Biases in your hiring process impact the diversity of your workforce. These conscious or unconscious beliefs cause certain candidates to be hired rather than others who may be more successful in a role.
Your employees’ diversity impacts their creativity, innovation, and productivity. This affects your company’s bottom line, reputation, and competitive edge.
As a result, taking steps to reduce biases in hiring is in your best interest. The following suggestions can help.
Implement these tips to minimize bias in your hiring process.
Educate Your Hiring Team
Train your hiring team on unconscious biases. This includes unfairly treating a candidate because of their race, skin color, or national origin. It also involves bringing aboard a candidate because their background, beliefs, and interests are similar to the decision-makers’.
- Identifying unconscious biases helps your hiring team understand how their perspectives impact hiring decisions and workforce diversity.
- Include what to look for and what to avoid during interviews.
- Hold your hiring team accountable for minimizing bias in their hiring decisions.
Update Your Job Descriptions
Your job descriptions need to be as inclusive as possible to increase diversity in your candidate pools.
- Include gender-neutral language.
- Use a clear job title, such as “Application Developer” or “Data Analyst,” to attract the right candidates.
- List only the three to five necessary qualifications to perform the work to increase the number of females and people of color who apply.
- Mention any accommodations that can be made for candidates with wheelchairs or special needs.
- Use HR software to uncover other biases involving race, age, physical ability, or other protected classes.
Require Skill Tests
Testing for the necessary IT skills lets you compare candidates based on their performance rather than personal characteristics. This indicates whether a candidate would be successful with your company.
Conduct Structured Interviews
Ask the same questions in the same order for the candidates interviewing for a role. This provides an objective foundation to evaluate candidates.
- Use a rubric to score the answers from 1 to 5.
- Encourage your hiring team to take notes on each candidate’s answers.
- Discuss your team’s findings to make a hiring decision.
Get Help with Hiring
Let RightStone help add IT professionals to your team. Reach out to us today.