How To Reduce Bias In The Hiring Process

If your remote company doesn’t have a strategy to reduce bias in the hiring process, you may be struggling to build more diverse, inclusive teams.

After all, the success of every D&I mission starts with recruiting. 

Unchecked biases and non-inclusive vibes in your hiring process damage your company’s reputation and tank your candidate experience scores. They may even qualify as discrimination in some countries.

But addressing and reducing bias in your recruiting and hiring process can lead to higher employee engagement, job satisfaction, retention, innovation, and profitability.

So the tips in this guide will help your team brainstorm a game plan to welcome candidates with different perspectives and boost belonging. 🙌 

Let’s begin by answering: 

Unconscious bias refers to preconceived notions about a person based on their gender identification, race, religion, appearance, abilities, nationality, age, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, etc.

These implicit biases may prevent applicants from receiving a fair shot at employment. They also tend to favor a specific type of candidate over others.

For example, remote teams may say or think things about candidates like:

• They’re not a native language speaker, so it will be difficult to communicate effectively.
• Their personality won’t jive with our progressive company culture.
• They come from a country of workaholics, so we should choose them.
• The internet in their country can be unreliable.
• We’ll need new protocols to accommodate their abilities, and that’s too much to take on. 
• Familiarity with legacy systems doesn’t mean they can keep up with our tech stack.
• Can they really commit to a full workload with a baby on the way?

The worst part about unconscious bias is that people aren’t aware of how their assumptions affect employment opportunities. This “unconscious” prejudice separates bias from overt, intentional discrimination, yet the outcomes aren’t much different.

So now that we’re on the same page, let’s dive into:

Follow these seven tips, and your organization will become one of them:

Send this survey to your employees, so they can start recognizing their own implicit biases. Then they can hold themselves accountable for unlearning those harmful associations moving forward.

Whose voice is missing from your remote teams? 

• Young, middle-aged, and older employees
• People who identify as female, male, and non-binary
• LGBTQ+ representation 
• Neurodiverse and differently-abled employees
• Veterans
• Multilingual team members 
• Multi-racial and multi-national employees

If you notice one department consisting entirely of young men from Ivy League universities, that’s a red flag. 

Job descriptions are usually the first encounter candidates have with your remote company. Though they’re meant to show candidates what you’re looking for, they also tell candidates a lot about your organization’s inclusivity.

Use gender-neutral language. It’s probably obvious that gender binary pronouns (he/she) automatically reduce your applicant pool by more than half.

Skip the huge list of must-have qualifications. An oft-quoted statistic says men apply for roles when they meet just 60% of its requirements. But women will only apply if they meet 100% of them.

So requiring candidates to have experience with specific software, technology, processes, etc., can prevent top talent from applying — even though they can be trained on the job. 

Be an organization committed to upskilling; you’ll receive more eager candidates willing to learn. 

Focus on what someone in this role needs to do. Rather than describing your ideal candidate, tell job seekers how they can thrive in this position. Attract and entice them with all the ways you’ll value the skills they bring to the table.

Don’t be an ageist. Words like recent graduate, energetic, fast-paced, and digital native discourage older candidates from applying, despite their years of knowledge and experience.

These tips will help you attract candidates from diverse backgrounds rather than unintentionally exclude them.

Skills-based tests and practical assessments to judge how well a candidate may perform in their potential role are becoming more popular. HR teams say these may be more accurate indicators of success than resumes, “gut instincts,” and interviews combined.

Once your candidates take their assessments, you’ll have an unbiased score to help inform your final hiring decisions. 

“Bling hiring” refers to using technology to mask information that may reveal a candidate’s name, age, gender, race, educational background, location, nationality, etc.

This technology stems from the fact that just a name can trigger unconscious biases about an applicant’s gender, race, or nationality. 

Some organizations take data-driven hiring decisions a step further by leveraging AI-powered intelligent insights.

AI can identify the best candidates for the role based on algorithms that crunch data points faster and more comprehensively than you have time for. Then your human team can select your top choices from that intelligently-whittled list.

6. Revamp Your Remote Interviews

Assemble a diverse interview panel. Try to rotate the teammates you ask to join your interviews. Multiple perspectives reduce the chance of hiring biases and provide more varied first impressions of candidates. A diverse interview panel also shows new hires what your team is really like. 

Give each interviewer a candidate scorecard and compare scores post-interview to take everyone’s impressions into consideration. 

Always use structured, standardized interviews. Structured interviews use the same questions for all candidates, so everyone’s assessed on the same playing field. You can ask your department heads for job-specific questions, but those assessing company culture fit, work ethic, creativity, etc., should be standardized across the board.

Create candidate scorecards for an unbiased rating system. Some people are amazing during interviews despite lacking qualifications. Others let their anxiety overshadow their talent.

Candidate scorecards allow you to rank how well each candidate meets your expectations for the role. This prevents biases from creeping in and influencing how fit you perceive someone to be.

1. Open a blank spreadsheet. 
2. Use the top row to define what you’re looking for. Place each requirement, skill, personality trait, experience, etc., in its own column.
3. Score your candidates’ answers on a scale from 1 to 5 during their interviews. Place your score for each requirement in the corresponding column. You can also weight scores in more essential categories.

Now you have a matrix for assessing each candidate. 

When you tally up all the numbers post-interview, you’ll have an unbiased overview of which candidates scored well overall and in each category. 

Your hiring decisions will be based on an actual assessment of how well someone fits your criteria rather than how well they interview, what they look like, where they went to school, etc.

You probably have a section on your website or career portal dedicated to your commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. But did you know you can also add this intel to your WWR Company Profile?

Unchecked unconscious biases may be excluding the best candidates from your interviews and employment offers. But by leveraging technology and the tips in today’s post, you can make meaningful strides in your goal to attract and retain more diverse and inclusive remote teams.

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