HRs can develop an unconscious bias towards a particular group of people because of their culture, background, and ethnicity. An unconscious bias means having an unintentional preference for or prejudice against members of a specific racial, gender, or social group that affects behaviour and perceptions towards them.
Psychologically speaking, we all form biases, sometimes unintentionally, because we hear people close to us stereotyping individuals, and that can unconsciously form a bias towards people.
This kind of thinking is bad as it can enforce false stereotypes and cause us to judge people inaccurately. In the recruitment process, you can miss out on great talent because of these unconscious biases. HRs must avoid it.
There are many benefits to having a diverse cultural workspace, and companies should always make their environment pleasant and uncomfortable for all their employees. However, there are some strategies you could use to have unbiased recruitment. uKnowva HRMS supports many strategies listed below for organisations and HR teams to automate their bulk hiring process.
6 ways to avoid unconscious biases in recruitment
Embrace imperfection in candidates
Sometimes people have prejudices because they are not aware of a certain culture because they haven’t had many interactions with different people. So we must recognise that unconscious prejudice exists, but it is essential for us to eliminate it.
Each person has a distinct type of prejudice to some degree. Therefore, it is important to empower your employees and management to be self-aware enough of their prejudices because there is no instant fix that will eliminate all bias other than building awareness and educating them about being inclusive to all types of diversity.
Embrace your imperfection while striving for improvement. This will help you bring value and respect to recruits from different cultural backgrounds.
Hire based on competency
The best way to ensure that you avoid unconscious bias is to make sure you stick with competent individuals for the job. Sometimes we can get carried away by our assumptions about people.
To avoid this, ensure your recruitment strategies establish a hiring process that emphasises job competencies. Assign competencies so that the knowledge, skills, and talents that interviewers are searching for are unique and distinct.
Have your interviewers gather together and make a list of advantages and disadvantages based on each applicant's skills. Then, either agree or cast a vote to select the best applicant. Again, facilitate the dialogue to focus on competencies rather than unrelated details like a person's gender, race, or culture.
Continue to refine this process of hiring based on skills to retain the top talent in the firm. Your HR recruitment process will be beneficial to the company when you hire the right people. It must be based on their skill set because that’s what matters the most in this decade and beyond.
Make a standardised interview process
To ensure diversity and inclusion in recruitment, there are several things you may do. Standardising the interviewing procedure is one approach. Ensure each interview is conducted with the same plan or process for evaluating applicant responses. Giving all candidates an equal chance at success involves training managers on this procedure and mandating that they follow it.
When you welcome more diversity in the recruitment process, there is no shortage of talent. Your company can acquire the right talent from anywhere with the availability of the tech resources like the ESS portal by uKnowva. It makes the employee self-reliant despite their cultural or life-based differences.
Use skill assessment
Skill assessments are a great way to evaluate candidates' abilities. The results of these tests would be evaluated without consideration of any prior biases as you are testing candidates solely on their knowledge and skill set.
uKnowva’s HRMS makes finding the right candidate easy for you. Based on the requirement for the role, uKnowva’s AI will help you choose the right candidates and conduct competency exams to find the perfect candidate for the job.
Blind applications
To fight unconscious biases, companies have started not to show the applicant's name, age, gender, and country of origin from the resume and highlight their education, work experience, and technical skills that make them ideal for the job. This prevents recruiters from forming a bias opinion on a candidate and gives a fair shot to all who have submitted their applications.
Call of unconscious bias
If you notice a colleague forming an unconscious bias while interviewing candidates, you should call them out. Sometimes this behaviour is unconscious and manifests due to a lot of factors. However, calling them out will help you educate them and increase the quality of your hiring process. Employees can raise queries on the helpdesk desks found on the panel set by uKnowva to eliminate bias from the initial steps in recruitment.
Conclusion
Your company could suffer from a lack of diversity and unconscious bias via recruiting, which makes retaining top talent challenging. Give all of your applicants a chance and use these methods listed above. The recruitment process will then be free from bias.
Use smarter uKnowva HRMS for recruiting in bulk and without bias. It helps in real-time applicant tracking, checking their skills and experience over the background. The recruitment process automates at every possible level with uKnowva HRMS.
