5 Practical Ways to Reduce Bias in Your Hiring Process

Many organizations in Australia want to encourage an inclusive culture in the workplace, but unconscious bias stops it from happening. It is human nature to have unconscious biases, but it hinders the workforce from being diverse and inclusive if it happens during the hiring process. 

Various organizations in Australia seek professional help from Australia Job Consultancy to incorporate hiring techniques to avoid hiring bias. 

Before you can incorporate ways to reduce bias in the hiring process, it is important to know the disadvantages of hiring bias. When unconscious bias influences the hiring process, it is known as hiring bias. Due to such biases, decisions favoring a particular group or a person are taken, which may be detrimental to the others. 

Disadvantages of biased recruitment

• 
  Biased recruitment makes the pool of potential shallow and limits the quality of candidates that an organization could recruit.

• Due to personal hiring bias, the recruitment process can be affected. Due to one’s personal experience or emotions, the final result may be contrary to what is best for the organization.

• Unconscious bias hinders diversity and inclusivity in the workforce. 

Benefits of reducing Hiring Bias

• An organization with a diverse workforce is smarter and more innovative and helps in generating more revenue for the company.

• An organization with a diverse workforce is more productive and grows faster. 

Diversity in the workplace is important

• Diversity in the workforce of an organization leads to greater productivity and profits. 

• Different perspective

• Higher innovation and increased creativity

• Better decision making

• Employees feel more invested in the objectives and culture of the company

• Better inclusivity

Ways to reduce bias in the hiring process

5 Practical ways to curb hiring bias are discussed below. 

Inclusive Job Description

The experienced consulting recruiters give utmost importance to the job advertisement. As per the experts’ advice, the job advertisement and content should appeal to diverse people. The gendered wording should be avoided while writing the job description. For example, the organisation should use the ‘the successful candidate’ phrase instead of words such as they. The preferences and requirements should be written carefully, and proofreading them at least twice is necessary. 

Introduction of blink skill challenges

Though CVs remain the best way to introduce prospective talent to the hiring manager, certain information in CVs can lead to unconscious bias. One way to address the issue of unconscious bias is to encourage ‘blind applications’. A blind application will not have information related to gender, nationality, race, and age; thus, hiring managers do not take biased decisions when making candidates’ lists for interviews.

You can also learn about : Effective CV Writing Tips & CV Template 

Drive awareness about unconscious bias

It is difficult for organizations to remove hiring bias completely, but driving awareness about unconscious bias is a continuous effort, and organizations must practice it. Organizations in Australia must develop policies and best practices to educate all staff members to recognize and manage hiring biases. Australia Job Consultancy suggests that organizations should train their hiring managers and technical product management other staff members about the ill effects of hiring bias and incorporate different practices to reduce them. 

Standardize Interviews

Unconscious bias can minimize in an organization if the interview process is standardized. Unstructured interviews may be personal and natural flow, but there can be unconscious biases since each candidate gets treated differently. Organizations should have an interview panel so that hiring biasedness can be minimized. 

Making data-driven decisions

The selection should be based on data to minimize unconscious bias during hiring. In addition, making data-driven decisions will help the hiring managers select the most appropriate candidate.

You Can Also read about : Effective Recruitment Strategies for an Imperfect Market