Recruiting is a task that can have many goals. Your company may aim to achieve the quickest turnaround, attract the highest-quality hires, and foster job satisfaction and retention through robust onboarding programs and work-life balance-focused policies. To focus your goals, you may also consider how bias affects your recruiting efforts and how best to reduce it.
What Is Hiring Bias?
When certain personal facts about a potential candidate help or hinder them from receiving a job offer, that’s bias. Outright bias that discriminates against applicants because of disability, age, race, gender, or religion is prohibited by federal Equal Opportunity Employment laws, but unconscious bias can influence hiring, too.
To help understand how this may be affecting hiring decisions, examine some of the types of unconscious bias:
Halo Effect
This refers to the holistic judgment of a person based on a single positive characteristic, such as assuming that an attractive person is also competent, friendly, and collaborative.
Horn Effect
The inverse of the halo effect, this type of bias prompts holistic judgment based on an unappealing characteristic. Both the halo and the horn effect put the candidate at a disadvantage as they are held accountable for inaccurate perceptions.
Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias affects humans inside and outside the interview room. It describes seeking information that confirms what you already believe and filtering out information that doesn’t affirm those beliefs. In hiring, this could manifest in interviewing a man and a woman for a supervisory role. If an interviewer believes men are better managers than women, they would look for things in the interview to discount the woman candidate.
Affinity Hiring Bias
This describes a natural compulsion to hire those most like themselves. It may seem like you’re hiring someone who you perceive will best fit the culture, but different backgrounds, interests, and life experiences make up a rich workforce and can help you confront affinity bias.
Stereotype Bias
Stereotype bias occurs when you judge someone based on what you perceive as a characteristic common to their group, often applied to certain genders, races, or age groups. These are dangerous biases because they stop you from fairly assessing someone’s actual personality and qualifications in favor of an unfair and harmful perception.
Nonverbal Hiring Bias
This type of bias places heavy emphasis on certain nonverbal actions by a candidate. For example, judging someone’s hirability based on the strength of their handshake or the frequency of a smile. Communication involves both verbal and nonverbal cues, so some people may interpret and prioritize nonverbal ones. But in an interview setting, some otherwise highly competent candidates may find it challenging to pass the unwritten test of nonverbal communication.
How an ATS Helps Reduce Hiring Bias
It’s helpful to understand the nuances of unconscious bias and have a sincere desire to overcome them. An applicant-tracking system (ATS) can be a valuable tool for putting tangible reminders about fairness and bias elimination in front of each member of the hiring team. Here are some benefits:
Structured Workflow
“A workflow is a series of connected steps or tasks that are designed to achieve a specific outcome or goal. It represents the sequence of activities, processes, and tasks involved in completing a particular project or business process.”
Hiring demands this level of precision and order because each step builds on the previous, and you often have more than one person at different points in the queue.
Because hiring teams are often made up of Human Resources and other managers, it can be challenging to coordinate schedules and keep the process moving at an ideal pace. A tool like ApplicantStack keeps each candidate’s status front and center, with a clear visual of what’s been done and what’s pending. Communication within the app ensures that no email or text gets filtered out or languishes in the inbox of someone on vacation.
Standardized Evaluations
Standardized evaluations screen all candidates according to the same criteria, none of which is subjective. When a job requires a set education level, number of years of experience, or other objective criteria, the ATS can filter out candidates who don’t meet those standards. This is where standardized evaluations are strong. Once you have collected a pool of potential candidates, focusing too much on standardization can reduce people to a series of facts and figures, and doesn’t allow you to assess the many soft skills that make up a quality hire.
Still, the ATS can help you quantify and categorize valuable soft skills as described in resumes, and you can choose to interview those who best fit a set of important criteria beyond the first evaluation.
Documentation
Hiring can be an overwhelming task, particularly if your company has multiple open positions, multiple locations, or a hiring surge. The ATS’s ability to document and track every step of the process means candidates can feel assured they are all treated fairly and equally. Mistakes can happen in human processes, but in the event of an accusation, your company can produce a data trail demonstrating the consistency of your hiring process.
Overcoming unconscious bias is vital for equitable and fair hiring practices. Modern job seekers examine the reputations of companies before considering an application. ApplicantStack is a valuable tool in reducing hiring bias.
Job descriptions are often the first introduction someone has to your company, and they have the potential to set a lasting impression. When hiring feels urgent, it may feel easy to just press send on a hastily-assembled or recycled job description. But consider some of the ways you can make improvements that will draw in the best talent for the role.
Focus on Clarity
Clarity describes the ability to convey your point using specific, precise, and engaging language. Achieving clarity almost always takes a few editing passes to cut unnecessary words, rephrase clunky sentences, and ensure your meaning is clear.
When writing job descriptions, there are a few ways to achieve clarity:
Avoid clichés. Job descriptions across industries are often filled with buzzy words that no longer have meaning. Rockstar. Team-player. Self-starter. Competitive salary. Set your job descriptions apart by avoiding them altogether.
Include essential information. This can include compensation, benefits, work location, work type (in-person, remote, or hybrid), and reporting structures.
Describe specific responsibilities. Use specific, descriptive words for job responsibilities rather than generic language. For example: “Responsible for keeping manager’s daily schedule, including email follow-ups and recording meeting minutes” instead of “Assists manager.”
Define any company-specific terms. Different companies may use the same words to describe different roles; for example, your company’s program manager may have direct reports, whereas at another company, a person in that role works alone. Watch out for jargon that could be ambiguous or confusing.
Be Specific About Qualifications
Qualifications can fall into two categories: “not optional” and “nice to have.” Too often, job descriptions are written as if they all carry the same weight, which may discourage an otherwise talented candidate who thinks they don’t meet your absolute requirements.
While for some jobs a college degree is not optional for both legal and training reasons (e.g. physician, attorney, accountant), for other jobs a college degree may fall into the “nice to have” category to widen the potential pool to include people who have the job experience and soft skills that would make them an ideal candidate. Using it as a hard requirement for certain jobs may draw a line in the sand that narrows your options significantly.
Consider the soft skills that an ideal candidate might have. Browse this comprehensive list from the U.S. Department of Labor and match soft skills to job duties to best describe the candidate you’re seeking.
Use Inclusive Language
Among the reasons to edit past job descriptions before posting is to scrutinize them for unconscious bias. Though many companies’ stated objectives and core values include diversity and inclusion, you may not realize that language in job descriptions can undermine those goals. Biased language can discourage talented people from even applying for open positions if they perceive that you’re looking for a certain type of person.
Stereotypes persist based on age, gender, race, and class, and many people may not realize that certain phrases reinforce those stereotypes. Some examples are obvious; for example, “We don’t need you to be a slave to your work,” which uses a harmful racial reference in a casual idiom, or “Looking for a young go-getter,” which clearly excludes older job seekers.
Others may not feel as obvious; for example, “Work hard, play hard” may imply a company culture where long workdays are followed by the expectation of socializing outside work hours, which excludes parents, people who care for elderly parents, or people who feel uncomfortable in crowded social situations.
Consider that words like “aggressive” or “outspoken” are unconsciously associated with masculinity and may discourage a woman from applying. Words like “college-graduate” or “cultural fit” may discourage minority applicants. Those words can imply racial bias. A phrase like “hit the ground running” can alienate a disabled job applicant.
This kind of language doesn’t overtly violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibiting employment discrimination, but it may turn off potential candidates who feel uneasy with what it implies.
Create a Company Template
The Human Resources department at Northwestern University created a template and guide to use for writing job descriptions. It includes HR’s approach to job descriptions and provides a template that includes fields like “Job Summary” and “Job Description,” a bullet-pointed list of 7 to 9 duties in order of importance.
By establishing a house style guide for job descriptions across all departments of your company, you can both make the task easier to approach and present a unified brand identity to job searchers in a variety of roles. Your company can be known for its clear, concise, and uniform job descriptions. ApplicantStack makes it easy to create templates and share them when roles open up that need to be filled. Explore how the platform simplifies this step in the recruiting process by ensuring that job descriptions are consistent and compliant.
Posting a job description is an act of faith that the right person will see it, recognize themselves in the job duties, and submit their application. To give yourself an edge in attracting the best talent, focus on clarity, specificity, and inclusivity in your job descriptions.
Within the ebbs and flows of the job market one thing stays consistent: the potential candidate experience matters. Your company’s ability to hire top talent starts with creating a positive experience with clarity, transparency, communication, and speed. Read on to discover how to leverage those characteristics into your hiring process
Understanding Job Offer Acceptance Rates
The overall job market plays a role in offer acceptance rates. A stronger job market influences the rate, since candidates have more offers to consider. But companies have control over some of what affects this metric, which can be calculated by:
Offer-to-acceptance rate = (# of offers accepted/# of offers extended) x 100
So if an organization extended offers to 30 candidates and received 18 acceptances, their acceptance rate (18 / 30 x 100) would be 60 per cent.
You can compare your rates with some recent trends identified in a Talent Trends Report from Ashby:
By industry, OAR rates in 2024:
Business Services: 82%
Health Technology: 80%
Saas and Cloud: 79%
Financial Technology: 77%
Online Marketplaces: 76%
Consumer Apps: 73%
Media & Entertainment: 72%
The small differences indicate that “the role itself, application process, and other factors likely have more weight than the industry the open role is in.” That’s good news for the four characteristics your company can tweak for a good candidate experience.
Clarity
Someone’s first introduction to a job opening at your company is often through the job description. Unfortunately, they can tend to run long and be chock-full of unnecessary information that doesn’t actually explain the vital parts of the job. As the writer of the text, try to put yourself in the shoes of job seekers. They are likely reading dozens, if not hundreds, of job descriptions, and will quickly tire of all-too-common clichés: rockstar, go-getter, team player, self-starter, fast-paced, hard worker, change-maker, results-driven.
If these phrases ever had real meaning, their pervasiveness has stripped them of value. Taking time to write concise, accurate job descriptions with specifics will help you stand out in a sea of words and will show candidates you’re serious about finding the right fit.
Consider a few tips from the experts at The Forbes Research Council:
Write short, compelling copy
Keep it simple and original
Clarify necessary skills from desired skills
Get insight from current employees
Provide clear expectations
Make the description employee-focused
Transparency
Transparency goes hand-in-hand with clarity. A candidate’s first introduction to the job should be easy to understand and feel honest and straightforward. That includes pay transparency. Job postings should have a listed salary or range, and the range should not be so vast that it’s impossible for the candidate to determine what they would be paid. Listing benefits is another way to communicate a commitment to transparency and fairness. It emphasizes that you invite discussions of fair compensation.
Another move towards transparency is for “Hiring managers and interviewers [to] share a copy of their interview questions, or share a list of clear topics and experiences they want to ask about,” says Sisi Wei of The Markup. “The point is to give all candidates an equal chance at doing well—regardless of whether they’re introverts or extroverts, or if they have the right experience or connections to guess what interviewers might ask.”
Communication
The first contact after receiving an application or résumé can set the tone for all further communication. Candidates want to know someone on the other end received their information and that it didn’t just get sent into an inbox void with no indication of a reply. Even an automated response can go a long way in establishing a line of contact and trust. Bonus points if the response indicates a possible timeline for further communications.
Even if that candidate isn’t the right fit for the open job, a courteous rejection can ensure a positive reputation. Referrals are a vital part of the recruiting toolkit, and you never know the connections of the person on the other end of the computer. It also keeps the relationship cordial for future job openings.
Good communication requires organization, and the best way to keep track of who has received responses and who is still waiting is by using an applicant tracking system. Applicant Stack provides the candidate an option how they would like to receive communications, ensuring they can be available for your timely responses. By sending responses within the ATS, each member of the hiring committee can quickly scan for finished and pending communication tasks. It eliminates responses getting lost when workers are out of the office or miss an email.
Speed
Candidates who’ve been in the workforce for awhile have seen dramatic changes in the way the hiring process plays out, and may be used to waiting longer for responses to applications and arranging interviews. Gen Z, on the other hand, says Kate Beckman “expect a quick feedback loop from companies, and prefer to be rejected than ‘ghosted’ during the hiring process. Not only does a swift response demonstrate respect for candidates and foster a positive candidate experience, but it also holds the potential to make a significant impact on the company’s ability to stand out and secure the best talent out there.”
Even if the ultimate response is a rejection, candidates prefer to be kept in the loop during all stages of the process, without long gaps between actions. Though each candidate is different, many Gen Z job searchers prefer to communicate via text message. Meeting each candidate at their preferences enhances their experience.
By focusing on four related goals: clarity, transparency, communication, and speed, you can offer a positive candidate hiring experience and find top talent for your company’s open roles. With ApplicantStack, the hiring process can become more streamlined. You can stay connected with candidates throughout the process via email and text-based communication. Automated workflows ensure that everyone stays in the loop and top applicants can receive and accept offers. Try it for free today!
In a perfect world, your hiring process would never experience a bottleneck. But as with anything where humans run the show, disruptions and obstacles are bound to get in the way of your goals. Luckily, there are tools and solutions to help with these common hiring bottlenecks.
Whenever a committee is formed, differences of opinion will follow. Hiring committees are often made up of human resources professionals, managers or colleagues in the department. No matter the size of your group, overcoming challenges is the only way to effectively recruit and hire new workers for your company. Below, we cover four common roadblocks with potential solutions.
Bottleneck #1: Managing Schedules
The members of the hiring committee are busy professionals with responsibilities and deadlines. Though HR is ultimately responsible for the hiring, all members of the team want to contribute to the hiring process. This can be made even more challenging if some or all of your workers are remote, and you add time zones and technology barriers to the equation.
Solution: Establish an in-house priority system for hiring conversations, meetings, and interviews. Unless someone is working with an absolute deadline, find ways to push and adjust so hiring actions take priority. If the team is too large to manage, take a hard look at the process and trim those involved to the essentials.
Bottleneck #2: Miscommunication
Managing the communication between the hiring team and the candidates can be a complicated task. The first line of communication starts with establishing the need for hiring. That department makes it clear what the job responsibilities entail. From there, someone writes a job description and seeks feedback for clarity and accuracy. The next step is posting on job boards and sending information to recruiters. Then the resumes come in, and need screening and responses. Once the pool is narrowed, you need to arrange interviews, job offers, and onboarding and training.
At each step of this process, you run the risk of a group email being missed, members of the team misunderstanding their roles, or someone thinking another person is handling it.
Solution: Use an applicant tracking system to centralize every aspect of the process. The ATS is a clear and visible record of each completed step, helping all members of the team to see the same thing at the same time. It allows for automated responses so applicants don’t feel like they’ve sent their resume into the void. Sending personalized messages within the system also eliminates confusion on the hiring side. The hiring committee can access the job description, where it’s been posted, and the metrics around each step. Using this data, you can analyze their efficiency and make changes where necessary.
Bottleneck #3: Screening Flaws
Screening can be one of the most time-consuming aspects of the hiring process, especially if you’re getting a high volume of not-quite-right candidates. It can feel overwhelming to have to sort through all the resumes and send responses, even if they’re automated.
This can bring out different personalities among the hiring committee:
The slasher who shows no mercy and cuts anyone who doesn’t strike them perfectly right
The ponderer who sits with each resume looking for it to reveal something hidden.
Each extreme can cause a bottleneck, because the slasher means you need more applicants and the ponderer can get stuck.
Solution: For jobs where you expect to receive a lot of applications, consider using tools like AI to sort based on important keywords. And for more specialized jobs where the applicants will likely be similarly qualified, reduce the pondering over the resume and use phone, video call, or in-person interviews earlier to round out the resumes and get a better feel for the individual behind the paper.
Bottleneck #4: Reference Checks
Waiting for responses from references can cause a bottleneck that affects both the hiring team and the potential hire. Short delays can turn into long ones because it’s easy to get distracted while you’re waiting for a response. For the candidate, delays can cause anxiety and possibly encourage them to take another job.
Solution: HR professional Tiffany Servatius suggests “giving references multiple ways to contact you with their response. Inform them that it is okay to email you or leave a voicemail if you are not available. In addition, ask the candidate to follow up with any references you have not heard back from within 24 hours.”
Utilize the Right Tools
The hiring process includes of a lot of people, opinions, schedules, and analysis, and finding the right person for your company can be a challenge. If you find yourself stuck on one of the bottlenecks above, consider how you can use tools and critical decisions to make sure your hiring process goes smoothly. With ApplicantStack, you can streamline some of the challenges that slow down this process. Find, hire, and onboard top talent quickly and efficiently with the right solution in place.
Client management skills can be the difference between a satisfied client and a loyal partner. In our latest post focused on skills-based hiring, we dive into the importance of this particular skillset, as well as it what it looks like. When you’re hiring, make sure to identify candidates with client management skills.
What Are Client Management Skills?
By definition, client management skills include the abilities needed to build trust, apply sound processes, deliver consistent value, and manage expectations in relationships. Building trust and rapport involves respecting others and listening actively, as well as adapting the style of communication as needed. Trust reduces conflict while speeding up the decision-making process, making this aspect of client management critical across all industries.
An experienced client manager also needs to be able to communicate effectively. Translating needs into clear next steps and offering proactive updates keep everyone on the same page. In some cases, difficult conversations may be part of the equation. Knowing how to address tough topics with empathy and clear communication can make a big difference in the success of relationships.
Client management skills also encompass strategic thinking, including looking for patterns and anticipating risks or opportunities. Jumping on those by creating plans that align with business goals is vital to keeping things moving and supporting clients.
The Importance of Client Management Skills
Here’s a real-world scenario: You have a relationship manager who struggles in this area. A small misalignment between that individual and a long-time client creates churn. Others in the industry hear about the issues, causing the situation to escalate. Your business reputation is damaged.
By contrast, when a skilled client manager steps into the role, relationships are repaired. Clients feel valued and heard, and they share this feedback with their colleagues, supporting the success of your organization.
But the need for these skills goes well beyond relationship or client management roles. In fact, you can look for client management skills when filling just about any position within your company. The category of “clients” can expand to include internal stakeholders, cross-functional partners, customers, and even vendors. The ability to manage relationships extends to the success and collaboration of internal teams.
In the workplace, client management skills can translate to:
Fewer escalations: With clearer expectations and less rework needed, the handoffs are better.
Faster collaboration: Strong relationships improve efficiency and coordination
Improved outcomes: Even when facing pressure, skilled individuals can produce better outcomes through clear, empathetic conversations.
More trust: When people feel heard, they work better in team settings.
Hiring for Skills First
All of our skills-first hiring posts have focused on specific abilities and how they can transform the workplace. Traditional hiring often focuses on degrees or experience as a shortcut for competence. But in roles that require flexibility and collaboration, individuals may be taking on new responsibilities and adapting their work to the needs of the organization.
Looking for specific skills when hiring can make a real difference in your success. Recruiting and selecting based on demonstrated capabilities allows jobseekers to showcase their skills. Tools like situational judgement, behavior, and examples provide insights into the level of client management skills held by a person.
Choosing to hire for skills first is also a better prediction of on-the-job performance. It emphasizes what the candidate can actually do and creates a wider, more diverse pool of talent.
Implement ApplicantStack to Simplify Hiring
When hiring, it’s helpful to consider more than just a few aspects of an applicant’s background. Looking at what they bring to the table is a must for recruiting that boosts retention and satisfaction rates. With ApplicantStack, it’s easier to manage the demands of hiring. You can use automated tools to identify top candidates, schedule interviews, and stay in contact through text messaging.
An eye towards retention starts at recruiting: a strong hiring process both finds the right candidates for the work and creates an environment for loyal employees. Consider these three suggestions to hire employees who will stay.
Be Transparent in the Interview Process
Candidates who interview for an open position at your company are most likely searching elsewhere at the same time. Active interviewing can be a juggling act of scheduling and timing for both candidates and hiring managers, especially when the process includes several rounds. This is why interview transparency can set you apart from other companies.
Senior Recruiter Carly Richter is passionate about interview transparency. She says, “I always talk candidates through the hiring process, how many interviews there are, what the timeline looks like, and I ask about their timeline, too. If you’re interviewing elsewhere, let me know! I’ll do my best to align timelines so no one is left with what-ifs.”
She suggests decreasing the stress around interviewing by helping candidates feel like they can be open about upcoming vacations and other offers, and comfortable asking direct questions about pay and benefits, work hours, and any small details about daily tasks that may affect their willingness to come work at your company.
Hire Candidates for Both Hard and Soft Skills
A candidate’s experience is valuable and should be weighed heavily towards their suitability. But time in a position can’t tell the whole story about how they will fit in with the culture. It won’t help you get to know their leadership, teamwork, or communication skills. Soft skills can be hard to evaluate from a resume, but they’re crucial because:
They Affect Team Dynamics. Employees with years of experience and technical savvy can disrupt a team if they are difficult to work with. A less-experienced candidate with excellent interpersonal skills can bring positivity and productivity by boosting the team.
They Influence Customer Relationships. For a customer-facing role, soft skills may be more valuable than experience. Employees who address customer concerns effectively can make or break your relationships with current customers, and, in the age of the internet, how your company is widely perceived.
They Increase Adaptability. In a changing world, the ability to adapt to new technologies, company reorganizations, and market adjustments is a vital skill. Adaptable employees can catch the vision of future growth and focus on how to change and move forward.
They Drive Leadership. Leadership skills are valuable for more than just upper management. Strong leaders see mentorship opportunities, take responsibility for decisions, work proactively, and resolve concerns.
They Reduce Turnover. Employees with high emotional intelligence and resilience react well to the many nuances of work life, learning to work with others, practicing conflict resolution and teambuilding for long-term success and retention.
In advance of hiring, prioritize the most valuable soft skills when screening candidates, so all members of the hiring team know what to look for. Frame interview questions for candidates and references to assess their soft skills. Pre-hiring assessment tools can help search out candidates who match skills such as:
Empathy
Emotional intelligence
Communication
Time management
Resilience
Adaptabilty
Critical thinking
Professionalism
Resourcefulness
Implement a Strong Onboarding Process
The hiring process doesn’t end once an offer has been extended and accepted. “It’s high time employers and recruiters realize the importance of an employee’s first 90 days at a firm,” says Joe Coletta, CEO of 180 Engineering. “I know of multiple instances of employers ghosting their new hires on their first day. These initial months are crucial in terms of training, building trust, and maximizing job satisfaction.”
Retention encompasses the actions taken to reduce employee turnover, and a strong onboarding process shows new employees that they are worth the company’s investment. It demonstrates a desire to make the employee comfortable in their new role, shows you prioritize adequate training, and offers resources for questions or concerns. Even for new hires who appeared eager to dive in, the first 90 days can be tenuous. A robust onboarding experience offers an adjustment period with lower stakes so new employees can find their footing at the pace that’s comfortable to them. They can observe the company culture and figure out how they will contribute.
To aid in retention, effective onboarding strategies can include:
An employee assigned to be an onboarding mentor
Training on company policies, culture, and benefits
Open-door policy with HR for further clarification
Teambuilding or icebreaker introduction events
Introducing new team members on social media or at a company lunch
Adequate job training
Encouraging career goals and aspirations, and following up at a later date to create concrete plans to help in promotion or advancement
The best onboarding strategies foster feelings of trust and a positive impression of the business. They make the employee feel like a valued part of the team and motivate them to contribute long-term.
Before starting the hiring process, consider the ways your team can focus on retention as a long-term goal. Interview transparency, hiring for valuable soft skills, and employing a robust onboarding program can pay dividends for employee retention.
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