Ironing out a hiring process that is strictly free from biases for or against any individual or group of candidates isn’t a simple task. It requires conscious efforts from all aspects of the organisation, not just your hiring strategy. Workplace culture has a huge impact on the recruitment strategy of an organisation, but what does it actually mean? In the simplest of terms, it is the characteristics and environment that transcend your organisation and gel it together. Combinations of elements such as personalities, traits, behaviours, and communications all contribute towards creating your ‘workplace culture’. 

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As mentioned in our previous blog, ‘STOP Hiring for Culture Fit and START Hiring for Culture ADD: What Culture Ass Is and How to Implement It’ (insert hyperlink), hiring for a culture ‘fit’ almost always leads to unconscious bias and eventually, a homogenous culture… who wants that? Searching for people that have similar or exactly the same skills, talents, and strengths as people in your current team KILLS innovation in your organisation. 

Firstly, you need to make inclusion and diversity part of your workplace culture. Hiring for ‘people like us’ is a dangerous strategy. Instead, organisations need to focus on building a culture whereby ‘fit’ means people who ADD, expand and strengthen your team dynamic, then diversity WILL be relevant to your successes in months and years to come. 

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Remove any criteria that can promote bias. Reconsider the way that you construct your job descriptions. Get rid of any brackets that could filter out top-quality candidates’ from applying to your jobs, such as requiring extensive years of experience, coming from high-profile companies, etc. Struggling to SELL your vacancies to your candidates? Click here to download our FREE job description template (https://info.finlayjames.co.uk/free-cv-template-download).

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Rethink what diversity looks like within your organisation, what is classed as diversity within the workplace? Diversity within the workplace, put simply, means that a company hires a wide range of diverse individuals. It can be misunderstood and thought of as only multi-cultural matters, but rather is referred to as gender, age, language, race, ethnicity, etc.

Diversity in the workplace is crucial to a workplace – Glassdoor states that 67% of job seekers said that a diverse workforce is an important factor when evaluating companies and job offers.

Diversity brings many benefits and values – Science Daily says that businesses who have higher levels of racial diversity bring in nearly 15 times more sales revenues on average than those with the lowest levels of diversity. Additionally, Deloitte states that 83% of millennials are more engaged when they think their company fosters an inclusive culture.

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Use different interviewers in each stage of the hiring process to allow no subconscious biases and a larger pool of expertise within the hiring process. This will ensure that there are more expert opinions in searching for the right candidate and divert any chance of unfair biases is exempt over other applicants. 

Seek to understand why there are job biases, Bohnet states that when hiring “think broadly about ways to simplify and standardise the hiring process”.

When interview questions are standardised and not defined, it allows the interview to have a natural and organic flow. This helps the employer to inspect the candidate's expertise, knowledge on the topics and allows focus on the specific factors that have a direct impact on performance. 

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