What are some strategies to help employers eliminate bias in the talent recruitment process?

Employers should take a holistic view of the various stages in the talent recruitment process to help eliminate bias. If employers wait until the interview to implement strategies to combat bias, the talent pool might already be skewed.

Employers should evaluate everything from the job description and posting through the interview. And, should look not only for explicit or obvious biases, but also those that are implicit or unconscious. These biases can work in all directions – causing employers to be unjustifiably fond or critical of a candidate. Bias can be addressed through manual and/or automated approaches to evaluating the various aspects of the talent-recruitment process.

For example, a job description can be reviewed by people familiar with the job and the diversity objectives of the company as well as with a web-based gender decoder that identifies words that may encourage or discourage applications based on gender. This is an eye-opening exercise that can help improve our awareness of biases.

A similar review can be done for the content of job postings, the medium used to communicate the job opening, the content of applications, whether, how, and when resumes and skills tests are used, and how applicants are selected for interviews.

In all aspects of the talent-recruitment process, the strategies you implement to eliminate bias should be objective and standardized.

But how can we determine whether our efforts to eliminate bias have been successful? The use of data science enables us to analyze the information available to identify patterns and issues that are not obvious. This check on our own practices can bring us closer to eliminating bias in talent recruitment.