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.
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