Hiring and Unintentional Discrimination
My thoughts today are on hiring and unintentional discrimination. Even with the best of intentions, we can act in ways that are racist or sexist (or ageist or any number of other things we don’t want to be).
The linked article focuses on automated hiring. This can be through the use of advertisements created by an algorithm or by pre-screening resumes with an algorithm. The problem with these algorithms is that they can unintentionally encourage (or discourage) certain people to send in their resumes and get those resumes seen by a human who does the hiring. Ironically, these incidents are exactly what the algorithms are intended to prevent.
Even without automation and algorithms, we can inadvertently discriminate. In recruiting, this happens by where we post jobs, by what words or phrasing we have on our listings, and by which requirements we note. In pre-screening resumes, this can happen in every aspect, from reading the candidate’s name (yup!) to noting where they went to school (or didn’t) and what year they graduated. And during interviews, our poor human minds are constantly judging and measuring through our individual filters of experience, knowledge, and societal influence.
You can minimize your unconscious bias (I know you don’t mean to) in a number of ways: running your job postings through an online bias filter (see Resource 1), stripping resumes of personal information (names especially), and using rubrics to score resumes more objectively. (If you can have more than one person do these things, that can help too.)