Having interviewed numerous hiring managers, spanning from junior roles to CEOs, a recurring challenge has surfaced: the presence of unconscious bias ingrained in the most hiring methods including the most prevalent one—referrals. This issue spans across startups and Fortune 500 companies, impacting all six continents. In this blog, we delve into strategies for implementing an unbiased hiring process to foster a more inclusive and diverse team.
6 Steps to Hire a More Diversified Team
- Define Clear Job Requirements:
Clearly defined job requirements is paramount. Take a comprehensive approach, giving significant consideration to soft skills, hard skills, attitude, and cultural attributes essential for the role, in addition to defining previous experience and qualifications. Identify the top two critical skills and attributes for each category, ensuring a concise job post. To streamline this process, leverage Talina’s “Generate with AI” feature to create a gender-neutral and targeted job description that appeals to the right candidates.
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Hire for Skills and Attitude:
Prioritize the evaluation of skills, attitude, and competencies in all candidates applying to your job post. Move beyond a mere focus on job experience and keywords. Select candidates who not only demonstrate the right attitude but also show the potential for growth. If conducting individual interviews for all candidates seems time-consuming, leverage screening tools like Talina’s video interview and AI analysis. This system uniquely emphasizes skills and attitude, allowing you to efficiently engage with hundreds of candidates simultaneously
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Use AI to Eliminate Unconscious Bias:
There are few Human Capital Management systems, Applicant tracking systems (ATS systems), and AI technology players that can look at candidates based on what is needed for the role and avoiding the pitfalls of replicating your existing team. Avoid the common mistake of training AI models on current employees, as this perpetuates biases. Applicant software like Talina will never ask you to train their model on what your current employees are doing, and how they think but rather on your vision and what is best in the market. It will open your horizon to innovation and diverse thinking. Talina is built as a blind AI recruiter and does not look at name, age, gender, ethnicity, and other biases.
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Use Structured Interviews:
Maintain consistency and fairness by employing structured interviews. Share a set of questions with recruiters to ensure a standardized approach and equal chances for Candidates. A structured interview will steer recruiters away from unconscious bias and get them to focus more on the candidate skills and attitude. Talina can simplify this process, taking the hassle out of structuring interviews, and conducting the initial screening for optimal outcomes.
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Diverse customers require diverse teams:
Align your team composition with the diversity of your customer base. For instance, an all-male team serving female customers might lack crucial understanding and insights. AI, especially when designed to overcome bias, plays a pivotal role in fostering diversity without the need for extensive training and resources. While companies often invest significant funds in training recruitment teams to identify unconscious bias, the challenge lies in detecting what is inherently “unconscious.”
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Measure your Diversity metrics:
Identify key diversity metrics and track them before and after adopting new practices. AI systems like Talina can assess the diversity of candidates applying versus those selected. Internally, you can evaluate the impact of diversity on various aspects of your company, such as leadership, promotions, pay, customer base, and supplier preferred list.
In conclusion, assembling a diverse team significantly impacts company performance, influencing employer branding, candidate interest, talent acquisition, and customer purchasing decisions. Diverse teams are more adaptable and have a higher potential for growth compared to those with a narrow representation of society. Building a diverse company fosters product development that appeals to a broader customer base and sets the stage for sustained success.
