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In recent years, the topic of subconscious bias has been thrust into the spotlight, forcing us to reevaluate ourselves and how we look at others. One area that subconscious bias is extremely prominent in is the hiring process. Even though you may not realize it, your internal biases can have a huge impact on who you hire, potentially causing you to overlook some great potential hires and can even lead to discrimination cases being formed against your company.
For this reason, it is extremely important to understand and eliminate your subconscious bias. Although the process isn’t easy, there are some steps you can take to eliminate your bias.
Here’s how to eliminate subconscious bias from your hiring process.
Understand Implicit Bias
Before you can eliminate subconscious and implicit bias, you need to understand it. In order to do this, you need to do some personal and professional self-reflection. What are your own personal biases, and how can that affect the hiring process?Additionally, what are some biases that may exist within the company, and do these biases create challenges for certain candidates? Hosting company training sessions and seminars on the topic are a great way to get employees to start thinking about these questions. Before you can start to deconstruct your implicit biases, you need to be able to identify them first.
Standardize Interviews
A common mistake that hiring managers make is having unstructured interviews, something that can lead to unconscious bias.When different candidates receive different types of interviews, it can be difficult to judge them fairly. Your unconscious bias and preconceived notions about people can cause you to conduct the interview differently, potentially leading to an advantage or disadvantage for a candidate. However, if the interview process is standardized in the same format for every single candidate, there is much less room for unconscious bias to influence your decision.
Work Tests
Utilize blind work tests and skill challenges to decrease the amount of unconscious bias in your hiring process. Work tests and skill challenges can be given out to test a potential candidate’s fit for the job, seeing if they have the necessary skills.However, when these tests are submitted with applications and resumes, unconscious bias may still creep its way in. That’s why it’s important to have these tests graded and analyzed blindly, with no names attached. Doing this allows you to pick out what candidates did the best work, without you being influenced by your unconscious bias.
Analyze Different Viewpoints
One of the best ways to eliminate subconscious bias in the hiring process is to analyze different viewpoints and opinions from various people within your company. Instead of having one person handle the hiring process, establish a committee that is filled with employees from different backgrounds. Individually these committee members have different life experiences and opinions, which might lead them to have different opinions on different candidates.Although individually each member of the committee may have their own biases, the collective opinion can eliminate that bias when all viewpoints are taken into account. Just make sure that if you do decide to build a hiring committee you create one that is sufficiently diverse so that different viewpoints and opinions can flourish.
