In the ideal world, people are hired solely for their achievements, work experience, and skill set. But the reality is that many hiring managers have biases that they likely are not even aware of that can impact decisions about who they bring into an organization. Blind recruitment is a process that aims to remove biases from hiring decisions.
The bigger-picture purpose of blind hiring is to promote a more diverse workplace. Hiring based on skills and talent. The process involves removing details from resumes and applications that can impact which candidates are chosen because of unconscious and conscious biases during the screening stage. It helps the screening to be bias-free to ensure during the interview stage, you have the best candidates chosen based on skill and talent.
Unconscious biases refer to the thoughts and feelings individuals have collected over the years that impact how they approach various situations. While many people consider themselves to be open minded, the mind moves so fast that it is often difficult to always know what influences one’s thinking and how decisions are made.
Among the details removed are:
For example, removing hobbies can help eliminate the tendency for an HR manager to hire someone with similar interests to their own, which has no connection to how well they could do the job or not. As well, hobbies can reflect a certain demographic and prevent a diverse workforce.
By removing certain information about a candidate during the hiring process, including on the resume, hiring teams can assess these individuals on their experience, not on existing biases. That is the goal, whether you have a remote team or not.
To begin the process of implementing blind hiring to provide the fairest practice possible, you can take advantage of modern tools to effectively remove candidate information that is impertinent to the job such as name or address. While some organizations remove all personal details mentioned in the above list, others only remove ones that have been identified as having a bias problem. Systems can assign a number (such as “1”) or letter (such as “A”) to distinguish them from each other while still providing a view of the skills and relevant experiences to the screener.
Your hiring team will be able to see only information about each candidate that is pertinent to the job. Specifically, their time spent with a company, job title, degree, and hard skills. Thus, only the factors that are truly important are up for consideration during the recruitment process.
Finally, educate your HR team and other employees about the problems with unconscious biases and ways to determine if they have any existing ones. Perhaps most importantly, provide them with strategies to overcome identified biases.
Inequality within the hiring process due to gender, race, age, background, and other personal information is never okay. Blind recruitment helps to remove any biases that a hiring panel may have, whether it is conscious or not. This way, your company can become more inclusive with a diverse workforce.
Talcura’s recruitment technology can help your team to implement blind recruiting. Contact us today to learn more.
