Image courtesy Alex Geerts @alexgeerts. Diversity recruiting
Unconscious bias can hamper diversity at every stage of the hiring, recruiting, screening, and interviewing process to assessment and onboarding. But some strategies can help improve equal opportunity at each phase.
Diversity hiring is considerably more than making adjustments in one area of the process, and neither is it about the hiring. When we discuss diversity and inclusion, hopefully, it will lead to substantially more all-inclusive aspects of belonging in a workplace that does not end with recruiters.
Reassess Job Requirements
Job qualifications may likely contain equal employment opportunity statements. It is worth noting that people who write them frequently don't consider numerous factors influencing candidates' chances of applying.
In fact, a Social Talent analysis of published job advertisements showed a strange pattern in which the number seven was used repeatedly. Such as asserting that a candidate must have seven years of experience. Eliminate these if they are not fundamental requirements.
Why? A Hewlett-Packard internal report, the emphasis of a 2014 Harvard Business Review article, observed that most women only apply for positions where they believe they meet 100 percent of the standards, which is unlike men, who will apply if they meet merely 60 percent.
Thinking in terms of the aforementioned, if one were to state a candidate needs five years' experience, be certain you cannot hire a person with four years' experience since some women will be turned away. A better solution would be to remove capricious requirements.
Rebuff Bias at the Sourcing Stage
Whether one is white or black, demographically different, male or female bias has a high propensity of entering the search and sourcing process. Here is an example: An analysis of nearly 100,000 global noted that while recruiters searched for applicants on LinkedIn, irrespective of role, they are more likely to view male profiles.
Surprisingly, in every profession and seniority, recruiters invariably looked at twice as many males as they did female profiles.
What this report confirms is despite attempts to look at more female candidates than males, biases ensued, creating considerably more searches for men.
In our work with Fortune 500 clients, we found it to be effective when female talent is filtered using Boolean search phrases.
Using a data aggregator that gathers data from across the web and filters the most relevant information into a database of candidate profiles proved more effective. Rather than searching for specific terms such as, a recruiter could create a search by entering a female name list. It is worth mentioning again to recheck one's implicit and explicit biases. Ignore the propensity to look for ethnically diverse names only by specific surnames or candidates, only fitting the recruiters' bias for particular universities.
Learn to Identify Bias in Screening
It's inaccurate to conclude you will make the search bias-free. Ask yourself if you would invest time in helping a person, male or female, if they fit or not? Regrettably, if the candidate is a woman, unlikely. Despite claims, this quite honestly isn't an equal opportunity.
Imagine if your search would have selected Einstein before he was Einstein. Steve Jobs, a young Barack Obama in high school, a person who with the right nurturing who could cure cancer or be a leader fir to lead.
Screening is perhaps where for the most part, bias comes into play. Woods Kovalova Group's Unconscious bias training can help. There is research showing that hiring managers, whether male or female, rated men as considerably more capable than similar female candidates for STEM jobs, asserts a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study employed the same resume with randomly selected gender-specific names. The resumes were then sent to hiring managers for a job as lab manager. Managers claiming they were biases free, who believed they were viewing resumes of "men" ranked those profiles more capable, having a greater likelihood to be hired, also agreed they would mentor this person. Which one would assume is egregious to all of us.