It’s Time to Hire Candidates Based on Merit — Not Bias

By now, we know a lack of diversity and inclusion is a systemic problem in today’s workforce, and our hiring and recruiting processes are largely to blame.

According to Harvard behavioral economist and What Works: Gender Equality by Design author Iris Bohnet, “The easiest place to remove bias from the hiring process is in recruitment.” It makes sense: Hiring and recruiting is where organizations build the next generation of their business.

Those of us who have followed the HR technology talent acquisition space for a long time know that hiring and recruiting is ripe for disruption. About $5.7 billion was invested in HR technology from 2015 to 2017, and talent acquisition gets about a third of that share.

One of the biggest problems the talent acquisition market needs to solve is biased hiring and recruiting. As most of us know, some unconscious biases can stem from seemingly harmless things like unstructured interviews or relying too heavily on employee referrals. Some biases can stem from any of the 10 cognitive biases outlined by Gartner, which can include things like confirmation bias, information bias, overconfidence, and the ostrich effect.

To HR technology’s credit, it has helped make improvements to unconscious and cognitive bias in hiring and recruiting by simply taking the human element out of some of the processes that were inherently biased. But, with these improvements come a whole new set of problems.

The flaws that are readily apparent with HR technology obviously stem from any kind of technology bias in which people become data points, as most HR technologies don’t solve for their own technological biases. These biases can be data points like what school a candidate went to, what skills they list on their resume, the words used in an organization’s job description, or even a candidate’s name.

“The fact is, Latisha and Jamal do not get the same number of callbacks as Emily and Greg,” Bohnet said in another article. “You need to look at what each person brings to the table.”

To put a finer point on it, a recent study published in the Harvard Business Review found “when there was only one woman or minority candidate in a pool of four finalists, their odds of being hired were statistically zero.” However, when the candidate pool of underrepresented minorities went up to two or three, their chances of being evaluated on merit increased by 50 to 70 percent.

Obviously, there are skills and competencies these HR technologies just can’t account for today. But there are flaws that go much deeper than just the readily apparent biases that come with HR technology.

Popular professional networking sites lend themselves to a lot of the same problems organizations had before HR technology (and yes, I realize the irony of telling you this on LinkedIn). The truth is, hiring and recruiting can often become a game of who knows who on these sites. They enable recruiters and employers to fall back into old habits of only talking to and considering candidates who look like them and share their worldview. Sound familiar?

The fact is, if HR technology is going to help remove bias from hiring and recruiting wholesale, it needs to go a level deeper than normal technology bias or the biases that come from relying on professional networking sites. Organizations need to be able to hire based on a candidate’s actual merit — not a set of data points or homogenous connections.

That’s why myself and a team of seasoned experts decided to build Censia. At Censia, we know outdated recruitment technologies are blocking the best candidates through everyday bias. We help companies break bias by using the unmatched depth and breadth of Censia’s intelligent candidate discovery technology and global talent data platform. With Censia, companies get the right candidates, based on merit, with radical efficiency.

Our approach is different because we use over 140 data points to build candidate profiles that far exceed the typical evaluation of talent. Our data helps us better identify candidates who will be successful based on factors that others are missing, so when companies build out their talent pipelines, their selections are blind to race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, veteran status, and disability. Censia also allows companies to set an underrepresented minority slate percentage per role.

And we’re living what we preach. Censia is an inclusive company, and we’re proud of it. For more information on us, check out our website at www.censia.com.