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Most companies understand that a diverse workforce leads to a range of benefits. Most diverse organizations see productivity rise, creativity reign, and innovation flourish by bringing individuals from a variety of backgrounds together.
However, even companies that are dedicated to increasing diversity may struggle to make that goal a reality. Unconscious bias can wreak havoc on your processes, preventing you from achieving your objectives.
By integrating blind hiring practices into your recruitment procedures, you can make diversity goals easier to accomplish. If you want to learn more about blind hiring – including the benefits it provides and how to use it to achieve your diversity hiring goals – here’s what you need to know.
Blind hiring is a candidate screening approach that removes all personally identifiable information (PII) from applications. Names, photos, addresses, education specifics, and other details that may reveal a candidate’s gender, age, race, background, or similar characteristics are removed. Typically, all that’s left in the application is information about the candidate’s skills.
Hiring managers don’t have access to the applications until after the removal of the PII. As a result, they are “blind” to that information, ensuring it can’t influence their decisions.
When a company uses a blind hiring approach, hiring managers only have information about candidates’ skills. Any data points that may allow conscious or unconscious bias to play a role in recruitment decisions aren’t there.
As a result, companies can more easily identify top talent. All decisions are ultimately merit-based, as any other kind of information that may influence a hiring manager’s opinions – intentionally or incidentally – isn’t available.
When implemented properly, blind hiring creates opportunities for increased diversity. It eliminates the impact of a candidate’s background, ensuring that all applicants are given a fair chance at being selected if they have the skill set necessary to handle a position’s duties.
Using a blind hiring approach effectively means removing as much PII as possible. While certain data points – like candidate names and addresses – may be obvious choices, overlooking some other pieces of information could allow bias to creep into hiring decisions.
For example, college or university names may prevent equitable hiring decisions. Past employer names and addresses could fall into that category. Additionally, employment or educational dates may reveal a candidate’s age, creating opportunities for agism.
Beyond the application itself, another blind hiring best practice is to forgo social media screening during the initial parts of the hiring process. Social media profiles are brimming with PII, so you want to wait until well into the process to perform that type of screening.
Conducting an initial screening interview via chat software could also help reduce hiring bias. Using a chat-based approach, hiring managers can still have live conversations while reducing their exposure to cues indicating a candidate’s age, gender, or similar characteristics.
With the above approach, fairness will be a bigger part of the equation enabling decisions based on capability, ensuring other factors aren’t as likely to influence hiring.
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