How to Mitigate Bias In Hiring

We all have unconscious biases that we feel about people and while this is not necessarily a bad thing — and can be crucial in helping us to identify those who may be a threat to us from a strictly evolutionary standpoint — when it comes to the recruitment and hiring process, these biases can hurt your organization. All people have their own implicit bias about individuals and unfortunately, many recruiting strategies do very little to mitigate these biases and instead perpetuate them. Because of this, many businesses find themselves in very undiverse working environments.

But how can you lessen the effects of implicit bias in the workplace? Simple. You opt for a hiring strategy that mitigates bias. There are a number of implicit bias examples that show how a workplace can become extremely similar and homogeneous. You can find these types of examples in pretty much any recruitment strategy that relies on interviewers directly interviewing or being able to visually assess candidates during the interview process. Anytime an interviewer is able to directly see the candidate their decisions become automatically informed by the unconscious biases that they may not even know that they have. This is simply a natural part of being human and there is no way to “turn off” the unconscious biases that we may associate with a certain person. However, it is crucial to recognize that this method of interviewing and basing hiring decisions is incredibly outdated today, and hiring an employee simply because of a “gut feeling” is not the most effective way to get a great team.

So, how can you know how to promote diversity and inclusion in the workplace in a successful way? Using an interviewing system, like Qualifi’s on-demand phone interviews, can be just what you need to do this. Unlike traditional methods of interviewing, Qualifi helps you to record and structure automated phone interviews that give each and every candidate the same exact interview experience as well as mitigating biases by recording and transcribing candidate responses to the interview questions. Qualifi’s platform will then easily highlight the most qualified candidates — without preference or penalty for their names, appearances, or any other factors — for your recruiting team to focus on.

How To Mitigate Unconscious Bias

There are a number of solutions today that businesses can use to mitigate the unconscious biases that may be negatively impacting their company diversity as well as reducing the amount of qualified talent coming in. Each method for how to avoid unconscious bias may be different and it can be difficult to determine the most reliable and effective strategy to reduce bias because of all of the options available to you. This being said, simply doing a search for how to overcome unconscious bias in the workplace can be a great place to start if you are looking for solutions that can help you limit the amount of effect that bias can have on your hiring process.

One strategy that can help you understand how to avoid unconscious bias in the workplace is to utilize on-demand phone interviews that allow candidates to have an equal and fair opportunity for any open positions with interviews that are consistent and standardized. These types of interviews also help to make the interview reviewing process simpler and more straightforward by allowing recruiters to easily view candidate responses back-to-back.

Mitigating Bias in Interviews

There is a tremendous amount of unconscious bias in hiring decisions in businesses of all sizes and industries. This bias in recruitment and selection can lead to non-diverse workplaces and missing out on valuable talent due to biases. In order to mitigate bias in hiring, many businesses are having to change how they conduct their interviews as well as how they review their candidates. If you are looking for unconscious bias in recruitment examples or statistics, you can do a web search and you will likely come up with a few options. There are numerous “bias in hiring” statistics that can show the negative effects of allowing biases to run hiring decisions and because of this many businesses are wondering how to eliminate bias in interviews.

Luckily, there are a number of ways that businesses can approach this issue and there are many technologies today that can help your business to figure out exactly how to remove unconscious bias from your hiring process. One of the most effective ways to remove unconscious bias in interviewing or hiring is to utilize on-demand phone interviews. These types of interviews can help you to more easily create a consistent and structured interview that your candidates can take whenever suits them. This also helps to mitigate bias by not allowing you to see the candidate and therefore your recruiters are basing their assessments of your candidates on their qualifications rather than gut feelings.

Algorithm Bias

While technology certainly has come a long way over the past few years, it is definitely not perfect. Especially when it comes to algorithmic bias in AI. You may be wondering what is algorithmic bias in AI and why it is important. One of the most important things that a business can do to lessen the effects of bias on their hiring process is to ensure that they are dedicating time to detecting racial bias in algorithms and machine learning before implementing those tools. There are a number of bias in algorithms examples that can illustrate the problems with biases that technology and artificial intelligence can have, but there are also tools that use machine learning that take the efficiency of AI without the built in bias — such as Qualifi’s automatic transcription and keyword-combing strategy.

Virtual Interviews

There are many different strategies and tools on the market today for the recruitment process and some can be more effective than others when it comes to mitigating bias in the interview process. Some of the most popular interviewing technologies today include video interviews and phone interviews. Both of these interviewing options can be offered either synchronously or asynchronously. If you are looking to create a more effective and efficient interview system that promotes talent over biases, opting for an asynchronous interview system can be a good idea. This is because an asynchronous interview, or on-demand interview, allows you to record candidate responses and listen to or view them back-to-back like a playlist. This allows you to easily compare candidate responses and easily highlight the most qualified candidates more quickly.

When it comes to bias mitigation strategies, opting for an on-demand or virtual interview that is done over the phone can be a better solution than one that is done with video. This is because the interviewer is unable to see the candidate when they are giving answers over the phone and is therefore unable to base their decisions on biases about the candidate’s appearance, surroundings, or anything like that. Another reason for this is that many video software solutions have been shown to use algorithmic biases or otherwise perpetuate these biases rather than mitigate them. Now, you may be wondering “what is algorithmic bias in AI?” To put it simply, this bias is what certain software systems — such as visual recognition software — fail to properly distinguish people. For example, with many facial recognition software options, there is a much higher margin for error when it comes to identifying women of color than it does light-skinned males. On-demand phone interview software, on the other hand, does not have these problems because you are able to simply focus on assessing the skills and qualifications of your candidates, rather than their appearances.