5 Steps to Ensure Fair Hiring Practices at Your Organization
Sudhanshu Ahuja
September 23, 2020
For any organization, recruitment is not just about onboarding the right talent. It is also about hiring employees who fit into the organizational culture. Only then can you expect the employees to contribute more meaningfully and expect a long-term association with them.
One way to achieve this is by following fair hiring practices. As you follow a code of ethics and labor laws, you will not only hire more responsibly. You will also build an ecosystem that has trust and faith as its foundation.
Moreover, fair hiring decisions can help in building a solid reputation. When the talent knows that your organization hires for merit, they will be keener to pursue jobs with you. Not to forget, you will save your organization from an undesirable reputation.
Why does fair hiring matter?
To answer this question, let’s look at a few facts.
This ratio is to the tune of 55% in the UK, 43% in France, and 37% in Germany.
Linkedin found that recruiters are 13% less likely to click on a female’s profile when they are looking for candidates.
Harvard Business Review found that discrimination against minorities hasn’t declined in the last 25 years.
Discrimination comes in the way of qualified candidates getting the job they deserve. It not only leaves a sour taste but also discourages them from applying in the future. In the current scenario of talent scarcity, organizations want to avoid it at all costs.
Fair hiring practices can also protect your organization from expensive lawsuits. Above all, organizations should follow fair hiring because it is the right thing to do. It can give a boost to the employer brand like nothing else.
How can you and your team of recruiters ensure fair hiring in your organization?
Here’s the thing about hiring discrimination. Even if you have the best intention to hire for merit, you may not know that you are biased. One way is to learn to identify these blind areas. However, you can also adopt a few practices to ensure fair hiring.
Let’s look at 5 steps to ensure fair hiring in detail.
1. Standardize interview process
You cannot be present in every interview to ensure that it is fair to the candidates. There could be multiple recruiters and hiring managers that make it challenging. A better way is to level the playing field.
One way to do this is by asking the same set of questions to every candidate who applies to a role. More often than not, the interview discussions are unstructured. The interviewers decide the course of the conversation during the interview. They may be hard on a few candidates and soft on the others.
When you give them a framework with the same set of questions, there is no way but to give everyone an equal chance. With the responses, the hiring panel can decide who is a more deserving candidate.
2. Blind / Anonymous hiring
The governments of France and the Netherlands conducted studies to understand the impact of anonymous hiring. They found that it benefits women and minorities. It happens because of the unconscious bias of recruiters and hiring managers. They tend to make opinions and beliefs based on their experiences and societal perceptions.
They tend to favor candidates with similar characteristics as themselves. On the other hand, they tend to reject those who do not fit into their idea of the right candidate.
Blind hiring enables you to hire without these prejudices as all the demographic details get hidden. In the absence of such information, you can make decisions based on the qualification of the candidate.
Impress offers an AI-powered tool that enables anonymous hiring. It blinds all the biasing information from the resumes and empowers the recruiters to follow a fair hiring practice.
The platform evaluates candidates, ranks them, and scores them for the benefit of the hiring team. You can look at the result and interview the most qualified candidates. Thus, you can ensure that you hire irrespective of the background, gender, ethnicity or race.
3. Value-based recruitment
Employees who do not align with the values of your organization may lose their morale and productivity. As their motivation to work will get impacted, they will start looking for other job options.
To resolve this, you need to find better alignment. You need to evaluate the beliefs of the candidates vis-a-vis the values of your organization.
Also known as value-based recruitment, it focuses more on the mission and values of the organization. It starts by identifying the values that matter the most to your organization.
The next step is to translate these values into behaviors. The interviewers can evaluate the candidates based on these responses. They need to ask questions to see a display of these values during the interview.
4. Skills and competency assessments
More often than not, interviewers make hiring decisions on their gut feeling. As this happens, the quality of talent gets compromised. Moreover, it blocks fair hiring practices in your organization.
A better way to ensure that all the candidates get a fair chance is by evaluating their skills and competencies. You can start by identifying a list of abilities that will make an employee successful in a role.
The next step is to design a framework of psychometric evaluations, assessments, and other tests to hire the best candidate.
As you do this, you may feel you are burdening your team with the manual task of administering these tests. You can simplify this by integrating all the evaluations on one common platform to make the process more productive. As you do this, your users will also enjoy a more seamless process.
Impress offers an AI-driven tool that integrates with all major third-party assessment platforms to enhance the hiring output and experience.
5. Diverse hiring panels
In these rapidly-changing times, you cannot only hire candidates for the skills they possess today. Instead, you need to hire for potential. It will ensure that they are flexible and can take on challenging roles in the future.
You can achieve it by establishing diverse hiring panels. It means forming interview panels from across the board. You can include people from other teams, women, and other minorities. With such boards, you can give all the candidates a fair chance. You will see an influx of diverse employees who find support from a diverse panel.
Moreover, when a diverse team makes a decision, you can rest assured that gut feeling had no play in the hiring process.
Conclusion
When you follow fair hiring practices, you will be hitting not two but multiple birds with one stone. It will strengthen your employer branding and build a diverse workforce. Above all, such practices will ensure long-term organizational success.
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