick decisions, and when there is a high volume of candidates to interview, thin slicing can make up hours of difference in a recruiter’s workload. But even Ambady would never give a blanket statement that people should trust their first impressions: “[it’s] too dependent on the person, the context of the first impression, everything.” 

Take Steps to Make the Your Gut Isn’t the Only Factor

So, where does that leave a recruiter and a candidate? As a recruiter faces a large pool of candidates, thin slicing can be very necessary to consolidate options and conduct interviews in a reasonable time. As the pool narrows, however, it’s important that many perspectives are consulted on the hiring side. Gladwell notes in his book that some individuals are better at thin slicing than others. A number of methods can be incorporated to make sure candidates are given a fair evaluation:

• Employers can utilize automation in the initial application stages to narrow applicant pools and give recruiters more time with each candidate.
• Collaborative interviewing solutions can be used, such as video, so multiple recruiters can join and weigh in.
• Teams can reconfigure hiring processes to better support equitable candidate reviews.

Though the efficiency of thin slicing is undeniable in our personal lives and at work, precautions must be taken to ensure our own implicit biases are not the deciding factor. It’s only natural for recruiters to develop an ideal candidate in their process, and thin slicing can lead to overlooking great recruits for not checking a few of our standard boxes. A flustered candidate might give one recruiter the impression that they are underprepared. At the same time, another sees their nervousness as a sign that they are genuinely interested in securing the position at hand.

A collaborative process ensures that multiple perspectives have input on what should be a multi-level decision and that one unfounded bias does not spoil the process.

The post Thin Slicing the Candidate: Why Perception Matters  appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

So, you’ve tried documents and emails, shared drives, and maybe even online job description builders… and found nothing lets you manage your job descriptions the way you imagine. Current options are tedious, ineffective – and leave you frustrated and wanting more.

If these sound familiar, you aren’t alone and you’ve come to the right place.

A Modern Job Description Management Solution

If you’ve struggled to find a solution to your job description woes, join Amanda Kozak to explore JDXpert, the modern job description management solution designed for today’s HR professionals.

She will show you how JDXpert can help you boost your efficiency and streamline your job description process (and more.)

Here’s What You’ll Learn

• Quickly and efficiently construct high quality job descriptions utilizing the most comprehensive job description content available anywhere.

• Gain control of the review and revision process with simple workflows, role-based security and detailed versioning.

• Create quality, bias-free, skills forward job postings to recruit quality candidates.

  

• View your job description data in compelling ways that enable in-depth analysis through side-by-side views, matrix explorer, and more.

• Facilitate a more nimble revision process that adapts with shifting compliance requirements and working dynamics via Parent/Child efficiencies, FLSA questionnaire and Remote-work feature.

• Drive accurate, up-to-date and complete job data throughout your entire HR landscape via interfaces/integrations with most HR, Applicant Tracking, Compensation, and Market Pricing systems out there including Workday, Payscale MarketPay, and more.

Structure and Efficiency

JDXpert, the leader in job description software, allows teams to bring structure and efficiencies to the way job descriptions are created and maintained.

The post JDXpert: Modern Job Description Management For Today’s HR Pro appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

This unconscious bias can lead to hiring decisions based not on merit or qualifications but on factors such as race, gender or ethnicity. The result? A less diverse workforce and failure to reflect the company’s customer base.

Intelligent automation (IA) can help create a more equitable hiring process by reducing the reliance on human decision-making. By using algorithms to screen candidates, rate their qualifications, and select the most qualified candidates for interviews, IA allows companies to avoid the pitfalls of unconscious bias and create a more diverse and representative workforce.

What Are Intelligent Automation and Unconscious Bias?

IA combines advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, prescriptive analytics, robotic process automation, intelligent document processing and process and task mining to create digital workers, or bots, to support decision-making. Examples include data-driven processes using unstructured data, such as analyzing and classifying candidates’ resumes and CVs and making decisions or recommendations about who to interview.

Unconscious bias is how personal beliefs and prejudices influence hiring managers’ decision-making. These biases are often based on gender, race, ethnicity or age and can lead to an unfair hiring process. These unconscious biases make it harder for talented candidates to get a fair shot in the hiring process.

How Can IA Reduce Unconscious Bias In the Hiring Process?

There are several ways in which IA can reduce unconscious bias when hiring people:

1. 1. Find a broader pool of candidates: Intelligent Automation can automate candidate sourcing by scraping databases to find ideal candidates for vacant positions. It can also handle the flood of applicants for any given job. The Harvard Business Review says every online job posting receives an average of 250 applicants. Recruiters can’t manually handle this many resumes themselves, so they tend to whittle it down to the 10-20%they can handle, usually focusing on Ivy League degrees, employees of competitors and employee referrals. Through IA, digital workers can help avoid the issue of recruiters being unable to read every application.
   2. Create a more standardized process: Inconsistency in hiring can amplify unconscious bias. IA can help create a more standardized process by ensuring all candidates are treated the same and each step in the process is followed correctly since digital workers are always perfectly compliant with company policy. Examples include automated job postings, tracking applications through the hiring pipeline and running automatic background checks.
   3. Use data to drive decisions: IA can provide access to otherwise unavailable data. For instance, data sets too large for human workers to review. This data can be used to analyze previous hires, discern patterns and suggest corrections to the process. It can also help drive hiring decisions and ensure candidates are selected based on their qualifications, not a personal bias.

Benefits of Reducing Unconscious Bias

Reducing the unconscious bias in the hiring process can benefit an organization in many ways, including:

1. 1. Create a more diverse workforce: A more diverse workplace is not just good sense; it’s good business. Greater diversity enhances creativity, drives innovation and helps companies grow. For example, the Boston Consulting Group reported more diverse management teams led to 19%higher revenues than companies with less diverse leadership.
   2. Reduce turnover: Employees who feel they were hired relatively and without bias are more likely to be satisfied with their job and less likely to leave the company. By reducing unconscious bias in the hiring process, companies can reduce employee turnover and save on costs associated with recruiting and training new employees.
   3. Improve the bottom line: Workplace disputes often rooted in unconscious bias cost the U.S. economy approximately $359 billion annually. In addition, outright discrimination adds another $64 billion to the tab every year. Taken together, allowing unconscious bias into your hiring process proves costly.

More needs to be done to promote equity in your average hiring process. However, IA can be a powerful tool in reducing unconscious bias by allowing hiring managers to focus on the essential criteria for the role rather than allowing personal biases to influence their decision-making.

The post Eliminating Unconscious Bias in Your Hiring Process appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

So, you’ve tried documents and emails, shared drives, and maybe even online job description builders… and found nothing lets you manage your job descriptions the way you imagine. Current options are tedious, ineffective – and leave you frustrated and wanting more.

If these sound familiar, you aren’t alone and you’ve come to the right place.

A Modern Job Description Management Solution

If you’ve struggled to find a solution to your job description woes, join us as we explore JDXpert, the modern job description management solution designed for today’s HR professionals.

On November 17th at 2 pm ET, Amanda Kozak will show us how JDXpert can help you boost your efficiency and streamline your job description process (and more.)

Here’s What You’ll Learn

• Quickly and efficiently construct high quality job descriptions utilizing the most comprehensive job description content available anywhere.

• Gain control of the review and revision process with simple workflows, role-based security and detailed versioning.

• Create quality, bias-free, skills forward job postings to recruit quality candidates.

• View your job description data in compelling ways that enable in-depth analysis through side-by-side views, matrix explorer, and more.

• Facilitate a more nimble revision process that adapts with shifting compliance requirements and working dynamics via Parent/Child efficiencies, FLSA questionnaire and Remote-work feature.

• Drive accurate, up-to-date and complete job data throughout your entire HR landscape via interfaces/integrations with most HR, Applicant Tracking, Compensation, and Market Pricing systems out there including Workday, Payscale MarketPay, and more.

Structure and Efficiency

JDXpert, the leader in job description software, allows teams to bring structure and efficiencies to the way job descriptions are created and maintained.

Don’t take our word for it. Come see for yourself! Hit that register button and we’ll see you there.

The post JDXpert: Modern Job Description Management For Today’s HR Pro appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

For 2022, the theme of International Women’s Day is #BreakTheBias, and though we’re only beginning to understand the full impact of the pandemic on the workforce, research indicates that women bore the brunt. With that in mind, I asked women from across the HR and recruiting space to offer thoughts on what employers can do to #BreakTheBias in their recruiting and retention efforts. 

Christine Tao, co-founder and CEO of Sounding Board, on sharing personal experiences: “When I was fundraising, an investor I had gotten pretty far in the process with told one of my existing investors he didn’t think I was aggressive enough.

My natural style is not overly aggressive, but I am highly competitive and ambitious. I was lucky that my existing investor immediately shared some stats about how I had established more than 70% market share in my previous job in a hugely competitive market with lots of competitors.

But not everyone is so lucky to have someone defend them or call out bias on their behalf. Stories like these happen to women and POC every day. While it’s the overt prejudice or stereotyping that gets called out, the everyday, hidden biases are what continue to hold us back.

The more we can bring these to the surface and name them, the more likely it is that we can start to break these biases and create a more even playing field for us all.”

Lorna Hagen, chief people officer at Guild Education, offered thoughts on the role leaders play: “Breaking the bias starts with your executive team understanding and believing why this is important. It’s important and impactful to your company. It’s also the right thing to do.

Only then can you clearly define what inclusive hiring practices are. Beyond the signed offer letters, companies need programs and training in place to combat bias and build a sense of community, belonging, and inclusion. Through parity, clarity and, most importantly, listening, the people function can shape a workforce representative of the diverse stakeholders it serves, and create space for culture additions who feel they truly belong.”

Deborrah Ashley, founder of Thrivoo Marketing, suggested ways to get more women to apply: “The first thing to consider when hiring is your job posting. The language you use in your job postings can influence the candidates who apply for your role.

It’s really important to make sure you’re using language that encourages a diverse applicant pool. Instead of saying you value diversity and inclusivity in the job description, describe the company culture on your LinkedIn company page. By describing your company as a place that values diversity, you’ll attract applicants who share those core values.

Once you have your job listed on LinkedIn, share the position in a LinkedIn post and encourage your women employees (having an employee advocacy program makes this seamless) to share it with their networks. This way, you’re getting beyond the existing recommendations on your page, which are likely influenced by unconscious bias as well.”

Jill Stutzman-Deaner, vice president of customer success at HiringSolved, proposed this rethink: “A recent Nature: Human Behavior study found that a slightly extended shortlist of six candidates, rather than three, resulted in a 33% increase in the addition of women. This is an incredibly simple way to increase gender equity in hiring without a massive change to resources or budget.

I love this suggestion because it allows the recruiters to remain in control of the efforts toward gender equity. It can feel like, as a recruiter, you don’t have a ton of power because you’re ultimately trying to please an outside hiring manager. But you can take the step yourself to break the bias by giving yourself the power to be a champion for women candidates.”

Christy Spilka, vice president of talent acquisition, iCIMS, dug into the overall process: “When it’s time for the interviews, build a diverse slate of interviewers to strategically include a broader base of perspectives. Provide each interviewer with focus areas and standardize the feedback process. Gather feedback from each interviewer individually prior to team debrief conversations to reduce groupthink. ATS feedback forms can be a great way to do this.

Analyze your hiring data to continually optimize your processes. Do you have a lack of female applicants for certain roles? You may need to re-visit those job postings and/or evaluate your talent attraction and sourcing strategy.

Consider showcasing videos from employees across multiple dimensions of diversity sharing how your company supports work/life balance, an engaging and inclusive culture and day in the life. Continuously check your performance and pivot as needed.”

Adriana Herrera, founder of PayDestiny, emphasized the importance of systems that promote equity and belonging: “Feeling overlooked for career growth opportunities and under-compensated results in unhappy employees that voluntarily turn over.

Every year U.S. businesses lose over a trillion dollars due to turnover, (approximately half of which is voluntary). During the pandemic, men were promoted three times more than their women counterparts. 

To recruit and retain women workers, companies need to recognize the economic value of women workers who voluntarily turn over and build their systemic organizational capacity to compensate and promote women fairly.

An easy way to make women workers feel appreciated is to establish transparent data-driven pay matrices and promotion processes. When every team member knows that their value to the company and their team is based on market data and an equal assessment of their performance rather than a perception of their value (based on who they are), their level of work satisfaction and happiness increases. This is because compensation and career growth opportunities are standardized, creating a level playing field for all employees.”

Addie Swartz, CEO of reacHIRE, underscored how employers can support women workers, no matter where they are in their journey: “For decades women who have taken breaks have faced significant challenges returning to work, including unrealistic job requirements, unconscious bias toward career breaks or older workers.

And now, given a record number of job openings, forward-thinking employers are seeking alternative talent pools – including hiring women returning from career breaks through returnship programs. Employers can #BreaktheBias surrounding career breaks by seeing candidates’ skills and experience, not their resume gap.

Likewise, given the shift to hybrid work, recent data shows that employees who choose to continue working remotely – as is the case for many women – face bias when it comes to advancement opportunities.

To #BreaktheBias and drive retention among women, companies need to be more intentional about offering all women – not just high-potential employees – virtual tools and resources to build meaningful relationships, gain expert, in-the-moment career advice and develop their skills. Such resources empower women to have a supportive community focused on career growth, leadership, sharing stories and working together to seize opportunities and overcome challenges.

Tracey Parsons, CEO of WORQDRIVE, summed up the obstacles left to overcome: “Right now, we really need to be doing more to keep our current employees engaged and frankly, we need to let go. Letting go, for me, is the best way to #BreaktheBias.

We need to let go of our preconceived notions of the people on our teams, their skills and what they are capable of. I’ve seen this firsthand. While I may be known as a recruitment marketing professional, I am also a software developer. How many of these hidden skills are in your own company?

When we #BreaktheBias, when we let go, we can start to see our people as multifaceted, multidimensional people. And when we let go and see this, we can start elevating people based on their skills, not their facetime, favorability or ability to talk louder.”

Reflecting on where we were a year ago, it’s clear that changes are taking place— some good, some bad, some still to be determined. But we can’t #BreakTheBias this International Women’s Day without action. So how will you help?  

The post International Women’s Day 2022: Ways to #BreakTheBias in Recruiting and Retention appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

These results are rather shocking but echo an infamous 2004 study that found clear evidence of racism and prejudice in the hiring process. 

Nonetheless, recruiters and hiring managers have worked hard to combat bias. But what more can be done to ensure that your company isn’t affected by bias in the hiring process?

Utilize AI Technology

When you’re skimming through a vast net of applications, it can be almost impossible to give every application the attention it is due. Your assessment might even be affected by your mood or how busy you happen to be on that particular day. This makes it all but impossible to remove unconscious bias while reviewing applications and heightens the need for automation. 

AI technology can give hiring managers a head start in the review process. It can also ensure that your diversity and inclusion initiatives aren’t accidentally undermined. This is because AI programs are proven to follow ethical, objective assessments that reduce bias and ensure that all candidates are assessed on the relevancy of their materials. 

Be Intentional

Knowing that unconscious bias exists is one thing, doing something about it is entirely different. As a hiring manager, you must actively seek to combat industry biases when hiring and should intentionally translate positive intent into actions and results. 

Here are a few ways you can be intentional about addressing bias during your next hiring phase:

Set Diversity Targets

Your hiring and recruitment team must intentionally seek diverse candidates who are traditionally underrepresented in a particular role within your company. You can do this by viewing your competitor’s hiring data, to see where exactly you are lagging. 

Advertise in New Venues

Not all candidates use the same job boards. You may unwittingly be missing out on attracting diverse talent simply because they aren’t aware of your opening. To overcome this, you should research job boards that promote diversity and should consider attending new kinds of career fairs that help employers overcome bias in the hiring process.   

Educate Yourself

The standards that hiring managers held ten years ago are outdated and often harm diversity and inclusion efforts. To overcome this, you must understand that candidates are choosing to present themselves and their identity in different ways, as gender-fluid fashion is helping folks become more accepting of themselves and their identity. 

As a hiring manager, you should always strive to better yourself and your understanding of people. As such, you can dive into learning about diversity in recruitment by learning from experts and can start to read or listen to social thinkers and authors like Judith Butler, Ibram X Kendi and Robert Mcruer. 

Avoid Microaggressions

Recruiters and hiring managers often forget that DEI in the hiring process is about more than “looking good,” it also ensures you attract the best talent to your business. However, to ensure that you don’t put off the best candidates from applying to your company, you must become aware of microaggressions and how to avoid them. 

Of course, you should always respect the candidates that walk through your door. But microaggressions usually occur when you act on stereotypes that stem from unconscious beliefs about a person’s race, gender, disability or sexuality. To avoid microaggressions,  work towards a universal set of questions and should think twice before making any assumptions about an applicant’s personality or ability based on their identity. 

Take a Standardized Approach

You want to give yourself the best chance of accurately assessing candidates based on their ability rather than irrelevant areas of their identity or application materials. To do this, you should take a standardized approach to your materials and assessments. 

The easiest way to achieve this is to use a blind assessment. This means that you will remove all identifiers from a candidate’s materials and will only use a pre-formatted CV that allows you to focus on an applicant’s relevant skills and experience. 

You should also change the way you advertise for a role, as gendered or unnecessarily exclusive language will put off applicants who would otherwise do well in their role. To do this, you must review application materials and look out for unnecessary language that might seem like “fluff” or puts candidates off. 

Finally, be sure to structure and standardize your interviews long before an applicant walks through your door. This will ensure that unconscious biases won’t affect the interview and will help you intentionally direct the conversation towards the applicant’s abilities and experience, rather than their identity.

Conclusion

Reducing bias in the hiring process is all about educating yourself and making intentional efforts to combat unconscious bias. You can do this by standardizing your interview questions. Partake in diversity targets which will make it clear that your company has a clear commitment to improving diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace. 

The post How to Reduce Bias in Hiring and Recruitment Processes appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

For the sake of perspective, let’s take a look at a story that one candidate shared regarding how bias affected her interview experience. 

The Story

My interview was the common live virtual setup. We used Zoom, a recruiter took center screen and the hiring manager joined in the background. Of course, we all said hello, talked about the weather then commenced. 

The interview started off okay.  I was asked to walk through my resume and then describe my responsibilities in my most recent role.

But then the questions became more personal, uncomfortable and potentially illegal: 

• • • How do you spend your weekends?
    • How long have you had your TikTok account?
    • Are you married?
    • How many children do you have?
    • How are you going to spend your Christmas?
    • Do you smoke or use alcohol?

I felt the questions were invasive and as if I was being judged on aspects of my life that had nothing to do with my skill set. This made the situation very uneasy for me. There were even a few minutes when the interviewers made a joke about an internal situation that I should not have been privy to. 

Speaking from a candidate’s eye-view, I felt disrespected and as if my time was not valued, wasted even. I was offered the position and did not accept. Based on the interview and the people responsible for making me feel welcome at the organization, there were too many red-flags to abide by and I don’t think it would have been an inclusive environment where I would feel comfortable working. 

What Went Wrong in This Scenario?

Unfortunately, the scenario above is repeated frequently in various organizations and throughout multiple industries. Many times the hiring team members conducting the interview are not properly prepared and are simply ignorant to what can and cannot be asked during a job interview. 

If the interview isn’t planned in advance and interviewers are not trained on how to conduct themselves, the organization may be held liable for any damages.

If not informed on how to conduct an interview, most interviewers naturally default to their own biases. It’s been reported that lawyers, bankers, consultants and other professionals tend to look for someone like themselves in interviews. This can obviously lead to gender-biased hiring based on job titles, racial discrimination, ageism as well as many other biases.

And it’s not just candidates witnessing biases in interviews. Recent data reveals that 42% of recruiters believe interview bias is a problem in traditional interviews. The fact is, some questions just simply should not be asked by a hiring team. There is no in between; questions are either okay or they are not.

A safe, inclusive and legal hiring practice may feel like an out-of-reach ceiling when we read stories like the above. The truth is, however, properly trained hiring teams have the tools at hand to ensure best practices are being used. Interview questions should not be a guessing game.  

What You Can Do

The first thing a hiring team can do is strive to remove bias from the interview process. Organizations can use technology platforms like Clovers.ai to help hiring teams deliver a consistent and compliant interview process that helps remove bias and unconscious influencers that create it.

Once the candidate answers a question, the interviewer tends to take side roads to dive deeper into that particular topic. They go down certain paths in hopes of learning more about the character of the candidate. They ask questions like, “What are some of your hobbies?” and, “Do you enjoy living in the city?” to get to know the candidate. 

There are many interviewing tools the hiring team can use to help guide them in the process of asking the right questions of a candidate. Clovers provides interviewers live, guided questions in real-time to help them stay on track. You can also check out their Essential Checklist for Inclusive Interviewing that offers guidance on how to avoid asking biased, discriminating and illegal interview questions. 

A candidate will (hopefully) come prepared for the interview and the hiring team should do the same. Being casual is not a negative, but it is the responsibility of the hiring team to protect the integrity of the candidate experience. This interview guide from Clovers.ai provides a list of to-dos for hiring teams.

Survey the Candidates

Feedback on a hiring team’s performance from the candidate, hired or not, helps the organization understand better where they are passing or failing in the interview process, as well as be better organized and informed in the future. This is especially important in terms of biases, which are often unconscious. 

What a candidate experiences, especially if negative, will be shared. Spreading a bad experience via word-of-mouth is one of the most damaging “reviews” a company can receive. 

From a candidate’s perspective, it’s stressful enough job-hunting and going through all it takes to get to the interview. The hiring team should be professional and prepared to ask job-related questions and treat each candidate as if they’re just as important as any new employee.

To keep a flow of great talent, a company needs to maintain a clean reputation, understand the candidate’s perspective, follow-up respectively and be conscious of biases during the interview process and beyond, of course.

The post A Candidate’s Perspective: Biased (and Even Illegal) Interview Questions appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

With the latest release of AIS, clients receive Modern Hire’s proprietary Question Sets, verified across industries and jobs, plus ranked candidate recommendations. These features are specifically designed to mitigate bias, speed time to hire and drive best-fit hiring outcomes, Modern Hire said.

The new features allow Modern Hire users to take advantage of verified question sets that were developed for several families of jobs, including banking and financial services, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, retail, call center, professional and sales. The question sets cover entry level, experienced and management roles.

The system scores candidate responses to individual questions, then automatically combines them into a single candidate score. AIS outputs ranked recommendations to lighten the burden on hiring teams and promote consistency on the criteria by which candidates are measured.

Aimed at Helping Interviewers

AIS is an on-demand video interview feature that uses AI to evaluate candidate responses, providing recruiters and hiring managers with recommended scores during the review process to ensure a more fair, unbiased and complete hiring experience.

When it was launched in June 2021, AIS was positioned as a tool that would help interviewers avoid unconscious bias by providing a standardized, consistent and objective selection methodology, which would focus only on job-relevant aspects of a candidate’s responses. Its selection methodology is based on human ratings of candidate responses against job-relevant competencies known to predict success.

Natural language processing and deep learning models are trained on the evaluations of answers to ensure that AIS rates and ranks candidates in an interpretable, valid and fair way. Modern Hire claims the tool is over three times less biased than human interview scorers.

The post Modern Hire’s Interview Scoring Update Focuses on Bias appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

What you’ll learn:

• How to recognize different types of biases and make more informed sourcing decisions
• The relationship between unconscious bias, diversity and inclusion and preventing discrimination
• How to source and assess candidates based on data.

You’ll come away with the skills to diversify your pipeline, and make your evaluation process more inclusive.

About the sponsors:

ZoomInfo Recruiter

ZoomInfo (Nasdaq: ZI) is a global leader in go-to-market intelligence solutions. Our platform empowers business-to-business sales, marketing, and recruiting professionals to hit their number by pairing best-in-class technology with unrivaled data coverage, accuracy, and depth of contacts. The company’s large and diversified customer base consists of over 20,000 customers from global enterprises, mid-market companies, and small businesses.

pymetrics.ai

Gamified soft skills assessments. ‍A new standard for understanding talent.  Match talent to the right jobs by replacing archaic resumes with behavioral data. The pymetrics platform is powered by a science-backed, fairness-first approach to assessments that candidates and employees love to engage with.

The post Identify & Eliminate Bias for Equitable & Inclusive Sourcing appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

This often leaves sourcers and recruiters tasked with the responsibility to achieve them. Yet, many will still fail.

Why?

Well, there’s a little human trait called bias. Unconscious bias, hidden bias, implicit bias: we all have them.

They are a product of human nature. But our biases affect our behavior and choices. If left unchecked, those small, unnoticed choices impact who can see themselves thriving at your company.

That’s not all…

Starting next year, publicly traded companies will be required to report statistics about their Board members – including self-identified gender and racial characteristics and self-identification as LGBTQ+.

We’re going to see the best organizations start leading and setting the bar for everyone else to follow. Don’t be left behind.

In this webinar, Textio VP of Talent Acquisition and DEI Jackye Clayton will detail how to cut unconscious bias from your sourcing strategies, and the technology, tools, and practices to reach your targets.

On September 28th, you’ll learn:

• How to recognize different types of biases and make more informed sourcing decisions
• The relationship between unconscious bias, diversity and inclusion and preventing discrimination
• How to source and assess candidates based on data.

You’ll come away with the skills to diversify your pipeline, and make your evaluation process more inclusive.

The post Identify & Eliminate Bias for Equitable & Inclusive Sourcing appeared first on RecruitingDaily.