How Can Hiring Managers Make Their Recruitment Process More Equitable and Inclusive?

Recruitment can sometimes be prone to bias, leading to a non-inclusive strategy. Did you know that men are twice as likely to get hired, regardless of the hiring manager's gender? This blog explores how recruiters and hiring managers can make their interview and assessment process as well as their candidate attraction strategy more equitable and inclusive.

Make Your Interviews More Equitable

Firstly, it is useful to look directly at the interview strategy you are using to assess candidates. There are many ways in which you can make the interview process more equitable. Before the interviews, you need to create a set of standard questions for your candidates. These questions must be identical for every candidate and asked in the same order if possible. Bear in mind that questions need to be relevant to the position they are applying for. Remember to set a time limit for each interview, keeping this the same for each interviewee.

Once you have standardised your interview questions, it would be useful to set up a scoring system. This system should follow criteria which rank your interviewees based on their answers to the questions. This can lead to further inclusivity and less bias, which is the first step in creating a more inclusive and welcoming organisation.

Increase Diversity Of The Assessment Team

A diverse team can empower a business to be creative, innovative, and productive. Welcoming talent from a range of backgrounds, cultures, and environments will offer innovative solutions to problems.

When you are seeking to enhance diversity in your company, it is firstly essential to diversify your recruitment team. A diversified recruitment team will work towards an unbiased hiring strategy. By developing a diverse assessment team, you will be able to receive insights from different backgrounds, cultures and environments, and as a team, this will help you to make the best-informed decision for the hire, with little bias.

Reduce Potential Sources of Bias

Whilst CVs are a significant aspect of the traditional recruitment assessment, they are loaded with opportunities for biased decision-making. Unfortunately, CVs tend to define candidates through their past experiences as opposed to their future potential.

On top of this, CVs can lead to biased decision-making simply through the way in which they are formatted, the candidate's name or employment history. This is why human shortlisting of CVs is not the best strategy, and where AI can come in handy when shortlisting candidates from CVs. AI can assist recruiters in finding high-quality candidates without discrimination or bias being involved in the decision.

Final Thoughts

Diversity and inclusion are essential for the future of your business's talent pool. If you are seeking to improve diversity in recruitment in your company, then there are a multitude of methods that you can implement to improve the hiring process. Learning about these new methods and implementing them should be a continual process if you wish to be a successful and diverse business.

Contact Optima if you wish to understand how to make your teams and recruitment process more diverse.