Posted in Management Best Practices

Avoid Hiring Bias with These 3 Tips

You may inadvertently consider certain job candidates over others without even realizing it. In this situation, you may be the victim of hiring bias. And if you ignore this issue, it may hurt your business and its employees for many years to come.

What Is Hiring Bias?

According to Psychology Today, a bias refers to an inclination, prejudice, or tendency to treat one person differently than another. Some biases are positive. For example, you may shy away from fatty foods if you are biased toward positive ones. On the other hand, certain biases can be negative. And these are among the biases that may hurt your chances of hiring top talent to join your team.

Hiring biases may lead you or someone else involved in recruiting and interviewing job candidates to pursue some individuals more than others. A bias may cause certain candidates to be removed from consideration for a role, in spite of the fact that they may be a great fit.

If a bias goes unnoticed or unchecked, it may impact your entire team. The bias may shape your business, to the point where only certain kinds of employees are part of your culture. This may hurt your company’s chances of building an inclusive workplace where every worker is treated with dignity and respect.

Types of Hiring Bias

Hiring bias falls into three categories:

1. Institutional

Some groups may dominate a workforce, while others may be underrepresented. If this happens, there may be an institutional bias within your business.

2. Explicit

An explicit bias reflects certain attitudes, preferences, and generalizations. It may come across if you interview job candidates who share values or personal beliefs similar to your own.

For example, you may be more drawn to a candidate who graduated from the same school you attended over other individuals. In this example, you may have an explicit bias toward a candidate based on the fact that they have an educational background similar to yours.

3. Implicit

If you are dealing with an implicit bias, you display certain attitudes, preferences, and generalizations toward others you may have no control over. This type of bias comes in many forms, such as:

Gender: You may prefer to hire candidates of a certain gender over others of the opposite gender.
Confirmation: You may make an assumption about a candidate and look for evidence to support your belief.
Similarity: You may want to hire a candidate because they remind you of yourself.

A local staffing agency can help you avoid hiring bias. On top of that, the agency can provide hiring tips and resources to ensure you can add top talent that meets your company’s expectations.

When Does Hiring Bias Happen?

You may encounter hiring biases at any time when you recruit talent. From the moment you get a candidate’s resume to the time when you submit an offer, there may be biases. If you don’t see a bias, you risk a poor hiring decision.

Bias can come up during any time of the interview as well. An interviewer may judge a candidate based on the tone of their voice or other factors that have nothing to do with their ability to perform a particular role. If this occurs, the candidate may be dismissed, and your business may be forced to settle for someone who may be less than ideal.

Remember, no one is immune to biases. If you have concerns a member of your hiring team may be biased toward certain candidates, meet with this individual. This gives you the opportunity to discuss your concerns and work with this individual to explore ways to avoid hiring biases moving forward.

Hiring Bias Risks

Bias hurts your business, its employees, and its culture. To understand how, consider the immediate and long-lasting impact of what can happen if you ignore a candidate due to a hiring bias.

In this situation, you may choose an inferior candidate to fill a role. This individual may do a suitable job. Regardless, you may have missed a candidate who can thrive within your business. And this individual may have helped your company achieve outstanding results long into the future.

Let’s not forget about the amazing ideas and innovations you may miss, either. A top candidate who has a diverse background may help your business produce new products and services or improve its existing ones. Ultimately, this individual may be a difference-maker. At this point, they may be inclined to join one of your rivals and help them achieve their desired results.

You may get into legal trouble if you hire one candidate over another due to hiring biases. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) takes employment discrimination seriously. If your business is found using discriminatory hiring practices, it may suffer brand reputation damage and revenue losses. It may also hurt your chances of recruiting and retaining top talent.

Furthermore, the cost of a bad hire can be substantial. You may have to spend big to replace someone you hired on account of the fact that you followed hiring biases.

How to Identify Hiring Biases

You may believe your hiring process is fast, seamless, and free of biases. There are several things you can do to ensure that this is the case, such as:

Create hiring standards. Establish recruiting questions and evaluation metrics to assess candidates.
Look at your staff. If you continue to hire the same types of candidates and keep getting the same results out of them, now may be the perfect time to update your hiring process so you can create an inclusive team.
Track your metrics. Gather talent recruitment and retention data and assess it regularly, as this can help you see if you are hiring only certain kinds of candidates over others.

In addition to these things, get feedback from employees across your business. You can use surveys and questionnaires to understand how workers feel about your company and its commitment to developing and maintaining an inclusive team. Conduct these assessments periodically to check the pulse of your staff. As you identify improvement areas, prioritize them. This can help you continuously enhance your hiring process and reduce the risk of biases as you recruit talent.

Can You Prevent Hiring Bias?

You can absolutely prevent and overcome hiring bias. Here are tips to help you do just that:

1. Teach Your Employees About Hiring Bias

Don’t let hiring bias go by the wayside. Discuss this topic with your team and explain its potential impact on your company. If your workers understand biases in hiring, they can work together to create an inclusive environment where every team member feels valued and appreciated.

To protect against bias when you recruit talent, consider how you promote your job openings. For instance, review the language of your job descriptions carefully. Use gender-neutral terms and phrases in your descriptions. Also, avoid jargon that otherwise may make it difficult for job candidates to understand the role you want to fill.

Include multiple parties in your hiring process. This allows a candidate to meet with a variety of individuals from your business. You and your team can examine a candidate from multiple perspectives. This can help you make an informed decision about whether to hire a candidate.

2. Standardize Your Assessments

If you are worried biases will crop up as you review candidate resumes, make all application materials blind. To do so, remove a candidate’s name and other contact information from the resume before you and your team review it. This allows you to solely focus on a candidate’s skills, experience, and other pertinent information.

Along with this, utilize scientifically validated assessments to understand a candidate’s possible fit within your business. Some companies ask candidates to complete a scientifically validated behavioral assessment from The Predictive Index to determine how far these individuals should move through the hiring process. This assessment usually takes just a few minutes to complete and helps you see if a candidate may be an ideal choice. Perhaps most importantly, it is completely unbiased.

Use the same interview questions for each candidate. With a standardized interview process, you can quickly and easily identify the best candidates. Plus, you can minimize the risk of biases that otherwise come with asking some candidates certain questions and other candidates very different ones.

3. Extend Your Talent Search

Diversify your talent search by looking for talent on several online platforms. LinkedIn offers a great starting point to connect with a wide range of quality job candidates. Beyond this, use job boards where you can search for top candidates from around the world.

Let a staffing agency help you with your job search. An agency has recruiters on staff who can answer frequently asked questions and many others about hiring candidates. It can help you conduct a thorough talent search without having to worry about any hiring biases.

Be cautious if you use artificial intelligence (AI) in your talent search, too. AI may help speed up the process of identifying top talent. At the same time, concerns persist about AI hiring bias. If you rely exclusively on artificial intelligence, you may miss out on great candidates. You may also hire individuals who fail to help your company build and sustain an inclusive workplace.

Want to Avoid Hiring Biases?

Trust PrideStaff with your talent search. To learn more, contact your local PrideStaff office.