What Is Blind Hiring, and Can It Help You Hire the Best Candidate?

Blind hiring is a method used to block out an interview candidate's personal information that could affect the employer's hiring decision, a.k.a bias.

Bias exists in many ways, and it can happen as early as the resume-screening level. This article will break down the meaning of blind hiring, its functions, and how you can implement it into your organisation as it begins to rehire.

Blind hiring: how does it work?

Blind hiring hides a candidate's resume details, such as their name, university, hobbies, address, or graduation year. Such information can allude to a person's gender, race, religion, or socioeconomic background and likely sway a hiring decision.

Alternatively, hiring managers or recruiters concentrate on the candidate's skills or prior job experience and how it relates to the job. By evaluating the candidate's relevant job experience only, one can achieve the goal to lessen bias during the hiring process.

Unconscious bias in hiring

Unconscious bias is social stereotypes about specific groups of people that a person is not aware of. It happens automatically as the brain makes quick judgements based on a candidate's background and may cause hiring managers to make decisions favouring a candidate or vice versa.

Unconscious bias can also appear in job ads.

A study from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that job ads with words that sway masculine like competitive, leader or dominant, were not appealing to women. A study in the UK analysed 77,000 job ads and found 478,175 words that carry gender bias, with an average of 6 male-coded/female-coded words per job ad.

In blind hiring, the only thing that matters is the candidate's skills and experience.

Why organisations are getting rid of bias

If left unchecked, biases can affect or shape one's company culture, engagement and bottom line. Here are some of the reasons why companies choose to tackle it head-on and diversify their workforce:

Profit increase: According to Harvard Business Review, organisations with "above-average diversity" produce 19% higher revenues.
Enhanced productivity: Diverse teams achieve 60% better results.
Builds trust among employees: Diversity practices are directly connected to high levels of employee engagement, value, and trust.
Attracts top candidates: More than 85% of young adults prioritise working for a company that conducts itself responsibly and ethically.

Now you know why diversity in a company is critical. Below are some tips on incorporating blind hiring into your hiring process.

How to perform blind hiring for SMEs

No process is perfect, but if you want to reduce bias in your hiring process, blind hiring is the first step.

If you are running a small business with a tight budget, these are two easy ways to implement blind hiring practices:

Filter details with a spreadsheet: Hiring managers can extract data into a spreadsheet and filter out specific details from the candidate's resume.

Customise your application: Design a standardised application for candidates to enter just their relevant skills or experience.

Is blind hiring effective?

Though resume screening can reduce bias, it can still exist in later stages of the hiring process if the hiring manager and the candidate have a meeting.

We should also consider the factors in the effectiveness of blind hiring. When we block out critical information about a person's background, it will be harder for hiring managers to ensure they are hiring a diverse workforce.

Blind hiring can also shield a job candidate's personality or behavioural cues. These are the factors that can signal if the candidate is a good company culture fit.

How to reduce or prevent hiring bias

Here are a few steps to help you reduce or prevent hiring bias:

Neutralise the job description: Use gender-neutral language and consider your word choice to attract a diverse candidate pool.
Standardise the interview questions: Concentrate on questions based on skill or talent instead of behavioural ones.
Diversify the hiring staff: Your recruitment panel should include a mix of women and men, cultural diversity, as well as a wide age range.
Prepare the skills assessments: If you want to assess a candidate by knowledge, you should shift the focus away from gender, background, age, or personality.

Working to fight hiring bias can become the stepping stone that empowers your organisation to tackle larger challenges down the road.

Source: Embroker

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