4 Practical Tips to Overcome Bias in Remote Hiring

Every recruiter strives to make the best hiring decisions. Right?

But check this out: research has shown that unconscious bias can creep into the remote hiring process to make it impartial and unfair. Which can make many hiring decisions quite biased too.

But wait. What exactly is hiring bias?

To simply put it, hiring bias is a mental shortcut that talent acquisition professionals take, which leads them to interpret information subjectively. Unconsciously, hiring bias can lead many of us to make impulsive decisions that negatively impact our hiring process.

Okay, so now that we know that. But how can we combat hiring bias all together?

What a great question! We usually make unconscious decisions as a result of learned assumptions and beliefs, and without formulating any in-depth knowledge about the subject matter.

This is why today we’re sharing with you 4 smart ways you can say goodbye to bias in remote hiring! 

Lets dig into the good stuff now, shall we?

Build awareness around hiring bias

We know what you’re thinking. Isn’t it a bit awkward to build awareness around the elephant in the room? The truth is, it’s not. The only way to combat bias is to build awareness around the ‘gut’ instinct and how it can be wrong and subject to bias at times. In remote hiring, everyone is responsible for bias. And chances are, your team might not be aware of it.

So the best way to tackle this issue is to thoroughly train your team on the various forms of hiring bias: confirmation bias, conformity bias, gender bias, halo effect, horns effect and attentional bias. Take some time to research and learn more about these biases.

This way, you’ll truly understand how prejudices in remote hiring can negatively influence decision-making and the organization’s credibility. Then, you can start taking the initiative to change behavior and judgement accordingly.

Invest in an awesome hiring platform

Now that you built awareness, it’s time to take the next big step. Investing in a hiring platform.
A hiring platform can help recruiters automate, streamline, and optimize every aspect of the remote hiring process. It also provides recruiters with actionable and accurate insights on their candidates.

To illustrate further, when recruiters are looking for candidates with specific career levels, majors, or job titles, they can simply provide our hiring platform with certain keywords that they expect to see in the candidates’ resumes. Consequently, it will then filter through these resumes to find the most qualified candidates.

To make it even easier for the recruiter, our hiring platform will then rank candidates from highest to lowest match, and provide a matching percentage that signifies how relevant the candidate’s profile is to the job description.

This can help recruiters instantly spot the best candidates and make the right hiring decision effortlessly, without the need to second guess themselves or invoke any biased decisions in the remote hiring process.

Rewrite your job descriptions

Job descriptions give candidates a first impression on your company’s culture. Quite often, they tend to have the illusory effect of representing explicit and implicit bias. Some forms or job descriptions are influenced by particular words or language that may be deemed as outdated or exaggerated.

They can also use words that tailor the job description towards men or women. Therefore, this can discourage candidates from applying completely!

The great news is, our hiring platform can replace stereotypical words and replace them with neutral words. For instance, our hiring platform’s autofill text predictor can help recruiters write job descriptions by intelligently suggesting the appropriate skills, career level, industry and years of experience based on the job requirements alone! This completely helps mitigate bias in the remote hiring process.

Standardize your interviews

Did you know that structured interviews are twice as effective as unstructured ones?
Sometimes, candidates’ resumes don’t truly represent who they really are. This drives recruiters to form a biased first impression on them. Luckily, video interviews can combat this issue once and for all in remote hiring.

By standardizing interviews with a video interviewing software you will be able to ask all candidates the same set of questions and significantly minimize human bias. This way, recruiters can focus more on assessing the factors that have a direct effect on performance.

For instance, with our video interviewing software, recruiters can simply generate a Five Factor Model personality report for each candidate. Openness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Emotional Stability, are the five main traits that our video interviewing software relies on to help you get an accurate first impression on your candidates!

To sum it up

Bear in mind, that hiring bias doesn’t end when the candidate accepts the offer. In fact, it’s just as important to combat hiring bias when onboarding, retaining and promoting employees. It’s an ongoing process! Once you manage to keep bias at bay, you’ll notice major enhancements in your remote hiring process.

Candidates will find you more trustworthy, employees will foster your core values, and the hiring process will flow smoothly.

Therefore, we strongly suggest you take the right course action when combating hiring bias. Start by spreading awareness, investing in a hiring platform, writing clear job descriptions, and standardizing the interview process.

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