In a perfect world, people would get hired based strictly on their work experience and the skills they bring to the table. However, that’s unfortunately not the reality. The biases recruiters and hiring managers have can cause decisions to be made based on other factors unrelated to role fit.
Blind recruitment is the process of removing any and all identification details from your candidates’ resumes and applications. It helps you and your hiring team evaluate people on their skills and experience instead of factors that can lead to biased decisions. Here are some common identification details that are blacked out when doing blind recruitment because they can cause unfair hiring practices:
You might think you and your colleagues are open minded and would never disqualify a candidate for anything but a lack of skills or experience. However, even the most accepting people can be influenced by thoughts and feelings they’re not aware they have.
“Unconscious bias” is a widely-accepted idea that a person’s life experiences influence their thinking without them realizing it. All the things we hear, see and sense throughout our lives, whether we consciously remember them or not, impact how we approach different situations. Malcolm Gladwell explores this idea in his book Blink, making the case that our minds move so fast and have so much information stored, we’re not observant of every little thing that influences our thinking and decision making.
Long story short, when you sit down to review resumes and applications, you’re making assumptions and forming biases, whether you know it or not.
At this point, you’re probably wondering how you can put blind recruitment into action in your company. You’re hiring solution and processes are meant to capture as much information about your candidates as possible so you can make informed hiring decisions.
A simple way to create a blind recruitment practice is to assign a team member who isn’t involved in hiring to anonymize every candidate’s information. Create a template that allows them to plug in each person’s work experience, skills, degree and other pertinent information you’ve defined in the candidate profile. Don’t worry about soft skills yet. You can evaluate your candidates for those when it comes time to interview them.
Then have the person in charge of this process assign each candidate a number. When the process is complete, you’ll be able to see that candidate #3 spent five years working for X company, has Y skill and earned a degree in Z. You can use this information to decide who moves onto the interview stage based on the factors that really matter.
Blind recruitment does come with some downsides. Here are few things to consider before implementing the process in your company:
Discrimination and inequality continue to live on in the workforce. While blind recruitment has its disadvantages, it’s an effective way to overcome the biases hiring team members can have.
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