Dive Brief:

• Best-selling Author and National Public Radio reporter Shankar Vedantam notes that humans are prone to unconscious bias. This unconscious bias affects the way recruiters view candidates, and can even influence the selection process.

• Andrew R. McIlvaine, who writes at Recruiting Trends, advises that, “Very few people set out to consciously discriminate against job seekers from diverse backgrounds. However, virtually all of us have hidden biases.”

• Vedantam advises companies to use blind applications and build diverse talent pools in order to avoid unintentional bias in the hiring process. These methods can compensate for ethnic-sounding names being excluded from consideration, for example. 

Dive Insight:

In his book, The Hidden Brain, Vedantam highlights the very real problem of unconscious bias on behalf of recruiters who, without realizing it, make candidate selections based on pre-determined preferences. 

The problem for recruiters, according to Vedantam is that, “These biases, which have evolved over millennia, can block us from spotting talent that's right before our eyes.” He adds further, “In other cases, they can influence us to ignore qualified talent without even being aware of it.” He cites an example of the selection of Tom Brady, who was viewed by most as an undesirable candidate early in his career, but who became a superstar in professional football.

What can recruiters do to avoid unintentional bias getting in the way of fair and equal hiring practices? Along with leaving out certain gender and ethnic identifiers in the application process, Vedantam advises recruiters to look for ‘Superstars’ among candidates – people who have failed a lot in their careers, but keep trying new things. Recruiters should look for different types of candidates and not “recruit the same types of people over and over again.”