- Employers who went to prestigious schools may choose candidates from similar schools over more experienced applicants.
- Hiring bias can also include weighing someone's appearance or charisma more than their experience.
- To remove bias from your hiring process, you should structure your hiring process, involve many people in the interview process, speak with references, and conduct hiring bias training.
- This article is for business owners and hiring managers looking to remove subconscious biases from their hiring decisions.
Despite the growing number of diversity hiring initiatives, some managers still fall prey to their own inherent, subconscious biases when evaluating candidates. Without realizing it, they may tend to hire people who are similar to them, especially when it comes to their educational background, research finds. Keep reading to find statistics on the prevalence of hiring bias and learn how to eliminate it from your hiring process.
How to remove bias from your hiring process
Before anything else, take time to structure and define your company's exact hiring process for different jobs. For example, identify and target the key competencies necessary for an open job, and structure your process around those needs. An unstructured process brings out subconscious bias.
There are some straightforward tips you can implement quickly to remove bias from your hiring process. In addition to thoroughly screening candidates based on their qualifications, you can check your biases by involving multiple people in the interviewing process (such as department heads and executives), contacting candidates' references, and properly training your recruiters and hiring managers to recognize all types of discrimination.
Let's explore each of these tips further.
1. Involve multiple people in the interviewing process.
Rare is the job candidate who loves sitting for several rounds of interviews, but these interview series serve an important purpose. The more people who get to know a candidate as they apply, the more people can potentially identify each other's hiring biases. An HR staffer might pinpoint a CEO's subconscious biases in ways he couldn't if candidates interviewed solely with him.
2. Conduct reference checks.
A prestigious degree doesn't say everything about a person. Maybe the job candidate from Harvard misses deadlines more often than the candidate from a state school. You can discern this important distinguishing factor through reference checks. The state-school candidate's references may tell you she always hits her deadlines, while the Harvard candidate's references say the opposite. Factor in what you learn to work against your hiring bias.
3. Train your hiring team to recognize bias.
Hiring bias might seem like an abstract concept, but there's science underlying it. In fact, there are 13 kinds of hiring biases with their own characteristics that have been studied at length. You should learn about these hiring biases and teach everyone involved in your hiring process about them too. Beyond that, you should teach your hiring team how to identify these biases and act against them. A meaningfully diverse team could be the result.
How to approach having a more diverse team
The above steps to counter your hiring biases might naturally lead to a more diverse team, but you should supplement them with other steps:
- Seek the assistance of a full-time HR staffer or an outsourced HR company. For the latter, you can visit our PEO best picks page to learn more about top choices, such as our Justworks review.
- Add anti-discrimination policies to your employee handbook.
- Incorporate inclusivity into your values, vision and mission.
- Celebrate occasions that center and elevate marginalized groups. Make sure to get input from your employees who belong to these groups as you plan.
- Implement employee recognition programs.
- Monitor and analyze job performance with the same metrics for all employees.
- Create safe spaces in which employees from marginalized groups can report discriminatory action with promises of action – and without fear of retaliation.
How employers' education affects their hiring bias
Education bias may not be the first type of bias that comes to mind, but studies show it is a real phenomenon. Research from the job site Indeed discovered that bosses who attended a top-ranked college preferred to hire employees who also graduated from a prestigious institution. Specifically, 37% of managers who said they went to a top school said they like to hire candidates from highly regarded universities – compared with just 6% of managers who didn't attend a top school and said the same.
On the flip side, 4% of managers who didn't graduate from a top-ranked college said they consider candidates' experience more important when making hiring decisions. Just 11% of managers who did attend a prestigious school said the same.
"It's a worrisome trend that a manager's personal experience and background has such an influence on hiring decisions," said Paul D'Arcy, senior vice president at Indeed, in a statement accompanying the study's publication. "This type of bias can prevent companies from finding the diverse talent needed for their organizations to grow and thrive."
The research revealed that the bias toward top-college graduates is most prominent among managers hiring for entry-level positions and executive roles.
How employers act versus what they believe about education
Despite their desire to bring in employees from highly regarded schools, most managers agreed that going to a highly rated school doesn't translate into being a top performer. Just 35% of all of the bosses Indeed surveyed said top performers generally come from top schools.
Instead, the managers surveyed said the ability to work well with others, strategic thinking, and self-direction are much more indicative of high performance.
This finding "shows that we need to pay more attention to hiring practices," D'Arcy said. "It is often an unconscious bias that leads managers to hire people with similar backgrounds, but that means many talented and qualified candidates are being overlooked."
How non-educational hiring biases play a part
Where a manager went to school isn't the only bias affecting hiring practices. Greg Moran, founder and CEO of predictive hiring software company OutMatch, believes many hiring managers fall prey to their own subconscious biases about factors such as physical attractiveness, height, weight and charisma.
"Overt bias is exceedingly rare, but unintentional, abstract bias can occur," Moran told Business News Daily in a previous interview. "It's human nature; employers use their gut reactions to job candidates and hire people like themselves that they get along with. This can be dangerous, because employers don't even realize there's bias in their hiring process."
Nicole Fallon and Max Freedman contributed to the writing and reporting in this article. Source interviews were conducted for a previous version of this article.