Furthermore, 21% of employees who participated in the same Glassdoor survey have reported that they are uncertain whether their company is active in diversifying the workforce. Where you advertise and the content of your ads, how you talk about diversity, and the opportunities you offer for progression will all affect whether you attract a diverse pool of candidates in the first place. We also needed to have buy-in from all of our employees before we began blind hiring.. As a result, the interview loses objectivity, which can lead to every candidate being interviewed differently. One in five women experiences gender discrimination in recruitment. Judging from the increased levels of diversity theyve achieved since implementing the assessments, the new process seems to have reduced unconscious bias, Augustine says. But were filling roles quickly, and using GapJumpers has helped us cut down on how much time our recruiters put into the hiring process, since theyre not sifting through resumes. Hawley and her team plan to introduce blind hiring practices for other positions. Were taking small steps. One of the earliest blind recruitment trials was this oneorchestras ran blind auditions and found the probability a woman will be advanced out of certain preliminary rounds is increased by 50%, as well as enhancing by severalfold the likelihood a female contestant will be the winner in the final round when using blind screening. Modern recruitment software will anonymize the contents of the application form as well as the resume. As part of a study, researchers sent out almost 13,000 fake CVs to over 3,000 job postings. Please log in as a SHRM member.

This is a hiring method that anonymizes candidates demographics to eliminate bias from the hiring process. Blind recruiting eliminates the option of being hired through a referral. One of the biggest advantages of blind recruiting is that it could eliminate gender discrimination from the hiring process. To achieve that, hiring managers omit certain information from resumes, such as age, gender, and ethnicity. For example, whites and Asians pursue careers in computer science a lot more often than Blacks and Hispanics, which naturally leads to more whites and Asians being hired in the industry. This led to a tremendous shift in the way the whole industry brought on talent, with blind auditions becoming the norm. Once candidates arrive for interview, conscious and unconscious bias can still creep in. As an organization, we want to bring in a diverse group of job candidates, she says. People Management.

Cockroach Labs and FCB Worldwide both have workshops on unconscious bias for employees. According to PwC research, one in five women are discriminated against in recruitment, compared to 5% of men who experience discrimination when job hunting. The number of CEOs focused on talent diversity and inclusiveness was at 87% in 2017, which is a significant improvement from 2015 when it was only 64%. A GapJumpers plug-in syncs with the employers ATS so people who apply to jobs on the clients website are redirected to GapJumpers to take the assessment. Moreover, a 2014 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that managers of both sexes were twice as likely to hire a man as a woman. $(document).ready(function () { However, if your company is looking to create a more diverse team, its an excellent way to start your campaign. 3BL Association, 14.

Industries that use the most gendered wording are business, science and engineering, technology, and finance and insurance. 2022 GoRemotely.. All rights This allows candidates to retain anonymity, which prevents hiring managers from hiring candidates who are similar to them or rejecting candidates based on (un)conscious bias. Weve clarified our evaluation criteria. We decided to ask job applicants to not include their name, address, college name, or graduation date on their resume, she says. Engage your new hires from the moment they say yes. Even if you, as the employer, dont perceive them to be less-skilled, you might be deciding theyre less suitable unconsciously based on your preconceived notions of different schools. If your business already has an initiative that focuses on recruiting underrepresented genders and ethnicities in the industry, blind recruiting may interfere with the program.

three times more likely to be passed over for jobs. Furthermore, employees hired through a referral stay for three years or more. White men account for 72 percent of corporate leadership jobs in the U.S., a 2017 analysis of 16 Fortune 500 companies found.

Its Isolated, Some Say, New Google Tool Helps Job Seekers Prepare for Interviews, Beware of Inadvertently Hiring IT Workers from North Korea. Of course, it isnt the right solution for every organizationand the jury is still out on whether the practice actually prevents discrimination in the long runbut this unique form of talent selection may be worth considering if you work in an industry dominated by a single demographic. Although the concept of blind hiring isnt newit dates back to at least the 1970sthe strategy of hiding certain candidate information until the late stages of the recruiting process has become more popular in recent years, thanks to new tech tools and an increasing awareness of the importance of building diverse workforces. Weve only been doing this for about a year, so we dont have a ton of data yet. Organically, we needed to have a conversation about the topic, Grenawalt says. Approximately 70% of job listings across all industries contain masculine words. According to a blind recruitment study conducted by SomeoneWho, a digital recruitment platform, only 32% of HR managers felt confident that prejudice didnt affect their decision when hiring new staff. If you plan to use it as a hiring method for your business, make sure you are mindful of its limitations. Illustration by Ryan Inzana for HR Magazine. Instead, hiring managers focus entirely on the candidates experience, qualifications, and expertise. According to a study published in the Harvard Business Review, the majority of professionals rely on the mental synthesis of information or intuition when processing applications. There will be no manual work, and you can ensure that nobody (not even your recruitment team) will get to see the unredacted version of the resume until an interviews scheduled! This can include information like their: Blind recruitment helps hiring teams to assess applicants exclusively on their suitability for the position and reduces the risk of conscious and unconscious bias. var currentLocation = getCookie("SHRM_Core_CurrentUser_LocationID");

Whats in a Name or Addressor Graduation Year? Apply for the SHRM-CP or SHRM-SCP exam today! [SHRM members-only toolkit:Introduction to the Discipline of Human Resources Technology]. We will also outline the pros and cons of the process and help you figure out whether your business should adopt blind recruiting as a regular practice. I sat down with our founder, and we decided we wanted to build an inclusive environment for women. Since the company rolled out its blind hiring initiative 16 months ago, the number of female employees has increased by 50 percent, with women now making up 30 percent of the total workforce and 30 percent of the management team. Grenawalts goal in setting up the process was to recruit more women. Instead of entirely relying on blind recruiting, find a middle ground that suits your organization the best and implement a system thatll help you build a diverse workforce and an excellent company culture. As you can see, blind recruiting has numerous benefits. Surprisingly, workers aged 64-66 received 35% more interview invitations than those aged 29-31. Employers who adopted various diversity practices reported that they increased the level of external female leadership opportunities by 24%. Organizations run into trouble when they assume blind hiring will be a fix-all for their diversity problems. The second advantage is the uniformity of the assessment process. Non-white-sounding names are less likely to get invited for an interview. Please log in as a SHRM member before saving bookmarks.

We know diversity leads to creativity and innovation, which is why I love blind hiring. Hiring managers are often time-poor, have hundreds of candidates to sift through, and have to make a lot of choices about who to progress to the next stage in a very short period of time.

They also wouldnt be able to judge candidates communication skills or body language, for example, which can prolong the hiring process. If used correctly, this technique can be highly beneficial for your business, and implementing it into your hiring process is relatively easy. And theres good reason for that. To grow, evolve and inspire we must engage in continuous learning. Diversity and company culture are directly connected to a companys reputation, and companies that use blind hiring and have a positive reputation can easily hire and retain talent. (A Sharpie works fine.). When I joined the company, we had very little gender diversity, she says.

Blind or anonymous recruitment is the process of removing the candidates name and any other identifying factors from resumes, applications, and assessments during the recruitment process. Tech Hiring Slowing Down? Furthermore, resumes with male names are 40% more likely to get an interview than similar resumes with the same qualifications but with female names. Some take it a step further, removing information like names of schools and previous employers. Removing the race of an applicant means that no bias can be applied to the candidate during this part of the recruitment process. By saving her hiring managers time in the recruitment process overall, she was able to get buy-in for blind hiring. Its not unusual to get pushback from some hiring managers.

These high-tech approaches are intriguing but may not be feasible for smaller organizations that dont have the resources or infrastructure to make them work. Unconscious bias, which occurs when individuals make judgments about job candidates based on gender, race or other prohibited factors without even realizing theyre doing it, fuels the problem. In the 2000s, tech startups emerged to make it easier for HR teams to integrate blind hiring practices. Stripping identifying information from resumes may reduce bias in recruitingand you dont need expensive software to do it. Studies show that the relationship between diversity on executive teams and the likelihood of financial outperformance has strengthened over time. The resumes had similar qualifications, but the fictional applicants aged 49-51 received fewer responses than workers aged 29-31. This makes it easy to identify which candidate people are talking about when reviewing applications as a team. Anonymous recruiting CANT eliminate bias during interviews, it doesnt ensure your new hires feel welcomed on their first day, and it doesnt ensure they can progress through the organization and be an example for future candidates. Older candidates are less likely than younger ones to be called in for. Hiring managers select which job seekers to bring in for interviews based squarely on performance metrics.

Virtual & San Diego, CA | October 24-26, 2022. The simplest way to do it is to assign an employee who isnt a part of the hiring team and task them with removing certain information from candidates resumes. Use dedicated blind recruitment software (this is ideal if youre using a legacy applicant tracking system that doesnt have a blind hiring feature). There are pros and cons to blind hiring and theres a big difference between how youd approach the goal of reducing bias in the pre-interview screening process (hint: blind hiring can help here) vs ensuring your run fairer interviews (hint: you should be looking at scorecards rather than blind hiring if this is your biggest problem). Research shows that diverse companies are better at recruiting top talent, retaining employees and registering economic results. By presenting every application and resume in a standard format, its easy to compare candidates side-by-side. We began by numbering candidates instead of giving them names, and found that lower-numbered candidates would be invited to interview disproportionately more often than higher-numbered candidates. Recruiters are often swayed by candidates who have previously worked for well-known companies or attended reputable colleges. The home address of a candidate can reveal information about their socio-economic background that could cause unconscious bias. After all tests are scored and interviews are arranged, the company releases the identities of the candidates to the hiring managers. According to a study by OECD, one in five boys considers a STEM career as opposed to one in 20 girls, despite having similar performances when tested. Organizations should also yield better results, considering that every applicant is hired solely based on their qualifications. 50% more women got through to the final selection stages when using blind screening. As an HR department of one, Katherine McNamee, SHRM-CP, knew she didnt have the resources or technology to implement a sophisticated blind recruiting platform that would strip identifying informationsuch as a candidates name and college graduation datefrom resumes. If you want buy-in, you need to monitor how blind recruiting impacts diversity performance. A candidates name is also a clear indicator of gender, which in some cases can play a part in bias, and the removal of a name minimizes the chance of gender-based discrimination.

There are several ways to do it, and the main goal behind each is to eliminate all the personal and unnecessary information from applicants resumes. These vendors build their technology to integrate with existing applicant tracking systems (ATSs), which generally arent set up to strip out candidates identifying information. Theres always that little bit of uncertainty with a new process, but everyone has adopted Pinpoint really well. DONT use numbers. Neither members nor non-members may reproduce such samples in any other way (e.g., to republish in a book or use for a commercial purpose) without SHRMs permission. But progress on diversity is slow. This defeats the whole point of anonymous hiring. By removing a candidates identity from the equation, hiring managers can focus on hiring candidates based on their qualifications instead of relying on intuition or emotion, thus preventing unconscious biases from influencing their hiring decisions. The result?

As a result, the ratio of female musicians in the top U.S. orchestras increased from less than 5 percent in 1970 to 25 percent in the 1990s, according to a 1997 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Even though blind recruiting reduces the initial bias, applicants are most likely to be interviewed face-to-face at some point throughout the recruitment process, which exposes candidates to delayed discrimination. Communications is the common thread that runs through every role she's had, and is what she's really passionate about.