Best Practice – Removing Bias From Your Recruitment Process

An important topic and one that many businesses are working hard to get right. 

Covering a whole range of issues from how a job description is written, to personal prejudice of someone’s ability, to the perception of company-wide ethos and work environment considerations, bias at any stage of the recruitment process can negatively impact the choice and calibre of the candidates available to you.

Regardless of company size, industry, or location, when recruiting for a new position you are looking to attract the best possible person for the role so it is important not to inadvertently limit who you are appealing to.

Here at Foundations Executive Search we not only follow these tips on best practice when recruiting for our clients, but also offer specialist training to our client’s in-house recruiters to ensure the company and its hiring policy are at the very forefront of their industry.

Standardisation & consistency

This is one of the most effective ways to reduce the impact of personal bias during the interview process and all it takes is the hiring team agreeing on the skill set and experience required and devise a scoring system to determine which candidate best fits the requirements. 

This may sound obvious but it is all too easy, but it is something that is often overlooked even among larger organisations. 

Having your job description reviewed by a 3^rd party

The writing of the job description is often where unconscious bias can affect which candidates you appeal to from the start. This could be in the use of gender-specific pronouns to age-specific terms or even the description of the work environment and office culture.

By having another member staff or a professional third-party review the job description before it is posted you can quickly gain the insight and perspective of someone outside of the recruitment process. This is something that we do for all vacancies we are given to fill as standard.

Investing in technology

As recruitment technology continues to come on in leaps and bounds, there are a number of great programmes designed to help you illuminate bias throughout the process from highlighting gender bias in a job description to candidate screening to ensure the candidates with the right skills and experience are presented to you in a purely impartial and ranked order.

Some of these can be costly but there are a few very good cost-effective ones out there that we will be talking about in future blogs so keep an eye out!

Decision-makers awareness

Removing personal bias completely can be a hard obstacle especially when intuition and the softer skills play an important part in choosing a candidate who will fit well within the team as well as their purely technical ability, so it is of the utmost importance that the decision-makers and interviewers are aware of any bias that may affect the choice of candidates.

This is where we focus a lot of our training with in-house recruitment teams helping to ensure the recruitment process is as fair as possible and the organisation benefits by gaining the best employee for the role.

For more information on how Foundations Executive Search can help you 

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