
REDACTED DEFINE HOW TO
Educate employees on unconscious bias and the value of diversity, and teach them how to ask skills-based interview questions. In addition to stripping names, consider removing home addresses (a possible proxy for race and income) and dates (which can reveal age). “For example, your goal might be to increase the number of women in executive positions over the course of a year.” Create a goal. “Like any new business practice, you should set goals from the outset,” says Mikaela Kiner, CEO at Seattle-based consulting firm Uniquely HR. Here’s some expert advice on how to incorporate blind hiring into your company’s talent selection strategy: Blind hiring helps take some of people’s preconceived notions about others out of the hiring equation, at least initially. “Our brains make rapid, snap judgments when we meet new people”-and even before that, as the studies on resume names indicate. Moreover, a 2014 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that managers of both sexes were twice as likely to hire a man as a woman.Įven with proper training, recruiters and hiring managers are susceptible to unconscious bias, says Kim Ruyle, president of Inventive Talent Consulting LLC, a Florida-based talent management and organizational development consulting firm. According to a landmark study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, all else being equal, resumes with “white-sounding” names (the study suggests “Emily Walsh” and “Greg Baker”) got nearly 50 percent more callbacks than those with “black-sounding” names (the study suggests “Lakisha Washington” and “Jamal Jones”). Unconscious bias, which occurs when individuals make judgments about job candidates based on gender, race or other prohibited factors without even realizing they’re doing it, fuels the problem. workforce, according to 2017 demographics data. Even juggernauts such as Google struggle black employees make up only 2 percent of the company’s U.S. White men account for 72 percent of corporate leadership jobs in the U.S., a 2017 analysis of 16 Fortune 500 companies found. Yet lack of diversity remains a problem for businesses, in the tech industry and elsewhere. Meanwhile, a 2018 study from North Carolina State’s Poole College of Management found that taking steps to foster diversity made companies more innovative, as measured by product development, number of patents created and citations on patents. For example, recent McKinsey research of 366 public companies found that those in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management were 35 percent more likely to have financial returns above their industry medians. Research shows that diverse companies are better at recruiting top talent, retaining employees and registering economic results. Of course, it isn’t the right solution for every organization-and the jury is still out on whether the practice actually prevents discrimination in the long run-but this unique form of talent selection may be worth considering if you work in an industry dominated by a single demographic. Although the concept of blind hiring isn’t new-it dates back to at least the 1970s-the strategy of hiding certain candidate information until the late stages of the recruiting process has become more popular in recent years, thanks to new tech tools and an increasing awareness of the importance of building diverse workforces.

McNamee’s story is an example of how, with a bit of creativity and resourcefulness, anyone can adapt some of the big ideas coming out of Silicon Valley startups to make their own workplaces better. And because we’ve taken a collaborative approach to blind hiring, I think it has improved the candidate’s experience with our hiring process.” “It has changed our mindset as an organization,” she says. Not every applicant follows the instructions in the job posting-and McNamee doesn’t manually remove any identifying information she receives-but taking this small step toward blind hiring has paid off. After receiving resumes for a position, McNamee assigns each candidate a number and refers to applicants by their number until people are brought in for interviews.


“We decided to ask job applicants to not include their name, address, college name, or graduation date on their resume,” she says.
