What is Blind Hiring and How Is It Performed?

In addition to being beneficial for society, having a recruitment strategy that encourages diversity hiring also has a compelling commercial argument. Companies with gender diversity at the executive level were found to be 21% more profitable than those without it, according to a Mckinsey survey. Although the benefits of diverse hiring are well acknowledged, organisations still struggle to have an appropriate amount of gender diversity on their teams, particularly at the CEO level and in several STEM fields. Candidates care about working for a diverse company, According to a study: 76% of job searchers say that a diverse staff is a key consideration when assessing businesses and job offers.

There are numerous measures in place to broaden the variety of candidates. Examples include internal programmes that encourage the leadership development of minorities or gender-decoding software, such as Textio. Blind hiring is one well-known tactic that seeks to take some personal bias out of the picture.

What is a blind hiring process?

In a blind hiring procedure, distinguishable traits from a resume that are unrelated to the position or successful experiences are removed.

As businesses strive to increase diversity in their candidate selection processes, blind hiring has become a hot topic. Its beginnings can be seen in the 1970s, a time when white men predominated in symphony orchestras. Orchestras started holding auditions behind a curtain in an effort to improve diversity so that the judges could only evaluate the performance and not the applicant's gender or sexual orientation. 25%–45% more women were hired as a result.

How does blind hiring reduce bias?

It's not always a negative thing to make an instant decision: Bias has an evolutionary benefit by facilitating speedy decision-making, particularly in dangerous situations. However, occasionally these assessments are incorrect and can lead to us making unjust decisions, particularly when it comes to employment and recruitment. You may eliminate the various cognitive biases that emerge when reading a resume by masking some information like age, gender, race, or degree of schooling. By eliminating some of our early preconceptions about candidates (such as their names), blind hiring allows us to concentrate on each applicant's qualities and abilities.

How can I implement blind hiring at my company?

You can use a variety of tools, including Pinpoint, Textio, and Blendoor, to anonymize applications, strip any demographic information from resumes, and find individuals from varied backgrounds. There are always alternatives if you lack the funds for new software. Some HR specialists will export their candidate data onto an Excel document and conceal some columns, like the candidate's name. You could design pre-screen challenges or questions that applicants must solve before you check their resumes, and you could read the responses and solutions without knowing the respondents' racial or ethnic background. Before examining printed resumes, some employers advise candidates to completely delete specific content from their resumes, while others merely advise them to get a nice black Sharpie.

The Society for Human Resource Management's Daniel Bortz advises setting goals for what you aim to accomplish before setting up a blind recruiting procedure. For instance, your business might want to increase the proportion of female executives in your organisation by X%. Determine which sections of the CV you want to omit, and educate your hiring managers and recruiters on unconscious biases and the importance of diversity.

Blind hiring pitfalls

Although making an effort during the screening stage is fantastic, it does not ensure that diverse candidates will advance to the offer stage. Both identifying unconscious biases and conducting standardised interviews are skills that recruiters need to be taught in. If not, prejudice and discrimination at the interview stage may have an equivalent influence on the candidate's chances of getting selected for the position.

According to some research, making applications anonymous can have the opposite effect for minorities because it thwarts affirmative action's objectives. One study discovered, for instance, that anonymous hiring made it less likely for women to receive callbacks since it "prevented the deployment of positive factors aimed at enhancing the representation of women."

Additionally, the blind hiring process won't address job descriptions that are prejudiced towards one group over another and cannot serve as a replacement for a more inclusive job advertising.

Despite the fact that blind hiring has been demonstrated to promote diversity in many organisations, research is currently being done to determine what sort of procedures are necessary to develop a hiring strategy that is genuinely diverse. The strength of our own unconscious biases is something we can all take away from the blind hiring process. The more we become at putting our prejudices aside, the more egalitarian our workplace will be!

Your people will recall your support for them as individuals in the struggle, particularly those from underrepresented groups.