Blind hiring is a growing business trend meant to address diversity goals and improve overall hiring. But all trends aren’t what they’re cracked up to be. A little research is needed to determine if you need to try blind hiring for your company and/or clients. That being said, don’t blindly go into choosing the right blind resume software for hiring.
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What Is Blind Hiring?
To know if you want to try something, you have to understand what it is. The term blind hiring sounds a bit mysterious, but it is surprisingly straightforward.
With blind hiring, you literally avoid seeing certain information about candidates, so unconscious biases cannot influence you; you don’t even have the information to have a bias about.
Companies use this method in various ways. Some go so far as to use tests to determine a candidate’s skill rather than rely on interviews and resumes. Others simply try to blind themselves from specific criteria on resumes.
Why You Would Need To Be Blind To Certain Criteria
Many tiny, innocuous-looking bits of information give recruiters vital clues that form unconscious biases in their minds. The candidate’s name may tip the recruiter off to their gender or race. The names of schools and colleges may impress them. Even a physical address may tell them that the candidate lives in a poor or rich neighborhood and give them an unfair positive or negative impression.
Recruiters may want to make fair and impartial hiring decisions and believe that they are doing so., However, they can easily be found unable to do so because they saw information that influenced their decision.
Why Would You Want To Employ Blind Hiring?
Diversity becomes more important every day for legal reasons and for the increased creativity, innovation, and strength that comes with a more diverse team.
Blind hiring improves hiring all around. Regular hiring is burdened by unconscious bias that can weigh favorably or unfavorably on candidates and lead to poor hires.
For instance, many people unconsciously assume that men or women will be better at certain roles, that customers will have a negative impression of employees from other races, or that a person from a lauded university is more intelligent or skilled than one from another university.
These assumptions are inaccurate, causing recruiters to hire candidates who are not really the most qualified and overlook others who are. They also lead to one-dimensional workplaces that don’t perform as well as diverse workplaces.
When a company first attempts to be diverse, they discover that simply throwing token candidates into the mix doesn’t work. Without addressing the root causes of inequality, the company will be unwelcome or even toxic to these new candidates. Unconscious bias is one of the root causes of inequality and the hardest to eradicate because it is unconscious.
How To Employ Blind Hiring
Blind hiring is a broad concept to address a single problem, avoiding the absorption of information that tends to inspire unconscious biases. Ideally, you will focus only on the candidate’s abilities, skills, and experience. Anyone, black, white, male, female, poor, rich, or from any school, can get the job as long as they prove they can perform to needed standards.
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Eliminate Information
Dip your toes into the world of blind hiring by changing what appears on resumes. Career portals can be designed to not ask for certain criteria. Some customer management systems also remove this information.
Companies can ask recruiters to remove this information before submitting resumes for review. The latter tactic’s problem is that the recruiter will have to take their steps to also engage in blind hiring, or one of the most important stages of the hiring process will not be diverse.