How to Avoid Unconscious Bias in Recruiting Candidates

When you're hiring new employees for your company, you want to be able to recruit and retain the best talent in the industry. Unconscious bias in recruiting can keep you from finding the best talent by blinding you to good potential candidates. Although unconscious bias is unavoidable, it can be circumvented by using innovative technology. 

Mitigate Unconscious Bias With Blind Resume Reviews

Traditional hiring processes depend heavily on resumes, which provide recruiters with work history, education, skills, and other information necessary for application screening. Without realizing it, individuals use information about race, nationality, gender, age, education level, and other factors to create a biased mental impression of each candidate. By using automated technology you can avoid these pitfalls. 

By using blind screening processes, you anonymize the process and ensure that you have the best pool of candidates to choose from. 

Over time, you’ll also create resume standards that are equitable to remove bias earlier and earlier in the process, and increase the diversity of your candidate pool so that you can find the talent that other companies may miss due to their own unconscious bias.

Use Comprehensive Skills Assessments to Remove Unconscious Bias Activity

Assessments are an excellent way to gauge the skills and knowledge of an applicant against the job requirements. You can obtain accurate data from skills assessments that can allow you to make unbiased decisions about which applicants to interview. While a resume can provide a list of skills and experience, skills assessments let you see those skills in action. 

Crosschq 360 digital reference checks give you visibility into skills assessment scores with a comparison to baseline values. This allows you to mitigate bias from the hiring process by creating easily quantifiable data that you can use to select the best candidate for the job. Not only do skills assessments help to mitigate unconscious bias in the recruitment process, but they also reduce the amount of time spent screening and interviewing candidates, ultimately saving your recruitment and hiring teams time and money.

Base Your Recruiting Decisions on Data to Avoid Bias

A great way to reduce the effect of unconscious bias on your candidate recruiting processes is to use automated data analysis. Crosschq Analytics allows you to parse data from your ATS and HRIS while eliminating information that can introduce bias. You can use the data to identify employees who are more likely to be top performers or those who are likely to remain with the company for more than a year if hired. 

Using data, analytics, and machine learning, Crosschq creates algorithms that specifically target characteristics and skills that make someone a good match for your company. With this information, recruiters and hiring managers can focus on candidates’ skills and talents, thereby reducing or eliminating unconscious bias. Crosschq’s process excludes criteria and characteristics that could inadvertently create bias, unlike similar AI tools in the industry that don’t differentiate against data that could be biased.

Modify Your Recruitment Strategy to Remove Unconscious Bias

If you are having trouble recruiting and retaining talent, your problem could stem from posting old job descriptions on outdated job boards. Poor marketing tactics combined with biased job descriptions present a twofold problem for your recruiting prospects. By both improving when and where you do job marketing and how you word job descriptions, you can create bias-free experiences for job hunters and attract top talent.

With Crosschq Analytics, you can use data to tailor your job descriptions in order to reach the candidates you need. By adding real-time data and analysis, you can ensure that your job description is tailored to attract the greatest number of qualified candidates without inherent bias.

In addition to regularly updating your job descriptions, it is important to reach audiences on a wide range of platforms.  This allows you to choose from top talent that is unaffected by inherent human bias. 

Establish Clear Interview Parameters to Avoid Biased Decision-Making

Once your high-quality candidates are through the initial recruitment process, it is important to find ways to keep unconscious bias from affecting your interview process. This is one of the most difficult places to eliminate bias, as interviews are generally conducted face-to-face, whether in person or virtually. Fortunately, there is technology available to help mitigate potential bias, for a more fair and balanced hiring process. 

Crosschq Analytics allows you to create data-driven benchmarks to evaluate candidate performance during an interview. With clear interview parameters, you can ask the same questions and assess each candidate's suitability for the position with a greater level of objectivity. This reduces the likelihood that unconscious bias will affect your decision-making process. 

Obtain Unbiased Reviews and Recommendations

While reviews and recommendations from prior employers are critical for the hiring process, it can be easy for the hiring process to become biased. Using Crosschq 360 pre-hire surveys to obtain feedback on an employee's prior performance can help recruiters and hiring managers to maintain an unbiased approach throughout the hiring process and allow for fair-chance hiring. 

Crosschq 360 provides unbiased reference checks with quantifiable surveys that allow hiring managers to make informed hiring decisions based on real-time data. 

Reduce Unconscious Bias in Your Recruiting Process With Crosschq

Ensure that your recruitment team is hiring top talent with data analytics and AI technology from Crosschq. Although unconscious bias is an inherently human trait, you can reduce bias with data-driven recruitment processes. Crosschq will help you eliminate unconscious bias through resume screening, skills assessments, data analysis, and tailored recruitment strategies tailored to the needs of your operation. Our Crosschq 360 talent acquisition software, Recruit candidate referral network, and data-driven Analytics will help you establish unbiased recruiting and hiring procedures, so you can be sure that you are attracting the industry's top talent.

To learn more about Crosschq, contact us today to schedule a demo.