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How to de-bias hiring

Teresa

During my recent MBA I came across behavioural economics - and it was a light-bulb moment. It is how, and why, people do/think/react the way they do; part economics, part sociology, part psychiatry, and part sheer magic.

Below is a link to an article on the BehaviouralEconomics.org site on how to take the bias out of recruitment, and like so many BE theories it's blindingly obvious once it's been pointed out. They are looking at how using selective information, or even using 'dummy' applicants, can help in the decision making by negating our natural biases. The authors' research reveals that how recruiters think about and evaluate people is not fixed, it depends on the context in which they're being evaluated - specifically in the context of other people. 

'Want to Debias Hiring? Change What Hiring Managers Focus On'

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  • Very interesting question and topic.

    It's fascinating to see organisations actively working towards de-biasing the hiring process. It's a very complex thing to do because, as mentioned by Anna in this thread, many biased 'things' are subconscious like wording, application length, name of the hiring manager, etc.

    In my field, artificial intelligence and conversational software, I've had the chance to work with forward-looking recruitment teams on this very topic.

    The idea is that an artificially intelligent recruitment software (aka chatbot) would be a good alternative to avoid as many biases as possible. We've seen it work in two ways:

    1. All-encompassing & welcoming conversations.

    Instead of posting on job boards for very specific jobs (which includes lots of potentially biased wording), corporations would welcome all applicants to simply talk to the chatbot.

    The chatbot would, of course, be geared to ask relevant questions to the users and look for specific skills. When potentially relevant candidates arose, it would then drive them down the recruitment funnel and eventually hand over to a human.

    In this process, we avoid most of the formatting biases a job ad might display.

    2. Skill-focused.

    This one works as sort of the flip side of my previous point.

    Since the applicants all talk to a chatbot instead of a human, the chatbot focuses on finding the best candidate for the job.

    We are all guilty (consciously or unconsciously) of giving into biases. With a machine doing this job, the idea is it eliminates much of the biases recruiters might feel when reading applications or discussing directly when them.

    I keep finding the progress we're making on this quite fascinating. I doubt we'll ever completely get rid of these biases, but there is work that can be done at this stage to, at the very least, reduce them to a tiny minimum.
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  • Very interesting question and topic.

    It's fascinating to see organisations actively working towards de-biasing the hiring process. It's a very complex thing to do because, as mentioned by Anna in this thread, many biased 'things' are subconscious like wording, application length, name of the hiring manager, etc.

    In my field, artificial intelligence and conversational software, I've had the chance to work with forward-looking recruitment teams on this very topic.

    The idea is that an artificially intelligent recruitment software (aka chatbot) would be a good alternative to avoid as many biases as possible. We've seen it work in two ways:

    1. All-encompassing & welcoming conversations.

    Instead of posting on job boards for very specific jobs (which includes lots of potentially biased wording), corporations would welcome all applicants to simply talk to the chatbot.

    The chatbot would, of course, be geared to ask relevant questions to the users and look for specific skills. When potentially relevant candidates arose, it would then drive them down the recruitment funnel and eventually hand over to a human.

    In this process, we avoid most of the formatting biases a job ad might display.

    2. Skill-focused.

    This one works as sort of the flip side of my previous point.

    Since the applicants all talk to a chatbot instead of a human, the chatbot focuses on finding the best candidate for the job.

    We are all guilty (consciously or unconsciously) of giving into biases. With a machine doing this job, the idea is it eliminates much of the biases recruiters might feel when reading applications or discussing directly when them.

    I keep finding the progress we're making on this quite fascinating. I doubt we'll ever completely get rid of these biases, but there is work that can be done at this stage to, at the very least, reduce them to a tiny minimum.
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