Is Blind Hiring the most efficient hiring?

What is blind hiring?

Blind hiring is a hiring practice that aims to hide a candidate's personal and demographic information from hiring managers or HRs.

What can be included in personal information?

For example, consider a candidate named Chriss, following information about Chriss would be hidden from the hiring team:

Name: Chriss Sinister

Age: 35

Gender: Male

What can be included in the demographic information?

Now for a candidate named: James, the following information might be hidden from the recruiter:

Address: House number 56, Street #12, Altrincham Town, Manchester

City: Manchester

Country: England

It is basically designed to create a fairer recruiting process and minimize biases and unfair ways of selecting candidates. For example, rather than focusing on Chriss's or James's personal, demographic information, it aims to assess them based on their abilities, skills, qualifications, and experience only. The purpose is to provide equal opportunities to everyone, increasing the chances of hiring top talent and promoting workplace diversity.

What is another word for blind hiring?

Blind hiring is often called 'anonymous' recruitment, in which candidates' personal information such as their name, age, gender, race, or any identifying factors from their resumes are anonymous for the hiring manager.

How is blind hiring related to unconscious bias and how does it affect hiring decisions?

In blind or anonymous hiring everything is kept hidden to block any biases, whether conscious or unconscious, that could affect or influence a hiring decision. Unconscious biasedness is the unfair judgments made regarding an applicant based on their gender, race, ethnicity, background, and other crucial factors, without even realizing their effects.

Biases can also appear unconsciously in job descriptions, where hiring managers favor one thing or person over the other, in a completely wrong way. For example, they consider people of a certain race prior to others, minimizing the chances of their selection.

Blind Hiring Process

In the blind hiring process, the main aim is to minimize bias by hiding or blinding a candidate's personal details such as his name, address, ethnicity, religion, and race and promote fairness and evaluate each candidate based only on their skills, work experience, and qualities. It removes all identifiable details that are not related to the job description or the job post.

It is a major topic when it comes to increasing diversity in the candidate screening process. As people recruited through a blind hiring process, turn out to be from different cultures, values, beliefs, races, etc, promoting a diverse and inclusive workforce.

There are certain ways to set up blind hiring processes, and it entirely depends from organization to organization.

How to set up a blind hiring process?

In order to implement an efficient blind recruitment process, follow a few tips, mentioned below and you are good to go:

Train your Hiring Team Members

Give proper training, and conduct seminars or discussions to make sure every individual understands how important it is to eliminate discrimination and injustice in order to promote a diverse workforce. They should be given proper guidance on how to make decisions and ask questions, based entirely on the candidate's skills and performance, keeping other personal or demographic factors aside.

Implement Blind Candidate Screening

Start the first step of the recruitment process, using the blind hiring technique. But what does that mean? Don't worry, it simply means, when you are given a candidate's resume, make sure all the personal details are hidden from you prior to your evaluation.

Before sending the resumes to the hiring manager or the concerned person, mask details such as gender, address, race, ethnicity, class, etc, or anything that can activate unconscious biases intentionally or unintentionally from a candidate's application. You can assign code numbers to applications to eliminate identification later in the future.

Carry out Blind Interviews

Make sure the interviews you conduct, whether online or physical are not based on treating a certain group or race prior to another and are conducted irrespective of the candidate's personal information, and every individual is treated likewise.

Avoid personal questions such as:

Q1. What is your age?

Q2. What is your religion?

Q3. Where do you live?

There can be many examples of personal questions like those mentioned above, but the objective is to ignore them and ask the same questions, which are mainly skill-based, experience-based, or job-related, to all the candidates in the same order and judge them equally.

Use Skills-Based approach

Draft questions for candidates that are entirely talent-based, rather than asking them about their personal interests. Plan on focusing on their work samples, projects, and experiences. Craft coding challenges, problem-solving questions, or code-optimizing exercises, if the job requires a software engineer. The goal is to evaluate how much potential a candidate poses in order to be efficient in the open role.

Blind Auditions

If you are evaluating a candidate for a certain role, such as signing or acting make sure you judge them entirely on their skills, like for a signing role, focus on assessing them solely on their voice and nothing else, keep aside their personal details such as address, gender or their color and treat them equally.

Before Sending Offers

Just before sending them the offers, hiring managers can reveal the identity of the candidates that have reached the last stage of the recruitment process, to the hiring team and concerned persons. Here the hiring team can evaluate candidates based on their cultural fit, personality traits, diversity goals, and other important factors, but the goal is to keep personal questions aside, evaluate them equally without any biases and select the most ideal candidate based on their skills, experience and cultural fit.

Blind hiring as a recruitment strategy?

Having workforce diversity is not only good for the society but it improves the overall image of the organization. An efficient recruitment strategy is one that makes sure that the teams and employees are inclusive for example, having a gender diversity team, because they turn out to be more profitable than those without diversity. Moreover, most job seekers consider diversity as an important factor while applying to a certain company.

Disadvantages of Blind recruitment

Well, with a lot of advantages to adopting a blind recruitment strategy, there also comes a few disadvantages too. Some of them are mentioned below:

Hiding personal information

As in blind hiring practices, all the personal details of the candidates are hidden in the initial stage of the recruitment process, it sometimes makes it difficult for the hiring managers to know certain personal information that might play an important role, later in teamwork or job-related tasks. When this type of information, later comes out when candidates meet the hiring team eventually at the last stage of the process, it is either too late to make a decision again or to start screening for the same position again, from the very start, as it may costs more time and effort.

All weight on skill assessment

When hiding the personal and demographic details of a candidate, all pressure lands on evaluating the candidate entirely on their skill set. Many candidates can pass the skill set and can happily complete the skill assessments, as these tests give them a platform to flaunt their skills and do not encounter the personality traits or cultural fit of the candidate.

More diversity can sometimes become risky

Sometimes HR managers in the race of promoting diverse culture, start looking to hire more diverse candidates that are from underrepresented groups, eliminating the chances of people that might be more skilled than those. As a result, the hiring managers become confused because they don’t know who to give an advantage to until most of the candidate pool has already been filtered out, until further stages.

FAQS

What software do you need to implement blind hiring?

There are plenty of tools out there that you can use to implement blind hiring, and it completely depends on the company's goals, objectives, and the nature of the job role. The list of the most common blind recruitment tools is available and you can choose among them.

What other ways can I remove bias from the hiring process?

Along with blind hiring, there are plenty of other ways also to remove biases from the hiring process. The most common one is to write a clear job description that completely defines the role and responsibilities and be specific so that only qualified candidates apply for the role. Make sure to remove wording that targets some class or gender specifically, as this can have a negative impact on job seekers, that is not related to the specified class or gender.

Postface

All the steps of the blind hiring process are mentioned above in this article, along with its benefit. And this clears pretty much how blind hiring is essential in every hiring process when it comes to a company to promote a diverse and inclusive workforce other than that it treats everyone equally, irrespective of their color, caste, race, name, religion, and other specific information. There do come some disadvantages, along with the benefits of blind hiring, but they can be minimized, if strategies are more optimized, structured, and documented.

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