Upping Your Diversity Game: Tech That Enables a More Diverse Talent Pool

• Hiring bias emerges during job-listing creation, resume review and every other part of the hiring process.
• Diversity hiring technology, such as blind resume review and AI-assisted job listing creation, seeks to counter these biases.
• You should also consider hiring a PEO, involving more people in your hiring process and using several candidate sources.
• This article is for business owners and hiring managers looking to diversify their hiring practices.

Diversity is a common topic of discussion for HR teams and internal recruiters, and with good reason. Few people question that a diverse team makes a company stronger. But finding the right pool of candidates can be a challenge.

It's surprising where some of those challenges come from. Many people think subconscious bias during resume review could be the cause, and that's one of the issues. But even the way you write your job descriptions can impact the kinds of candidates who apply.

There is good news: Technology is here to help. From skills-primary recommendations to AI resume review, a diverse talent pool is closer than you think.

Removing bias

Removing bias from the hiring process is tough. Corporations have tried to combat unconscious bias by creating diversity training programs. Still, critics and even some studies say that traditional diversity training is the least effective means of removing bias from hiring. 

Thankfully, technology has provided several solutions to help remove bias, at least from the initial application.

Diversity hiring tools to remove bias

Several applications allow companies to find candidates based solely on skills. Software like Toggl Hire allows applicants to take a skills-based test, and those who score lowest are weeded out of the pack of potential hires before anyone can make assumptions about gender or race. Those with better scores are forwarded on to those looking to hire.

Similarly, Pymetrics and GapJumpers use online surveys and quizzes without demographic information attached. Applicants answer questions on GapJumpers – which it calls "blind auditions" – and employers review the answers to decide if the applicant is worth pursuing. According to its website, GapJumpers sees underrepresented groups making up 60% of the top performers in blind auditions.

Pymetrics combines neuroscience games and AI to match people with jobs. After roughly 20 minutes of playing behavior-based games, the AI matches the results with a position profile. If there's a match, the applicant moves on to the next round.

Going blind

Reviewing resumes remains part of the hiring process. That can be a detriment depending on your name or even where you live. 

A 2013 National Bureau of Economic Research study found that applicants with ethnic-sounding names need to send out 50% more resumes than candidates with more traditional Caucasian names. A 2021 University of California, Berkeley study found that job applicants with seemingly Black names received callbacks from large employers 10% less often than other applicants.

Diversity hiring technology has a solution for this persistent problem: blind reviews.

Did you know? Job candidates who are Black, Latino and otherwise non-white often face hiring challenges based on their names alone.

Diversity hiring tools to counter racial, name-based bias

Blind reviews can remove the temptation to make assumptions about candidates' demographics and let their skills shine through as the most important piece of their resume.

One application enabling blind resume review is TalVista. The company's redacted resume screening tool hides elements from the resume – such as name, gender and other identifiers – leaving only an applicant's skills and experience for employers to review.

Blendoor also allows employers to focus on a candidate's skills and background without demographically identifiable information by removing dates from job descriptions and highlighting essential pieces of an applicant's background. Then, like on the dating app Tinder (but without pictures), companies can swipe to indicate interest in a candidate based solely on their qualifications.

Targeting diversity

Resume review isn't the only place where bias can find its way into the hiring process. Even the way a job description is written can influence who applies. For instance, using words that appeal to a more masculine audience – like "challenging" or "aggressive" – can skew your applicant pool.

Diversity hiring tools to counter job description bias

Thanks to predictive analytics and plenty of examples of successful and unsuccessful postings, it's possible to adjust your descriptions to encourage a more diverse set of candidates to apply. 

Textio, for instance, reviews job postings for gender or culture bias. The platform reviews more than 10 million job posts a month, as well as the outcomes of those posts, and uses that data to improve its algorithms. It then makes suggestions on how to change the wording of your post to achieve better results.

Tip: Learn more about being a diverse and inclusive company by reading about six companies with excellent diversity and inclusion policies. These companies hire people with a variety of skills and of various races and genders.

How to complement your diversity hiring technology 

There are still ways to improve your company culture with diversity training and developing a diversity and inclusion strategy. This will keep the entire organization aware of the benefits of an inclusive workforce and lay out strategies to embrace diversity in hiring. 

With technology, companies can expand their candidate pool based on skills with better job postings and blind skills reviews. 

But diversity hiring technology should be paired with other steps, such as the following:

• Use a PEO. Hiring a professional employer organization (PEO) to assist you with HR can help with diversity hiring. Diversity initiatives are a key part of HR, so PEOs are quite well versed in them. Visit our reviews of the best PEO providers to learn more about top choices such as TriNet. (Read out TriNet review for more information.)
  
  
• Use several sources. Interview job applicants from several sources rather than speaking with candidates from only one platform.
  
  
• Hire diverse interns. Prioritize diversity hiring for your internships so that more diverse candidates are lined up to transition into full-time roles.
  
  
• Make diversity part of your company culture. Incorporate pro-diversity policies such as antidiscrimination rules in your employee handbook and company mission, vision, and values.
  
  
• Use more people in the hiring process. Involve more people in the hiring process so that they can identify potential biases you might otherwise miss.

Making the most of your technology and working collaboratively on the hiring process typically leads to more diverse hiring practices. And a more diverse team, of course, is a more effective one.

Max Freedman contributed to the writing and research in this article.