Introduction

At the forefront of this technological revolution is a collective set of techniques known broadly as Blind hiring or anonymised recruitment, whereby various tools are used to strip away at any and all personal and socio-demographic information about a candidate applying for a role. But what exactly are these tools, how do they work, and how can they be incorporated into a business’s candidate screening process?

Unconscious Bias

Even without knowing it, human beings are remarkably prone to incorporating bias in their decision-making process. For centuries our brains have made use of various biases to aide in our survival, from cognitive shortcuts – called ‘heuristics’ – that help us detect danger or speed up decision-making to unconscious biases that allow us to filter out largely irrelevant information. Perhaps most surprisingly is the fact that unconscious bias – which occurs when we involuntarily categorise people based on first impressions of them – can often be at odds with our own conceptions of ourselves and our values. In fact, even those determined to find the most meritorious candidates for a role will often, and unintentionally, base their decisions on group stereotypes over actual achievements.

This has made unconscious bias training a popular solution to unconscious bias, largely ineffective – a 2017 meta-analysis of nearly 500 previous studies found that training to reduce implicit bias had almost no effect on the trainee’s behaviour. Diversity in the workplace that relies on these methods has been stagnant at even some of the largest and most open companies in the world; for example, less than 5% of the staff at Twitter and Microsoft are non-white while less than 30% are female (Tech Diversity Scorecard).

In terms of recruitment, the effect of any bias – conscious or not – can be detrimental to all parties involved.  Not only do personally identifying characteristics such as gender and ethnicity tell you very little about a candidate’s productivity, capabilities, and potential; but they also get in the way of building a diverse and inclusive workplace. Therefore, companies are employing technologies that aide them in finding and procuring the best talent, and in the most diverse and fairest way possible.

At the forefront of this technological revolution is a collective set of techniques known broadly as ‘Blind’ or anonymised recruitment, whereby various tools are used to strip away at any and all personal and socio-demographic information about a candidate applying for a role. But what exactly are these tools, how do they work, and how can they be incorporated into a business’s candidate screening process?

What is Blind Recruitment?

Blind recruitment or resume redaction is the process of removing any information that might identify a candidate in their resume and job application, so that candidate suitability for a role can be judged as impartially as possible. This kind of information includes, but is not limited to:

Name

Research has shown that candidates with easier to pronounce names are often significantly more successful in being recruited. A candidate’s name may also be indicative of their gender, ethnicity, immigration-status, or even socio-economic background – all frequent sources of prejudice.

Gender

Sexism and gender inequality have pervaded the workplace for decades, consistently disadvantaging females in terms of their salaries, their job seniority, and even in their likelihood of getting hired in the first place.

Ethnicity

While candidates seldom mention their ethnic backgrounds in their resumes explicitly, ethnic and racial prejudices remain deeply ingrained in our society – this is no less true in the recruitment process. For instance, a 2016 report found that Muslim women are three times as likely to be unemployed as women belonging to other ethnic groups.

Age

A candidate’s age can often be inferred from their years of experience and education. Depending on the role, this can disadvantage both older candidates – who are often presumed to be less cognitively-flexible – and younger candidates – who are often presumed to be less experienced.

Personal interests/Hobbies

Some candidates mention hobbies or miscellaneous interests in their resumes that can frequently interfere with the hiring process in a number of ways, from resulting in misguided assumptions about the candidate to biasing hiring staff through their shared interests with the candidate.

Social Economic Background or Class

A candidate’s social class is another quality that can be inferred from their resume. Hiring team members may respond better to candidates who appear to be from a similar social class or even falsely assume qualities that they associate to members of a particular social class.

How does Blind Recruitment fit into the hiring process?

There are several ways to go about blind recruitment, but the simplest step towards achieving a blind hiring process is through application or CV redaction:

• The status quo in blind recruitment is to do it manually, whereby a member of your organisation removes any identifying information by hand. But,

  • This is often time consuming and resource intensive taking up to 5 minutes to redact one CV

  • Prone to human error,

  • Can only be performed by staff that aren’t involved in hiring decisions.

• Candidates can be asked to remove these details themselves. This minimises the resources expended by a business’s hiring team. However,

  • This relies on the candidates being able to accurately remove any information that could result in bias,

  • Prone to human error.

To truly find the best candidates for your business, you need to base your hiring decisions on the information that matters and in the most objective way possible.

Is there an alternative way to redact bias from CVs or resumés?

Yes, via Application Tracking Systems or ATS. ATS’ such as Taleo (Oracle) and Greenhouse are a way for employers to manage their hiring processes and filter applicants according to criteria such as their skills, former employers, etc. ATS’ can be made to automatically hide an applicant’s personal information, making them highly effective at blind hiring, without changing processes, via tools such as MeVitae blind recruiting solution

To truly find the best candidates for your business, you need to base your hiring decisions on the information that matters and in the most objective way possible – that’s where we come in.

We’ve engineered the world’s first ATS CV Anonymisation solution. Our technology anonymises over 15 predetermined fields, from gender to University names, so that your hiring is focused acutely on an applicant’s merits and not their social or ethnic backgrounds.

• While most ATS solutions apply a one-size-fits-all approach, our ATS is highly customisable to let you choose exactly what to redact and what to include.

• Since blind recruitment is designed to make your hiring process insensitive to a candidate’s personal information, it may get in the way of achieving your diversity quotas. Our redaction technology effortlessly sidesteps this problem by giving you the choice of what to redact.

• Redacting information from a resume often strips away at the context within a text and could, in the process, hide a candidate’s personality. Our technology, on the other hand, is built using computational linguistics and natural language processing to extract information directly out of a resume so that you retain all of the semantic detail and every bit of an applicant’s personality.

• Manually redacting information from a resume is often rather slow. Using our automated tools, cognitive biases can be removed in seconds – up to 90% faster than manual redaction and with a 95% accuracy, whether it’s for entry level roles or executive hires.

Our technology has the track record to boot. In fact, our tools have resulted in more than 30% increase in gender diversity and 35% increase in ethnic diversity; all while saving your organisation months of work.