Unconscious Bias In Recruitment

Unconscious bias is widespread and can harm recruitment agencies, employers and candidates.

What is unconscious bias?

Why is unconscious bias a problem in recruitment?

Legislation

Why is unconscious bias not good for business?

How can you avoid unconscious bias?

What is unconscious bias?

Research into unconscious bias suggests that stereotyping comes from a predisposition to form relationships with groups similar to ourselves to protect against outsiders.  This predisposition encourages us to unintentionally apply labels to different demographics and use them to make snapshot opinions about individuals or groups.

While this mechanism is no longer necessary, we still use these biases to make sense of the world and quickly process external information. However, it is often inaccurate and causes us to make uninformed decisions.

In recruitment, this suggests that the hiring manager or recruiter will favour a candidate who is more similar to themselves.

Why is unconscious bias a problem in recruitment?

Oakstone has often argued that diversity shouldn’t be a box-ticking exercise and that creating a truly diverse team can have multiple benefits. Data shows that companies with high levels of cultural and gender diversity have a better chance of receiving above-average financial returns than companies that lack diversity.

• 81% of founders say diversity enhances creativity and innovation

• 67% of all founders say that diversity improves problem-solving

• 63% of all founders say that a diverse workforce provides greater access to talent

Many companies claim to have a fair, non-biased hiring process; however, research suggests that all recruiters and hiring managers are susceptible to making decisions based on looks or backgrounds (consciously or unconsciously).

Agency Central recently conducted a poll with its network of recruitment leaders and found that 96% of recruiters think unconscious bias is a problem in the recruitment process. A third of recruiters believe unconscious bias is a big problem. Only 4% think that unconscious bias does not impact the recruitment process.

Research into unconscious bias shows that it may be a bigger problem in recruitment than you may think.

For instance, in 2015, CIPD produced a report on the role of behavioural science in recruitment and found that a whole range of factors can influence how an employer evaluates a candidate. 

Some of the findings included:

• Recruiters are more likely to hire people who are like themselves

• ‘Ethnic’ names get less response than ‘white’ names

• Male interviewees are less successful than female interviewees

• Factors such as time of day or temperature can affect how an interviewer feels about a candidate

• Candidates may get asked different questions to justify biases

However, stereotyping is having a notable impact on recruitment.

Legislation

While unconscious bias may be innocent, it can be seen as discriminatory and against employment laws. This is predominantly centred around the Equality Act 2010, which was introduced to minimise discrimination regarding nine ’protected characteristics’.

These protected characteristics are:

• Age

• Disability

• Gender reassignment

• Marriage & civil partnership

• Pregnancy & maternity

• Race

• Religion & belief

• Sex

• Sexual orientation

Although asking questions about characteristics is against the law, 85% of interviewers have asked illegal questions (with females being more likely to be asked inappropriate questions compared to men).

Why is unconscious bias not good for business?

If recruiters, hiring managers, and business owners choose to move forward with their unconscious bias, their preferences over certain qualities and their talent pools' size and diversity will naturally start to shrink.

This can mean

• You're missing out on skilled, qualified and experienced candidates

• You're risking making the wrong hiring decision because you're hiring based on uninformed choices and opinions.

• As a recruiter, you fail to help clients build a diverse workforce.

How can you avoid unconscious bias?

Unconscious bias naturally occurs in all of us, however there are a few things people can do to avoid it. Try some of the following:

Use gender-neutral language.

Suppose you've chosen to target active candidates rather than an executive search. In that case, you'll likely write a job description and advertise it on a job platform such as LinkedIn or Indeed. Various studies have suggested that particular words and phrases can put off or exclude certain applicants.

Gender-biased language denotes words that are thought to appeal more to either male or female applicants. 

A 2016 study into job ad language by Textio showed that job ads with more masculine phrases (e.g. adventurous) attracted more male applicants – while more feminine phrases (e.g. enthusiastic) attracted more female applicants. 

Opting for neural wording could increase the number of applicants by 42%.

Blind hiring

Luckily for recruiters and hiring managers, CVs don't hold much information when it comes to sexual orientation or disability; however, research suggests that a name can be enough to sway our opinions.

A startling example of this comes from a 2009 study which showed that job applicants with 'white-sounding' names were 74% more likely to receive a positive response than those with 'ethnic-sounding names. 

Blind hiring is an approach that aims to remove unconscious bias by censoring demographic information. This encourages hiring decisions that are not influenced by prejudice and increases shortlist diversity.

Change your panel of interviewers.

Since individuals tend to prefer people similar to themselves, the only way to actively avoid bias in this scenario is to increase the number and type of people involved in your recruitment process.

For example, if only one person is responsible for interviews, the candidate will have to hope that that individual's biases don't negatively impact them. Having a group of people, on the other hand, will mean that biases are likely to be cancelled out, leading to a fairer judging process. 

Applied, a recruitment platform, found that hiring accuracy improves when three people are involved in decision-making. Their study showed that this scenario caused wrong hire rates to fall by 15%. 

Having different people, rather than just an individual, can make applicants feel they are being assessed fairly.