Consciously, most of us do not condone discriminatory behaviour. Yet, all of us have bias of some sort toward something, someone, or some group – even if we think we don’t! More often than not, we make decisions that discriminate against one individual or group in favour of another, without even realising that we are doing it, and ironically, often against our own conscious belief that our decision-making is unbiased.
This unconscious bias can dramatically impact our business decision making in areas including mentoring, promotion, performance review, policy, marketing and customer service. But perhaps nowhere is unconscious bias more evident at work than in recruitment and selection processes. An unconscious bias can discriminate against applicants of a certain race, age or gender. But unconscious bias can also be more subtle, screening out candidates who may mistakenly be perceived to have passive personalities (e.g. due to a weak handshake or lack of direct eye contact) or to be non-conformists (e.g. because they have visible tattoos or piercings), who have attended a lesser-known university, or whose address is deemed to be on the wrong side of town. This is highly problematic because companies are screening out large numbers of diverse candidates that could bring innovation, creativity, and new and beneficial ways of thinking into the business. Further, research indicates that having staff diversity that reflects a company’s customer base has an extremely positive business impact.
Here are some strategies to help you and your business mitigate the risk of your recruitment and selection processes being negatively affected by unconscious bias:
- Promote an Employee Value Proposition (EVP) that includes benefits that will attract a wide and diverse pool of applicants to apply (e.g. include flexible work arrangements).
- Use gender and age neutral language in job descriptions, job ads and interview questions. Avoid heavily masculine and feminine coded language. For example, ”leader”, “ambitious”, “strong” and “competitive” are masculine and can dissuade women from applying for jobs. They are more often used more in male-dominated professions when compared to words such as “support”, “nurture”, “collaborate” and “connect” which are coded as feminine. Software exists that can comb through language to alert employers if language is too gendered.
- “Blind shortlist”, i.e. remove personal details such as names, ages, educational institutions, etc. from job applications.
- Ensure diversity on selection panels. Ideally, the diversity of the panel should reflect the diversity of the candidate group as much as possible.
- Recognise that you have biases, prejudices and stereotypes, and increase your self-awareness of them by:
- Asking for feedback
- Testing your unconscious bias by taking Harvard University’s free Implicit Association Test (IAT) at www.implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/.
- Question your first impressions of candidates.
- Treat all candidates with the same level of fairness and respect, regardless of the level of affinity or connection you feel with them.
- Focus on the knowledge and skills required for the job, i.e. the key selection criteria.
- Encourage selection panel members to suspend judgments until the end of the interview, in order to minimise biases associated with first impressions.
- Deliberately slow down decision making. This helps to avoid making decisions on the basis of rapid, intuitive, and at times unconscious, judgments.
- Selection panel members should make shortlisting and selection decisions collectively.
- Justify your decisions, and make others involved in the selection process justify their decisions.
- Reconsider reasons for decisions.
- Selection panel members should monitor each other for unconscious bias.
- Hold everyone accountable by creating a culture of discussing and calling out unconscious bias. This reduces its stigma and helps people become more conscious of the decisions they’re making.
- Question cultural stereotypes.
- Challenge negative terminology about ‘groups’.
- Reinforce and promote positive images of diverse groups of people in recruitment and selection materials, the company website and career sites.
- Track the number and ratio of diverse applicants and adjust your attraction campaign accordingly in order to increase representation of diverse groups. For example, if 40% of applicants were female, but only 12% of those interviewed were female, then the shortlisting process requires review and adjustment.
- Provide diversity training to selection panel members.
Understanding, accepting and mitigating against our unconscious bias is neither an easy or comfortable process, but it is a necessary one if we want to reap the benefits of a truly diverse workplace. It requires those involved in recruitment and selection, and other business decision making processes, to have a high level of self-awareness and introspection, as well as a willingness to call out and act on unconscious bias when they detect it in themselves or others.