To address the need for inclusive teams, strong businesses are developing recruitment strategies that promote diverse hiring. Mckinsey conducted a survey that revealed that companies were 21% more profitable when having gender diversity at their executive level. 

The process of blind hiring involves discarding any identifiable characteristics of a resume that might not be related to the job or the required experiences crucial for the success of the job role. 

Blind hiring has also become a hot topic among corporations around the globe, as they become focused on increasing workplace diversity related to their candidate selection process. 

Reducing bias with blind hiring

Making a quick decision can sometimes prove beneficial as bias helps us out, especially when in danger. However, sometimes, there are chances that a quick judgment leads to an unjust decision, especially when hiring is involved. Therefore, hiding specific characteristics such as age, gender, or ethnicity can help recruiters remove certain cognitive biases that can unintentionally occur when going through a resume. 

Types of Biases

The most prevalent bias that lives among recruiters is their need to hire someone “just like them.” As a result, they subconsciously influence their interest in candidates. Here are the most common five biases: 

Overconfidence effect

This bias occurs when the recruiter’s confidence in their judgments is more significant than their accuracy. Usually, recruiters remember the examples of how their gut instincts helped them in finding the perfect hire while completely disregarding the times their gut instincts lead to numerous bad hires. 

Halo effect

This bias occurs while recruiters assume that if a candidate can excel at a particular task, the candidate can also excel at numerous other tasks. Usually, when a recruiter likes a candidate, they build a bias. They will be a perfect fit for the job while failing to analyze the candidate’s abilities related to the job requirements. 

Similarity attraction effect

This bias occurs when recruiters work to find similarities among the candidates. As an example, recruiters prefer candidates with similar hobbies, which are not even remotely related to the job requirements.

Confirmation bias

This bias occurs when recruiters prefer certain information that confirms what they believe is right and disregard information they believe is wrong. Confirmation bias is the leading reason why recruiters ask inconsistent interview questions to a group of candidates. 

Illusory correlation

This type of bias is where recruiters perceive wrong relationships between people or events even when such a relationship may not exist. They end up asking questions that provide information related to the candidate’s personality but cannot determine their performance on the job.

Benefits of Blind Hiring

The real benefit of blind hiring is judging candidates on a defined set of performance factors such as their skills and abilities to deliver at work. Additionally, blind hiring also promotes workplace diversity as recruiters will stop screening candidates that share their similarities. 

Some recruiters consider blind hiring a more scientific approach as it provides a standardized form of assessment procedures for every candidate applying for a position. This leads to the selection of candidates who meet the job requirements. 

Also, with blind hiring, the practice of asking candidates “who do you know” is abolished. This benefit gives access to other candidates who are better equipped with the required skills for the job. 

Dangers of Blind Hiring

In the case of blind hiring, diversity happens accidentally, but there are cases where blind hiring hinders diversity instead. Minority candidates are sought by numerous organizations for their commitment to maintaining diversity in the organization. Still, without the option of understanding personal information about the candidates, they cannot actively maintain it. 

Blind hiring disregards specific organizations’ need to find a candidate that is a “cultural” fit. The only credible information that blind hiring offers is regarding the past employment of the candidate. This represents clues about the working environment the candidate is used to but might not be enough to determine if the candidate would fit into the organization’s culture. 

The most commonly used practice referrals can become extinct with the widespread use of blind hiring. Numerous managers or executives casually announce the availability of positions with their networking circles, even when referrals provide a bias that leads to a preference of these individuals over more capable candidates.   

Conclusion

Even though adopting blind hiring practices might be challenging for the organization, there are significant benefits for specific positions. Finding the right skill set should be the norm, not a person’s identifiable characteristics such as age, gender, or education. 

As more recruiters decide to adopt blind hiring within the organization, resumes will become a memory from a less important past. Instead, organizations will put candidates through objective assessments. However, their background, education, references, and accomplishments will also become less important. It will only be beneficial in the final interview stage after determining that their capabilities are perfect for the job post.