With each new data point, the AI gets better at processing and recognizing stellar candidates. This type of large-scale processing is beyond the scope of what the human brain is capable of. Best of all, the AI assesses this data without being burdened with assumptions and biases.
The pandemic has hastened the digital revolution – the query of Evren Lucas is if we can consider the great resignations as an opportunity to reset the employment practice and eliminate bias therein.
The trouble started in march 2020, presaging the global pandemic, which brought a ripple effect on the economy, devastating businesses and bringing on mass unemployment. There was a shifting attitude to work culture by using the latest technologies. It promoted remote working and ushered in new opportunities. The digitization of services transformed how industries work and how we approach our daily lives. Many services are using online platforms today. And wherever possible, digitization has been initiated, and the human component got eliminated to the maximum. It makes most processes easier, so this technological change is good. Yes, the traditional infrastructure is still visible in parts for those unwilling or unable to embrace this change.
New Tools for A New Age
We use the latest technology today, AI, ML, and APIs, to help manage complex things effectively in our modern lives. So how can we use these tools to solve recruitment field problems? Indeed, not much has changed in the hiring process where the industry is wriggling to find a solid base though there is a shift in cultural attitudes. The CVs made in the 1950s and today look pretty much the same.
The hiring process of a manager goes through conducting a line of interviews after selecting a candidate by scrutinizing hundreds of CVs. The interview process starts with one over the telephone culminating in a face-to-face and then a follow-up. The candidate successfully passing through all of them gets an offer. But is it a reasonable way of selecting the best person for any post? Perhaps the candidates’ shortlist is simply a list of the hiring manager’s preferences. And based on the name, gender, schooling, and preconceived ideas about who can be a good fit.
Outsourcing Hiring a Way Out
We all can be vulnerable to unconscious bias, and there is a chance of it seeping into the recruitment stages. And businesses are aware that bias is an issue in workplaces. Yet nothing meaningful has been done to address this anomaly. As an alternative, hiring a viable candidate gets outsourced through CRM and recruitment agencies. It does streamline and organize the hiring process and also reduces the workload on HR. Taking steps to make policies that tackle unconscious bias deems essential now.
It is unlawful under the equality act in the UK to set quotas for workforce members having protected characteristics like race, age, religion, sex, and disability. Though employers have the power to promote qualified candidates with protected characteristics, they need not.
It is how the law handles the positive discrimination problem; hiring a candidate possessing protected characteristics though less qualified boosts diversity.
According to a Harvard business review study creating a longer shortlist increased the female candidate proportion from fifteen to twenty percent. Expanding the informal shortlist can be one way of tackling the recruitment bias problem. Nonetheless, is it the best way to include diversity in the workplace?
Solving Recruitment
The evolving technology is an exciting point; utilizing it has a real impact by helping remove unconscious bias from the hiring process that suits the machines best, whereas removing the human touch is seen as awful. Plenty of start-ups have begun using technological tools like AI, ML, and cloud for recruitment, and hope to bring about recruitment as a service (RaaS) that can drastically readdress the recruitment process.
With this, the companies can use end-to-end recruitment services and do not need to pay overpriced commissions to recruitment agents and hope to reduce recruitment bias significantly. Accordingly, in this platform, candidates will initially get presented with a standardized set of questions to assess suitability before algorithmic grading based on their answers against an ideal response. The telephonic interviews will get conducted using voice masking to eliminate any bias at the early stage.
Digitization is a practical way of reducing bias in the recruitment process. Indeed, we may be susceptible to our programming shortcomings, but maybe a little quality control on some decisions would help us stay unbiased.
