You know that it’s illegal to
discriminate when hiring—against women, people of a certain color or religion
or age, and more. “I’d never do that,” you think. Alas, even the best of us
have trouble keeping subtle discrimination at bay, putting any hiring manager
at risk of a lawsuit or simply narrowing the talent pool unnecessarily. So
here’s how to keep bias out of your hiring decision.
Studies show that nearly everyone
has biases, and that we usually don’t know we have them. These biases harm our
decisions and may be the root of subtle but real and even pervasive
discrimination. They often operate below the surface of conscious thought, so
you may not even be able to detect them as they happen.
Problematic biases start with the
first things you learn about a candidate, usually in the résumé,
and may stop you from going any farther. Without ever noticing it, you might
reject one résumé
and proceed to interviews, but accept another otherwise identical résumé—identical
but for a few details that trigger associations and biases best kept away from
your decision. You may lose out on great candidates before you even get
started.
The best protection against accidentally
discriminating, inappropriately or illegally, is never knowing the information
in the first place. Sure, at some point you will inevitably know the race and
probably the sex and approximate age of a candidate, but the longer you avoid
knowing it the better and clearer your decisions will be. With a little
preparation, you can avoid it from the point of first contact.
How? Take some information out of
every résumé
before you look at it. Of course you’ll have to draft someone else to do this,
or ask your sources or candidates to do so. The benefit is that you won’t see
bias-triggering information before you’ve made a decision on whether to proceed
with a candidate, and what’s more, stripping out that irrelevant information
will help the important things come into focus.
You or a third party can redact résumés
in common electronic formats such as Word and PDF documents without much
difficulty. Word documents can be directly edited and saved. For PDFs, in Adobe
Reader you can highlight a section of text, right-click on the selection, choose
properties, and change the highlight color to black. The data is still
technically in the document, but all you need to do is hide it from sight.
Place a comment next to the text with any substitution you want to make, as
suggested below.
Here are five kinds of
information that often appear on résumés that you can safely remove
before seriously examining them.
Name
Names are packed with information
about sex and ethnicity, social class, age, and more. Studies demonstrate that
people form ideas about a person’s likeability and the tendency to hire based
on just a name. You don’t need to know any of this to make sound decisions, so
replace names with neutral random identifiers.
Citizenship
Unless you legitimately require
particular citizenship, it’s illegal to discriminate based on nationality. More
obviously problematic than names, the information is nonetheless often stated
or easily inferred from many résumés. Remove it when you can.
Of course there’s no hiding the fact that
IIT Madras is in India and Ecole
Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne is in Switzerland. Attending school in a
country doesn’t mean you’re a citizen, but it’s an easy assumption to make
because it’s usually true. It’s valuable to know that a candidate attended a
prestigious school, but you might substitute “top 50 school” or “top 500
school” to learn what you need to know to make a sound decision.
Year of graduation
Ageism is an insidious aspect of
the workforce and manifests strongly in the recruiting process. While it’s
common and usually appropriate for candidates to say how many years of
experience they have with the techniques or technologies relevant to the job,
it is never necessary to know, when looking at a résumé, exactly when a person
graduated. It’s too easy to infer age. While an older candidate may have
recently graduated with a germane degree, he or she is more likely to have
obtained a degree long ago, and the graduation year is a dead giveaway. Ask for
a year of graduation later, when you need to conduct a background check.
Specific dates of employment
Specific dates show gaps. Readers
notice gaps in employment history automatically, and that leads to speculation.
A year-long or multi-year gap could be a sign of time off to raise children,
indicating the candidate’s familial circumstances. It might also indicate
unemployment due to any number of other reasons, but how could you know which
it is by looking at dates on a page? You’ll find out later if you need to; at
the résumé-reading
stage, you don’t need to know, and it could mislead you. List the length of
time in each position instead.
Religious and political clubs and affiliations
Candidates frequently list
outside or personal activities on their résumés, typically at the very
end. They may be intended to show good citizenship, or even some relevant
experience, such as leadership, by running a club or campaigning for a
political party. While possibly interesting, these personal activities are too
likely to trigger biases on religious, political, ethnic, or other grounds.
Especially relevant experience should be in the main body of the résumé,
so it’s probably best to remove this section entirely.
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