Whittling down lists of candidates to find the perfect person for an open role can be a daunting process made even more challenging when issues like unconscious bias creep in, causing recruiters to overlook the best candidates.
However, AI is increasingly being utilized by forward-thinking companies to eliminate bias from the recruitment process, helping leadership to create more diverse working environments.
What Is Unconscious Bias?
Sometimes called implicit bias, unconscious bias is a problem that affects all of us. It refers to associations we hold beyond our conscious control and awareness. Triggered by our brain making snap assessments and judgments, unconscious bias is molded by our personal experiences and background, as well as societal stereotypes and cultural context.
Unconscious bias is about much more than ethnicity and gender—it can extend to a variety of different constructs, including age, physical characteristics, names, educational background, and many more categories. Unconscious bias is incredibly pervasive and surreptitious. Most people would be mortified at the prospect of being construed as biased, yet the reality is that we are a product of our environment, bombarded from birth with billions of social signals and stereotypes.
From overt statements to subliminal messaging and stigma, each of us is molded by our backgrounds, role models, and experiences, all of which color our attitudes and behaviors toward other people.
Unconscious bias can take a variety of different forms, including:
- The Halo Effect
- The Horns Effect
- Affinity Bias
- Age Bias
- Gender Bias
- Appearance Bias
- Confirmation Bias
- Authority Bias
What Are the Advantages of Diversity in the Workforce?
Research suggests that diversity has a multitude of different benefits in the workplace. With a variety of different perspectives, skills, knowledge bases, and opinions, businesses can connect with a far wider demographic, boost problem-solving and decision-making capabilities, and create better opportunities for innovation and creativity.
Moreover, diverse organizations are more appealing to ambitious professionals. One study by Indeed suggested that 55 percent of job seekers cite diversity and inclusion as extremely important factors in deciding whether to work at a particular company.
Diverse companies are more productive, and by extension, more profitable too. A recent study indicated that businesses that rank in the top quartile in terms of gender diversity in executive teams are around 15 percent more profitable than their non-diverse counterparts. Diversity and inclusion also lead to reduced staff turnover. When employees feel valued, accepted, and appreciated for who they are, they are more inclined to stay with the same company.
How Can You Avoid Unconscious Bias Impacting Your Business?
The first step to mitigating unconscious bias is increasing your awareness. This means being honest with yourself and recognizing and understanding your own biases. It can be helpful to have discussions with colleagues to explore biases or attend unconscious bias training workshops.
Unfortunately, even with the best of intentions, our unconscious biases can have a considerable negative impact on recruitment decisions. Often, the automatic mental shortcuts that we use to process information and make decisions cause us to arrive at less than satisfactory outcomes.
Despite all of the huge strides taken by business leaders, HR professionals, and recruiters to eradicate bias from the recruitment process, sadly, it still exists. The good news is that forward-thinking recruiters are increasingly turning to innovative technology to eliminate bias from recruitment processes.
Eliminating Bias with AI
AI can be implemented throughout the hiring process. Not only does it eliminate the need for hiring managers to manually sift through resumes, but it can judge and rank candidates based purely on their skills and experience. Additionally, many organizations use applicant tracking systems to automate many menial tasks associated with recruiting and hiring, streamlining processes and saving time, effort, and money.
From the candidate’s point of view, AI ensures all prospective hires receive seamless, safe communication, starting from their first point of contact. Thanks to automated email technologies, chatbots, and other tools, AI and automation can be implemented to ensure candidates are updated about the hiring process and their questions are answered quickly and efficiently.
Recruitment technology facilitates blind screening through the initial stages of recruitment, reducing the risk of hiring choices being made based on personal characteristics. With recruitment technology solutions in place, no longer will factors such as a person’s name, age, or physical appearance impact their recruitment prospects.
The addition of recruitment technology has slowly but surely been chipping away at recruitment bias for years, creating more inclusive recruitment processes and drawing attention to legacy recruitment workflows and leadership mindsets that hamper inclusivity. Today’s recruiters are increasingly leveraging the power of technology to challenge the more subtle, insidious forms of recruitment bias, where workers are discriminated against due to their weight, religion, age, accent, or sexual orientation.