Recruiting is more than just landing a great resume. No. It’s about landing the skills, culture fit, personality, and potential your company needs. Unfortunately, humans are flawed and extremely biased, and we have somehow grown to hold all of these really strange biases.
This can be anywhere from gender bias to age bias, or even only hiring candidates because they came from our alma mater. But how do we do away with these biases when recruiting employees?
Dealing with Bias in Hiring
Say you have two resumes sitting on a recruiter’s desk. Two people with the exact same experience and qualifications. But one is male. One is female. One went to a more fancy-schmancy Ivy League university. The one went to a not-so-fancy one.
When a recruiter is looking at these two resumes, he/she is subconsciously making decisions that reveal the kind of person they “see themselves as,” which will favor the individual who appears to be that. Then, the person who is that – will be given the job, while the person who might just be as capable will lose out.
Technology to the Rescue
Fortunately, technology has also enabled hiring managers to create more objective systems to recruit with, especially through talent acquisition software. These sorts of solutions allow companies to detect and reduce bias and increase objectivity in their hiring processes. This actually helps with those hefty costs that come with making a bad decision based on bias and overall makes the hiring absolutely accurate – essentially hitting the hiring bullseye every single time!
How Does Thomas International Help?
Standardizing Evaluations
One of the primary problems with recruiting at most companies is that organizations lack scoring or evaluation criteria for the recruitment process. Being a candidate source company, we see this all the time. When a company lacks this system, the company looks at the job level. All the information that comes in is a little too subjective to provide a real measure at all.
The Thomas International personality test, one of their many products, allows organizations to hire for what really does matter — the candidate’s personality, what skills do they have, things along this line. Without a systematic recruitment or scoring model, companies can’t hire for objectivity.
Promoting Fairness
By sticking to the numbers, Thomas International’s program hopes to make employees be able to review candidates on the numbers themselves rather than their gut, and rather than in an unstructured interview. Worst of all, a study from Thomas International reports that over half of companies develop jack-of-all-trades employees who are unacceptable in all roles.
Imagine you’re about to interview a room full of people. Now imagine that those people all walk through the same door. They’re all asked the same questions to see how they perform. There’s no bias overtaking your decision-making process because you know, by the process of innovation and the aid of contrasting, that every candidate will be evaluated on set criteria, scored, and ranked against each other.
Real Results, Real Impact
So, as we’re sure you are getting the point. If you are not using data-driven recruitment strategies to combat the creep of bias in recruitment, you are performing worse than you would if you did, so stop damaging your team performance and, so, decreasing employee engagement everywhere (the poor things).
For example, a company may have issues with gender equality in leadership roles. In such companies, their gender-biased manager will rather go for a man than a woman applying for the same position — no matter her qualifications and potential.
However, with tools and resources, you can also see if your business has previously been making one of these mistakes; you can see where you need to focus your hiring efforts and invest in proactive talent acquisition strategies to fill your cupboard full of skilled individuals with great talents.
The Future of Fair Hiring
The candidate-driven market is only growing, and without tools to mitigate bias in recruitment and the virtues of job analysis software on our side, businesses and retailers, even of the huge and welcoming national supermarket variety, are in danger of getting left behind. Recruitment software, including assessments, is a requirement when it comes to hiring a skilled workforce (it always has been), but now it’s time we level up and start to reflect on it.
Final Thoughts
Hiring fairly is, in the end, just smart hiring. If you are, and always have been, hiring fairly, then that is good news! But if you’re looking for your business to have that big, happy, diversity-filled, data-driven hiring workplace atmosphere and become –you know – successful, isn’t it time to start collecting the evidence to make a difference, and that will come in the form of tech, and handy dandy data?
