Technology

Can Blind Hiring Address Diversity in Tech Companies?

A small increase in workplace racial diversity can correlate with significantly higher sales, suggests some research. Some studies show that organizations with the most diversified executive boards had as much as 14 percent greater EBIT. Other studies demonstrate that diversity makes workers more innovative and Blind Hiring. Let’s see how this approach can improve a company’s diversity analytics.

Defining Blind Hiring

Blind hiring anonymizes or “blinds” recruiter or hiring manager personal information about an applicant that might lead to unconscious or conscious bias. This prejudice is unjust and discriminatory because most of the personal information displayed has nothing to do with job performance.

The blind hiring method facilitates workplace diversity by removing prejudices related to race, gender, age, and education level from the recruiting process.

Blind hiring is part of a bigger push to remove flawed human judgment that prevents choosing the finest applicants. Harvard Business Review research indicated that applicants chosen based on an algorithm were 50 percent more likely to be successful than those picked by human recruiters.

Resume-Based Hiring

Human bias was identified in resume screening. Similar resumes with white-sounding names get 30 percent more interviews. Old-sounding resume names were ranked lower than modern-sounding resume names.

Most blind hiring methods involve eliminating names and images from resumes and internet accounts. Other personal information deleted from resumes includes graduation year, college names, and residences, which might expose a candidate’s age and economic level.

Blinding resumes might be time-consuming or impossible to conduct by oneself without recruiting technology.

Test-Based Blind Hiring

Orchestras started blind hiring when musicians auditioned behind a screen. From fewer than 5 percent in the 1970s to 25 percent in the 1990s, this blind auditioning increased female players in the top five American orchestras.

Some professions now use pre-employment tests to measure job-related abilities and knowledge (e.g., software development). As long as applicants can finish the exam remotely, anonymous candidate ids may readily blind this sort of test. A personality test is another blind pre-hire test. Research shows that organizations that employ personality tests in hiring have a more diversified workforce.

If you don’t employ a third-party program or service to anonymize and test candidates, it will be impossible to “blind” oneself to the results of a pre-hire exam or assessment.

Blind Hiring Through Interviews

Anonymous interviews are the third technique. Anonymous interviews are written take-home Q&As or chat interviews. Many organizations use a take-home interview, which may be anonymized by issuing candidates’ IDs.

There is usually a phone interview as well. It’s hard to anonymize someone over the phone, let alone in person. How beneficial are anonymous interviews if the profession demands a lot of personal connection, like sales or customer service?

Diversity Blind Hiring Metrics

It is important that the criteria you use to measure diversity recruiting include the performance of your blind hiring program. The most straightforward approach to taking this step is to zero in on a specific demographic or group whose membership you would want to see grow as a result of your recruiting efforts, and then to make that demographic or group the criterion by which you evaluate the success of those efforts.

Brian Wallace

Brian Wallace is the Founder and President of NowSourcing, an industry leading content marketing agency that makes the world's ideas simple, visual, and influential. Brian has been named a Google Small Business Advisor for 2016-present, joined the SXSW Advisory Board in 2019-present and became an SMB Advisor for Lexmark in 2023. He is the lead organizer for The Innovate Summit scheduled for May 2024.

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