Hiring Practices to Avoid Discrimination

Discrimination in the recruitment process, or allowing non-meritocratic factors such as gender, race, and age to influence your hiring decisions, has always been an issue in the hiring world.Even if recruiters take some precautions and are aware of their biases, there’s still a good chance that unconscious bias and discrimination of some sort will find its way into at least one step in the hiring process. This is important because the goal of every recruiter is to find the best possible candidate for a particular position, and if your decision-making capabilities are skewed by any kind of bias, you might be missing out on top candidates. It’s also important to your clients because diversity is one of the ways to enhance candidate experience, bolstering a company’s reputation as a welcoming place to work. Below are some important hiring practices to help you avoid discrimination.

Educate and Inform your Staff on Discrimination in Recruiting

One of the first steps to avoiding discrimination in the recruitment process is to build an awareness of hiring biases and the detriments that come with discriminaiton. This might seem like a tedious or trite thing to discuss in a staff meeting, the The Office may come to mind, but addressing the issue head on is really the only way to open the discussion on discrimination in hiring the process. You can start by informing your team of some of the anti-discriminatory AI innovations that are sweeping the hiring world and proceed to listing the benefits of removing bias from the hiring process.Here are a few ways that avoiding discrimination will bolster your recruiting efforts.

• According to a Glassdoor study, two-thirds of candidates stated that they’d prefer to work in a diverse working environment, making clients more attractive with a more diverse team.
• Diverse leadership leads to creativity and innovation.
• Inclusion in the workplace leads to higher rates of candidate engagement.
• This study on Harvard Business Review shows why diverse teams lead to greater profits.

Utilize AI to Remove Discrimination from the Hiring Process

Innovations in AI are sweeping almost every step of the recruitment process, and there’s no exception to AI’s effectiveness when it comes to removing bias and discrimination from the hiring process. One of AI’s most common uses in recruiting is in resume parsing and candidate screening. The appeal of this is, of course, the vast capabilities of powerful software to sift through thousands of resumes at accelerated speeds, streamlining a good portion of the hiring process.What AI screening can also ensure, however, is that factors like gender, race, age, and even a candidate’s name will not be assessed in the evaluation and ranking of candidates. AI can do this because it’s you, the recruiter, who is able to set the algorithm and machine-learning conditions that train AI to look for things that you want in an ideal candidate.While some may argue that the technology isn’t quite where it needs to be for recruiters to implement a fully automated and intelligent hiring software, the industry should expect to see AI innovations as a central part of any recruiting team in the near future.

Removing Bias from Interviews

There are several practices that recruiters can follow to eliminate discrimination and bias from interviews. This is extremely important to recruitment because, despite what a resume and work experience say about a candidate, the face-to-face time that an interview provides is an imperative factor to any hiring process. So how do recruiters remove bias from the interview process?

• Conduct panel interviews: Panel interviews, especially when the panel is made up of a diverse set of leaders, will help mitigate and filter out individual bias.
• AI Applications: Another way AI is helping us interview smarter is through voice-capturing technology that can draw connections between what the interviewee is saying and how they’re saying it.
• Select Trusted Interviewers: Be sure that your interviewers are trusted, experienced, and well-informed on anti-discriminatory hiring practices.
• Keep Records of your Hiring Decisions: Keep records of every interview process that takes place. Evaluate them on a quarterly or annual basis and check for patterns or potential red flags in your hiring process.
• Interview Script: Starting with an interview script before leading into a more informal questioning platform will level the playing field for each candidate. Interviewees will receive the same questions in the same order, allowing everyone an equal chance to answer your carefully selected questions.

While it’s impossible to completely eliminate unconscious bias from the recruiting process, there are steps you should be taking to avoid discrimination and expand your candidate base. Loxo’s advanced, state-of-the-art hiring technology relies on powerful AI applications to source, screen, and present you with candidates based on the merits of their skills and qualifications. Our proprietary directory contains more than 500 million people across 95 data sources, ensuring that your candidate pool will be diverse, expansive, and comprehensive. Rely on smarter technology and honest recruiting practices by getting started with a FREE Loxo account today.