You would think in this day and age organisational diversity would be a moot point – with global social reforms across gender, sexuality, disability and race equality, one could believe the challenge of diversity has been overcome.
Sadly, this is not the case. Some fu(cked) facts:
So why do we continue to see inequality in employment?
Despite the best of intentions, hiring managers or recruiters can discourage groups of potential applicants. They do so by using restrictive terms which are gendered or ageist, this can extend to unnecessary education standards which are not required to do the role.
More often than not, recruiters and hiring managers are overwhelmed with application volumes … having to review sometimes thousands of resumes and cover letters for one role. This often leads to CV screening for job titles, big brand company names, and favouring certain universities or education providers.
In some instances, unintentionally or intentionally, applicants will be filtered out of the screening process based on their name. Researchers of Harvard and Princeton found that blind auditions increased the likelihood that female musicians would be hired by an orchestra by 25 to 46 per cent! Whilst one seminal study found that African American sounding names had a 50% lower call back rate for an interview when compared with typical White named individuals.[5]
Would you believe there are over 100 different forms of cognitive biases? Confirmation bias, affinity bias, similarity bias, halo effect, horn effect, status quo bias, conformity bias… the list goes on. These biases make diverse hiring an even more difficult process as you don’t even know that you are missing out on the best candidates!
Time and time again research has shown that diverse organisations are more effective, perform better financially and have higher levels of employee engagement.
A recent McKinsey report, “Delivering through Diversity” showed that organisations with gender-diverse management were 21% more likely to experience above-average profits. Whilst companies with a more culturally and ethnically diverse executive team were 33% more likely to see better-than-average profits. This figure grows to 43% when the board of director level is also diverse in gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation.[6]
More compelling is that for every 1% rise in workforce gender and cultural diversity, there is a corresponding increase of between 3 to 9 per cent in sales revenue![7]
Not only is diversity a social and ethical problem for organisations, but it is also a commercial one.
Blind screening: Removing information that reveals the candidate’s race, gender, age, names of schools, etc to reduce unconscious bias that creeps into hiring decisions.
For our customer, a global airline, cabin crew are at the heart of delivering great customer experience.
With 9000+ cabin crew creating iconic experiences for passengers every day, they want to maintain their strong brand through hiring only the best in customer service and give their applicants an iconic experience.
An iconic brand also attracts an enormous number of applications some of which don’t fit the criteria. Sifting through so many CVs to uncover the right candidates is extremely time-consuming for the recruiters.
Some of the challenges the team faced in their existing processes included:
The results were amazing.
A post-campaign survey showed a perfect score from the recruitment team rating the technology as faster, fairer and delivering better candidates.
No matter the good intentions, humans will always lean on their biases when making decisions. Interrupting bias in recruitment needs a systemic solution. Something that can operate independently, in the absence of a human trusted to do the right thing.
While PredictiveHire does not claim to completely solve for bias within an organisation, using a chat-based assessment at the top of the recruitment funnel will help you to interrupt, manage and therefore change, biases that reduce diversity in hiring.
Chat is inclusive for all candidates
Candidates chat through text every day. It’s natural. It’s normal. It’s intuitive. It’s an opportunity for them to express themselves, in their way, with no pressure.
Playing games to get a job is not relevant. Talking to a camera is not fair. What if you are unattractive, introverted, not the right colour or gender, or don’t have the right clothes? When you use chat over other assessment tools, you’re solving for adoption, candidate satisfaction, inclusivity and fairness. Our platform has a 99% candidate satisfaction score, and a 90% completion rate.
Here’s the 2020 Candidate Experience Playbook.
We use an intrinsically blind assessment design
Blind screening means an interview that is truly blind to the irrelevant markers of age, gender and ethnicity. That just can’t see you. And therefore, cannot judge you.
We do not use any information other than the candidate responses to the interview questions to infer suitability for the job your candidates are applying for. We call this ‘fairness through unawareness’ – the algorithm knows nothing about sensitive attributes and therefore cannot use them to assess a candidate.
We only care if the candidate is suitable for the job, and nothing else.
Why is organizational diversity important?
What are examples of organizational dimensions of diversity?
What does diversity mean?
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References
[1] https://builtin.com/diversity-inclusion/diversity-in-the-workplace-statistics
[2] https://humanrights.gov.au/
[3] https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/publication-download/research-report-107-disability-pay-gap
[4] https://theconversation.com/transgender-americans-are-more-likely-to-be-unemployed-and-poor-127585
[5] https://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1108&context=student
[6] https://www.forbes.com/sites/pragyaagarwaleurope/2018/10/19/how-can-bias-during-interviews-affect-recruitment-in-your-organisation/#79b1c0b81951
[7] https://www.forbes.com/sites/pragyaagarwaleurope/2018/10/19/how-can-bias-during-interviews-affect-recruitment-in-your-organisation/#79b1c0b81951
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