Hiring is a challenging task for many managers. One of many issues that can play into the recruitment process is hiring biases. These, often unconscious, biases can result in hiring teams eliminating employees from contention based on characteristics such as their gender, age, or race.

Luckily, there are numerous ways that those involved in hiring can unearth these biases and resolve them to ultimately reduce bias in the hiring process. By reducing recruitment bias, you’ll also benefit from a more diverse team, which has been proven to improve company performance.

To discover exactly how to avoid bias in hiring, keep reading!

What is Hiring Bias?

Hiring bias relates to making hiring decisions and giving preferential treatment to certain candidates based on things other than candidate experience. This can include favoring candidates of a particular gender, age group, or ethnicity.

These biases are predominantly undetected, with the hiring team not consciously knowing that their decisions are biased. This type of undetected bias is known as unconscious or implicit bias. Having these biases affect hiring decisions can lead to a homogenized workplace, with a lack of diversity.

Two people in suits shaking hands, with one also holding a resume — There are many ways to discover unconscious bias and remove it from your hiring practices.

Types of Hiring Bias

Some common hiring biases that people will be aware of include:

Gender bias
Age or generational bias
Race and ethnicity Bias
Religious bias
Sexual orientation bias

A few less well-known types of hiring bias that could occur include:

Name bias: A tendency to prefer and even judge people based on their name. Some studies have even shown that having very common names or easy-to-pronounce names can increase your chance of being hired.
Beauty bias: This bias relates to preferring the most attractive candidates. Beauty bias is often on show when the candidate and the person hiring are of different genders.

While generally more attractive people are more likely to be hired due to this bias, it occasionally works the other way. If a hiring manager is threatened by a candidate’s attractiveness, they may not offer them the job.
Confirmation bias: If you favor one candidate at the start of the process, for whatever reason, confirmation bias could affect the rest of the process, with you unfairly favoring that one candidate over others.

Confirmation bias tends to show itself in interviews. You may ask your favored candidates questions that play up their strengths and make them look good instead of asking challenging questions that truly show who the candidate is.
Similar-to-me bias: This unconscious bias is one of the most common. As the name suggests, it refers to choosing candidates that are like you. That could include candidates of the same gender or race as you or from the same generational group, or even the same socio-economic background, among other characteristics.

Similar-to-me bias is notably one of the biases attributed to women being turned down more frequently than men for senior positions.

Two women at a table discussing something in a business setting — Confirmation bias involves asking your preferred candidate interview questions that play to their strengths.

How Do You Reduce Bias in the Hiring Process?

Now that you understand what hiring bias is, you may be wondering: “What is the Best Way to Reduce Bias?” There are a variety of ways to eliminate biased hiring practices from your recruitment process, including by setting diversity goals, having a diverse hiring team, and having employees take tests to uncover their unconscious biases.

The following are ten ways to reduce implicit bias in hiring.

1. Discuss Biases

If you notice that you’re lacking in certain types of employees, discuss why as a team. For example, if you’re a predominately, or all-female team, discuss why that is and what it is about male employees that potentially makes them not the right fit for the company.

A majority of the time, employees and employers don’t even notice that certain groups are missing until it’s brought up. By simply discussing which groups are underrepresented, you can recognize diversity gaps and begin work to eliminate those gaps through more diverse hiring practices.

2. Set Diversity Goals

After determining which groups are underrepresented, work on increasing hires from underrepresented groups. Setting diversity goals can help with this.

As with any other business goal, diversity goals must be specific, measurable, attainable, and have a time limit attached to them. Diversity goals don’t only have to relate to hiring targets. These goals can also concern improving awareness of implicit bias and promoting diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

3. Run Hiring Bias Education Sessions

Determining which groups are underrepresented can be taken further by holding informational seminars on how to reduce bias in the hiring process. These sessions cover the topic in more depth and offer ways for those involved in hiring to check and lessen their biases.

4. Take a Hiring Bias Test

Simply analyzing your team and the employees you’ve personally hired is not necessarily enough to uncover all of your biases. Luckily, Harvard created a resource over two decades ago that highlights each unconscious recruitment bias you possess.

Project Implicit asks you a variety of questions and then showcases biases that are present. By understanding all of your biases, you have a better chance of successfully removing them from your decision-making process.

A man wearing glasses sitting at a desk using a laptop — Taking a hiring bias test is a great way to uncover unintentional biases.

5. Include as Many Team Members in the Hiring Process as Possible

While certain biases could exist across the whole team at a company, they’re more likely to be specific to individuals. This is why including multiple parties in every step of the hiring process is important.

Many companies have one hiring or HR “gatekeeper” who assesses all applications alone and even conducts first interviews before passing on their top picks for additional interviews that generally involve more team members. This practice can result in those candidates in final interviews being the result of bias, meaning a great candidate could have been passed on simply because the sole hiring manager had an unconscious bias in hiring.

Even if you only have one hiring manager or HR rep, always include the department the new employee will be entering in the process. Allow those that will be working closely with the new recruit to see all applications and select their top candidates. You can then discuss everyone's picks together and decide which of those should move on in the process.

6. Develop a Diverse Hiring Team

As just discussed, one way to reduce bias in the hiring process is to include multiple people. However, if these individuals are similar and possess similar biases, that tactic won’t have much of an effect on increasing the diversity of successful candidates.

Due to this, ensure that those in the hiring process represent different backgrounds, assuming you currently have a diverse enough team to do so! This includes having both men and women in the hiring process, plus those of different ethnicities and age groups.

7. Create a Diverse Management Team

Creating a diverse organization starts from the top down. As just discussed, having a diverse hiring team can help eliminate bias in hiring. But, you can’t have a diverse hiring team if your team as a whole, especially management, is homogenized.

Management will be the most involved in making decisions, including hiring decisions. If you have the goal of increasing team diversity going forward, start by hiring managers from underrepresented groups. These hiring decisions in management should then have a trickle-down effect on all other roles in the company as biases will get balanced out.

Three businesspeople meeting another person for an interview — Having a recruiting team made up of multiple employees should help reduce bias in the hiring process.

8. Use AI in the Hiring Process

One of the most effective methods for eliminating bias in hiring decisions is using software that has no biases, like AI-led applications. While real people will have to jump into the hiring process at some point, AI is a great tool for streamlining recruitment and reducing bias.

AI, such as applicant tracking software (ATS) that sends you only the top job applications to review, runs on the information you input. However, this is generally related to hard and soft skills a candidate must have. Therefore, this software simply chooses those that best match what you’re looking for. It shouldn’t discriminate based on characteristics like gender or race.

Once you begin interviews, you must then attempt to hire without unconscious biases getting in the way.

9. Hire “Blind”

Another great way to reduce bias in the hiring process is by hiring “blind.” This practice involves removing non-essential information that could result in bias from applications. Fields to remove include applicant names, school names, plus start and graduation dates, and ages/DOBs, if included. Again, you can use AI and software that does this for you. If a candidate has included a picture on their resume, that should also be removed.

To avoid age biases, you may also consider removing dates that jobs were held. For example, if someone held a job in 2010 while another applicant has jobs starting in 2020, you can get an idea of approximately how old each candidate is. However, knowing how long employees remained in certain positions can be pertinent to the hiring process.

While you will have to meet the candidates at the interview stage (whether over the phone, on a video-call, or in-person,) and will then discover their name, approximate age, gender, and race, biases will have been removed from the first part of the process. This process makes it more likely that the final hiring decision will be made without bias.

10. Use an Interview Script

Asking all interviewees the same questions in the same order can help limit bias and allow you to collect the same answers and information from everyone. While it may be necessary to ask questions on the fly based on candidate responses, never drift too far from the script. Ensure all questions get asked in the correct order, even if you ask a few “off-script” questions too.

As a result, you’ll have answers from every candidate to your most important questions and queries. You can compare these answers to ultimately make a final decision based on candidate experience and other factual information, not based on their personal characteristics which play little to no role in being successful in the position.

In Summary

When implemented, these top tips to reduce bias in the hiring process should help your hiring team unearth unconscious biases and remedy them to make recruitment decisions without bias. In doing this, you’ll benefit from a more diverse workforce that will ultimately lead to a more successful company!

If interested in discussing more ways to optimize your recruitment efforts, get in touch with the team at Lynne Palmer. We have over 60 years of experience helping publishing and medical communications clients find top talent.

10 Ways to Reduce Bias in the Hiring Process