Today, most organizations promote themselves as equal opportunity employers with fair and diverse hiring policies. And while most recruitment and HR teams have the best intentions, this can be almost impossible to guarantee when manually screening candidates because we all have unconscious biases – those underlying stereotypes we don’t realize we hold.
Unconscious bias in your recruitment process has a flow-on effect, impacting a range of commercial outcomes. In fact, recent global research by McKinsey highlights the deepening relationship between high levels of diversity and financial outperformance.
Alongside the many productivity and cost benefits, impress.ai’s AI-powered recruitment workflow is the best way to eliminate bias in your recruitment process and advance your diversity agenda. Here’s how it works
Automating the application and screening process
By automating candidate screening, applicants are evaluated and progressed against specific role criteria, not personal opinions. From essential application criteria to an intelligent review of written submissions and question responses, impress.ai can deliver bias-free hiring.
A specific template guides the process for each role. The recruiter simply selects the corresponding template, which breaks the role down into the required competencies, knowledge, skills, and experience. At every step in the process, applications resumes, assessments and responses are evaluated against these alone. AI-powered chatbots can even perform interviews, intelligently reviewing and evaluating open-ended text responses.
impress.ai integrates a range of best practice tools to achieve this, including behavioral interviews, situational judgment interviews, work sample tests, industry, and role-specific assessments, and case study interviews.
Hiding information that could lead to bias
impress.ai automatically hides demographic and personal information that could influence outcomes. This includes name, gender, picture, date of birth, etc., so this irrelevant data doesn’t form part of shortlisting decisions.
Where this information is relevant to the hiring process, it’s easy to disable the filter, allowing recruiters to view it. However, as a further safeguard against human bias, an audit process takes place when the filter is turned off and is available to senior management for review.
Fighting the halo effect
The ‘halo effect’, whereby a candidate’s submissions or responses are evaluated more positively or negatively due to a belief you already hold about them, can contribute to making the wrong hire. For example, suppose a recruiter sees that an applicant attended a top university or perhaps their own alma mater. In that case, they may be more likely to score that applicant’s written submission higher than others, regardless of the quality.
impress.ai removes this risk in two ways. Firstly, by automating the screening process and secondly, by allowing the recruiter to evaluate all candidates’ responses to each question in sequence, rather than evaluating all the answers from one candidate at once. This means the recruiter assesses each answer independently, without carrying over the judgment of a candidate based on a previous response.
Making it easy to do the right thing
We understand that resources are finite, and teams must decide where to deploy them for maximum impact. Technology can be an enabler, but if it’s challenging to learn, hard to use, or requires a developer to customize, it won’t be used, or corners will be cut.
That’s one of the ways impress.ai is different – we make it easy for your team to do the right thing with technology that is simple to use, flexible, and easily customizable in-house.
Continuously learning and updating
Your impress.ai workflow uses machine learning to continuously improve and update itself based on real-time candidate and recruiter actions. It’s simple to train the algorithm, any recruiter or HR team member can do it, and we’ve even gamified it to make it engaging.
Diversity is a critical part of your recruitment, but it can be challenging to deliver with a manual process. If you are ready to experience what AI-powered recruitment can do for your business, increasing productivity, reducing costs, and finding the best candidates while delivering on your fair hiring agenda, get in touch with the impress.ai team.
