Could Blind Recruitment Promote a More Diverse Workplace?

Ask any hiring manager, and it’s apparent that they want to assemble a team that has better problem-solving skills, can creatively and proactively face challenges internally and external to the organization, and work more efficiently as a team.

There’s a plethora of evidence out there that diverse teams better achieve these goals and have a greater impact on an organization’s bottom line. In fact, it is proven that building a diverse and inclusive culture is vital to the success of a business.

As an example, McKinsey has found companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 25% more likely to have above-average profitability than those in the fourth quartile. EY has found that firms with women in top management roles are more innovative and are worth $40 million USD more on average than companies with exclusively male leadership.

To see the financial benefits of a diverse workforce, it is equally important to ensure that an organization’s workplace culture is also inclusive. Effectively, there is no point hiring more women or people of color if they feel they cannot speak up or will be ignored, having a “good on paper” statistic instead of a truly diverse team.

Culture has been a huge buzzword over the past few years, and for good reason—creating an environment in which people can thrive ensures you get the most out of your team and will offer unique approaches to problem-solving. In recruitment, we often talk about “culture fit,” screening candidates on how their qualities will impact the culture of the organization. We look at how someone’s values, behaviors, and beliefs will align with the employer and team they’ll be part of.

It’s not surprising—we have all seen the impact of hiring someone who doesn’t quite fit, and how quickly things can unravel. But perhaps we are too focused on the culture “fit” and not on the culture “add.” It’s not always about how well someone fits in, but what they can bring into the organization that might have been missing.

Too much focus on culture fit means we end up hiring candidates similar to the existing team, even in our own image, which is not a great way to build an inclusive culture. When we shift that focus, we hire someone who will bring diversity of thought to the existing environment.

Getting the right blend in a company can be a daunting prospect for employers—there’s a lot at stake if it goes wrong, and challenges like unconscious bias can hinder the process. One way of ensuring we hire for culture add rather than culture fit is through blind recruitment. This involves anonymizing applications as part of the recruitment process so that, while the candidate’s skills and experience are visible, their personal details are not.

Due to various laws and regulations, some more recent than others, many factors will already be anonymous during the application process, such as an applicant’s age, date of birth, marital status and compensation history. However, what’s in a name? Hiring managers may not consider the impact a name may have on bias of the hiring team. Names may be ethnic sounding, and distinctive to regions. Even the best hiring managers must take steps to battle unconscious bias and build a truly diverse team. The National Bureau of Economic Research has found candidates with white-sounding names must send out ten resumes to get one callback while counterparts with African-American sounding names have to send out 15.

Furthermore, educational history may invoke bias. The U.S.A.’s racial achievement gap shows us that 72% of white students enrolled in college after high school, whereas just 44% of black students enrolled in college. Historically, some colleges and universities have predominantly white or black student populations, or point to wealth and legacy, allowing potential bias based solely on the names of the educational institutions. There can also be unconscious favoritism and bias from hiring managers that went to the same college.

Although it seems removing names and schools is an easy practice to implement to reduce bias, there is another side to the argument. By removing any personal information, including LinkedIn profiles and pieces of personal branding, are we removing crucial pieces of context from the hiring decision?

Anonymizing resumes does not allow the hiring manager to contextualize a person’s experience. It may be that a candidate has an impressive professional background but has also enjoyed many socioeconomic privileges throughout their life. In contrast, someone with the same qualifications may have overcome a remarkable number of obstacles. It’s harder to gauge this without knowing who that person is.

This process also makes it harder to look at other aspects of the person’s life, such as maternity, caregiver status, or Visa issues, which may explain a career break or slower progress up the ladder. Blind recruitment also only removes bias from the earlier stages of the process, as you will eventually have to meet the candidates face to face—at which point, bias can exist if the hiring manager allows it to.

Blind recruitment has been proven as one element of removing unconscious bias to achieve a diverse team, but there are many other parts of the process that need to be examined. Other ideas are to publicize (and follow through on) your organization’s commitment to diversity, and write job descriptions with language that will appeal to both male and female candidates. As the workplace evolves, hiring managers will have to continue evolving their own best practices to change alongside it.