Charles Hipps is the Founder and CEO of Oleeo, an award-winning provider of innovative talent acquisition technology.
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The new generations of job seekers highly value workplace diversity. Up to 76% of job seekers consider this essential employer brand aspect when evaluating companies in their job-hunting endeavors. Incorporating a diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) strategy into the earliest stages of the recruitment process can encourage the right talent to apply to work at your organization. Blind recruiting can prevent you from missing out on qualified candidates.
Research shows that businesses with diverse talent tend to be 25% more likely to outperform their competitors and enhance their bottom lines. But while more and more companies are noticing the importance and impact of diverse hiring, many still struggle to reach the desired levels of diversity across the board. Bias, even when unintentional, can negatively affect the hiring process and result in fewer diverse teams within your organization. The right recruitment strategy can help you reduce the risk of biased hiring decisions and promote a more inclusive workforce.
What Is Blind Recruiting?
There are numerous diversity-focused recruiting approaches nowadays. One of them is blind recruiting. This practice consists of blocking out some of a job candidate's personal information to conceal anything that could negatively affect a hiring decision.
Removing recruiter bias—both conscious and unconscious—gives top talent a better chance to land a job based on their qualifications and experience instead of their demographics, sexual orientation, ethnicity, disabilities or background.
How Does Blind Recruiting Reduce Bias?
Bias is human nature. According to Psychology Today, bias "is a tendency, inclination, or prejudice toward or against something or someone." As a survival feature, bias can be helpful, but in other contexts, it can cause a great deal of discriminatory harm to certain underrepresented groups.
Bias interferes with fair decision-making when it comes to talent acquisition. By concealing information that could trigger prejudicial reactions from your human resources team, blind sourcing can reduce cognitive biases.
How To Introduce Blind Hiring Into Your Recruitment Process
Unconscious bias can be hard to eradicate. Yet, blind hiring could help your talent acquisition team put their unconscious bias aside and make more neutral hiring decisions. This practice promotes objectivity when diving into the talent pool to source the best candidates. The following measures could make your diversity recruiting strategy run more smoothly:
• Train employees about hiring bias and its effects.
• Anonymize job applications and résumés.
• Create a more consistent recruiting process that fully complies with hiring equity laws.
• Perform regular metrics assessments.
• Consider using blind recruiting software or an applicant tracking system.
Blind Recruitment Top Tips
Blind hiring is just one step toward onboarding more diverse candidates and meeting your workforce diversity goals. If you want your recruiting efforts to attract more diverse talent pools, I recommend following these suggestions:
• Neutralize your job descriptions so that they stand out on your preferred job boards.
• Standardize your interview questions to focus on the applicants' talents.
• Diversify your human resources team.
• Shift your company culture to promote DE&I practices.
• Encourage referrals from your diverse talent.
Workforce diversity is not another business trend. Implementing diversity hiring initiatives to attract and retain a candidate pool with people from different backgrounds will positively impact your organization.
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