To find out how to interpret bias in recruitment, we also have a great eBook on inclusive hiring.
While workplace diversity might once have been considered a ‘nice to have’, today it’s a ‘must-have’ for employers who recognise the value it brings to their organisation.
The idea of workplace diversity is that the people in any organisation’s team should reflect the society in which we live – that is people of different genders, different ages and different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. That seems logical and simple enough, yet achieving diversity is still a struggle for many.
Today, workplace diversity is not just about increasing female representation and employing team members from different cultural backgrounds. While these are great goals, true diversity is about so much more.
Diversity can be broadly sorted into two categories:
Inherent – effectively the defining traits and characteristics we are born with – gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, socio-economic background, religious and cultural backgrounds.
Acquired – reflecting our experience of the world around us and covering things like education, life knowledge, learned values and skills, socio-economic mobility, political beliefs. These are developed, earned or achieved over time.
It’s the combination of inherent and acquired traits that make people and societies diverse. This holistic view of culture, background, life experience, education, values and perspectives is a top priority for recruiters and employers alike.
Diversity hiring is not about increasing workplace diversity for the sake of diversity. Diversity hiring is all about giving every candidate an equal opportunity, regardless of their background. It’s about identifying and removing any steps in sourcing, screening and shortlisting candidates that may allow discrimination against candidates and personal characteristics that have nothing to do with their ability to do the job such as gender, age, religion, sexual orientation and so on.
By removing biases against individuals or groups of candidates, the process of finding the best candidates to be considered for the role can be based on merit and all the qualities identified as essential for the role and the organisation.
From discovering an opportunity through to offer. It addresses bias, inclusivity and fairness. And ideally, it makes recruiters’ lives easier. This is explored in the Inclusive Hiring e-Book here >
Diversity is embraced by companies who understand the value it brings to their business.
In their 2018 report Delivering through Diversity, McKinsey&Company found that:
While McKinsey’s study was focused on US global companies, their findings are reflected in other studies, white papers and shared experiences of organisations all around the world.
Unsurprisingly, diversity in the workplace can be a deal maker or breaker for millennial and GenZ job seekers. Deloitte found that 83% of millennials are more engaged when they can know a company fosters an inclusive culture.
But it’s not just the next generations. A recent survey by Glassdoor found that 67% of all candidates say it’s an important factor when considering employment opportunities while more than 50% of current employees want their workplace to do more to increase diversity.
While there’s no doubt that diversity hiring is good for business, for any organisation that doesn’t embrace diversity, the opposite can also be true. Apart from missing out on the benefits that diversity brings to productivity, employee satisfaction and business reputation, employers also risk breaking the law.
Within Australia, diversity is supported by national and state laws that cover equal employment opportunity, human rights, and anti-discrimination in the workplace. It’s essential that all employers understand their own responsibilities and the rights of employees or job candidates. The cost of non-compliance can be severe while the damage to an organisation’s reputation could be matched by irreparable damage to sales, business contracts and their employer brand.
In Australia, it is unlawful to disadvantage employees and job seekers in any way because of their:
Whether innate or learned, everybody is capable of unconscious bias. Reinforced by our own personal experiences, cultural background, beliefs and world view, bias is how we feel about something – a person or group of people, an idea, a thing – and how we use those feelings to make judgements and decisions about those people or things, often instantaneously.
Psychologists and researchers have identified over 150 types of bias that impact the way we engage, assess and interact with others. In the recruitment process that’s 150 ways that otherwise suitably qualified candidates can be overlooked, ignored, put aside or deliberately discounted. You can read more about unconscious bias in our article here.
Because unconscious bias is a universal and inherently human condition, it’s a problem that can’t be solved by any amount of bias training or awareness.
So if humans can’t solve the very human problem, what can be done? Sapia has solved the issue of unconscious bias in hiring by taking humans out of the process for top-of-funnel interview screening through an Artificial Intelligence enabled chat interview platform. It’s an easy way to implement data-driven decision-making with a structured and automated process that provides a level playing field for all candidates.
Adopting Sapia Ai-enabled decision-making to remove bias from the early interview process is one of the easiest ways to get diversity hiring working for you. Here are some further ideas from Sapia’s team to help increase diversity in candidate sourcing, screening and, ultimately, hiring.
More female graduates in technical roles? A better cultural spread across the organisation? More women in middle management? Without understanding how diversity hiring supports your business plans, how would you ever know you’re making progress? Diversity hiring strategies and initiatives should be agreed by your leadership team, documented in HR plans and socialised among all stakeholders.
Developing a reputation as an employer who values and nurtures diversity starts with your own people. Talk to your people to hear what’s important to them and understand if they think any policies (or attitudes) are holding diversity back. Talk to your team about diversity and the benefits it can bring.
Think about policies that may support more diversity in your workplace. Beyond hiring, it may be providing extra time off for community events or religious festivals, or simply providing workplace flexibility and freedom for employees to be comfortable being themselves.
The more your team buy into policies that support, value and celebrate diversity, the more your reputation as a diversity employer will organically grow. And the more it grows, the easier diversity hiring will become… as candidates who value diversity will be lining up to work with you.
Sapia’s automated interview platform is designed to integrate seamlessly with leading Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). Even before the interview process, use screening tools in the ATS to filter and sort candidates on skills, qualifications or experience alone. This blind screening to identify candidates with the best potential adds an additional layer of bias-free screening to your diversity hiring.
Undertaking a review of past job ads can help you see where bias may have crept into your recruiting process. Is your language inclusive? Would all candidates feel they could apply regardless of age, gender or cultural background? While being careful not to actually be biased, your words can talk more directly to the candidates you want to attract and explain why they’d be a great fit for your team.
While you’re reviewing the way you reach out to candidates, also consider whether you’re screening or interviewing for the qualities you actually value most or you’re unconsciously guiding the process towards certain types or profiles. Sometimes you need to ask others to check your own bias.
Is it time to fish for candidates in a different talent pool? If you’re relying on the same sources and same screening factors, you’re likely to keep cultivating the same type of candidate. Think about where and how you can connect with a more diverse candidate pool.
If you are targeting more women in specific roles, for example, find relevant interest or networking groups online or within platforms such as LinkedIn and talk to candidates directly. Ask your female employees to recommend their own connections or former colleagues and share job leads. The same principle applies to reaching out to any particular demographic or skill set and employees appreciate having their opinions and recommendations heard and valued.
Especially when you’re starting your diversity hiring journey, you may want to help things along with specific diversity programs that could offer an internship or traineeship to candidates of specific backgrounds. Consider working with local schools, colleges or community groups to make connections and target the appropriate up and coming candidates. It can also be a great way to engage and motivate your own team in supporting diversity hiring goals.
Candidates know text and trust text and questions can be tailored to suit the requirements of the role and the organisation’s brand values. Unlike competitors, Sapia has no video hookups, visual content or voice data. No CVs and no data extracted from social channels. All of which can be triggers for bias– unconscious or otherwise.
Sapia’s solution is designed to provide every candidate with a great experience that respects and recognises them as the individual they are. People are more than their CV and candidates appreciate the opportunity to tell their story in their own words, in their own time. Sapia is the only conversational interview platform with 99% candidate satisfaction feedback. You can read more about blind screening in our article here.
You can try out Sapia’s Chat Interview right now – here – or leave us your details to get a personalised demo
Voluntary employee turnover can have a direct financial impact on organisations. And, at the time of this pandemic outbreak where the majority of the organisations are looking to cut down their employee costs, voluntary employee turnover can create a big concern for companies. And thus, the ability to predict this turnover rate of employees can not only help in making informed hiring decisions but can also help in saving a substantial financial crisis in this uncertain time.
Acknowledging that, researchers and data scientists from Sapia, a AI recruiting startup, built a language model that can analyse the open-ended interview questions of the candidate to infer the likelihood of a candidate’s job-hopping. The study — led by Madhura Jayaratne, Buddhi Jayatilleke — was done on the responses of 45,000 job applicants, who used a chatbot to give an interview and also self-rated themselves on their possibility of hopping jobs.
The researchers evaluated five different methods of text representations — short for term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), LDS, GloVe Vectors for word representations, Doc2Vec document embeddings, and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). However, the GloVe embeddings provided the best results highlighting the positive correlation between sequences of words and the likelihood of employees leaving the job.
Researchers have also further noted that there is also a positive correlation of employee job-hopping with their “openness to experience.” With companies able to predict the same for freshers and the ones changing their career can provide significant financial benefits for the company.
Apart from a financial impact of on-boarding new employees, or outsourcing the work, increased employee turnover rate can also decrease productivity as well as can dampen employee morale. In fact, the trend of leaving jobs in order to search for a better one has gained massive traction amid this competitive landscape. And thus, it has become critical for companies to assess the likelihood of the candidate to hop jobs prior to selections.
Traditionally this assessment was done by surfing through candidates’ resume; however, the manual intervention makes the process tiring as well as inaccurate. Plus, this method only was eligible for professionals with work experience but was not fruitful for freshers and amateurs. And thus, researchers decided to leverage the interview answers to analyse the candidates’ personality traits as well as their chances of voluntary turnover.
To test the correlation of the interview answers and likelihood of hopping jobs, the researchers built a regression model that uses the textual answers given by the candidate to infer the result. The chosen candidates used the chatbot — Chat Interview by Sapia for responding to 5-7 open-ended interview questions on past experience, situational judgement and values, rated themselves on a 5-point scale on their motives of changing jobs. Further, the length of the textual response along with the distribution of job-hopping likelihood score among all participants formed the ground truth for building the predictive model.
To initiate the process, the researchers leveraged the LDA-based topic modelling to understand the correlation between the words and phrases used by the candidate and the chances of them leaving the company. Post that, the researchers evaluated four open-vocabulary approaches that analyse all words for understanding the textual information.
Open vocabulary approaches are always going to be preferred over closed ones like LIWC, as it doesn’t rely on category judgement of words. These approaches are further used to build the regression model with the Random Forest algorithm using the scores of the participants. Researchers used 80% of the data to train the model, and the rest of the 20% was used to validate the accuracy of the model.
Additionally, researchers also experiment with various text response lengths, especially with the shorter ones, which becomes challenging as there is not much textual context to predict. However, they found a balance between the short text responses along with the data available and trained the model predicts for even those.
To test the accuracy, the models are evaluated based on the actual likelihood of the turnover with relation to the score produced by the model. To which, the GloVe word embedding approach with the minimum text of 150 words achieved the highest correlation. This result demonstrated that the language used in responding to typical open-ended interview questions could predict the chances of candidates’ turnover rate.
Leveraging data from over 45,000 individuals researchers built a regression model in order to infer the likelihood of the candidates leaving the job. It will not only remove the dependency of companies on candidate resumes and job histories but also enhances the process of hiring into a multi-measure assessment process that can be conducted digitally for recruiting.
By Sejuti Das, Analytics India Magazine, 02/08/2020
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The following is an excerpt from our Talent Acquisition Transformation Guide, a comprehensive playbook to help you audit and improve your recruitment strategy.
Winning more talent means getting your team in ship shape. In many organizations, the Talent Acquisition business operates in an isolated camp – no one sees or hears from you unless you have good or bad news about a particular candidate or role vacancy.
Efficiency in recruitment requires absolute alignment. Your people leaders and your executive team must be in alignment with your new strategy, because they are equally responsible for executing it. Gone are the days when, for example, marketing managers could pass a job description for a copywriter to a Talent Acquisition specialist and wash their hands of the prospecting dirty work. Now, more than ever, the hiring manager and the specialist must form a partnership, sharing the duties of advertising, promoting, vetting, interviewing and assessing. After all, candidates for said copywriter role will expect it.
To get cooperation and buy-in from your people leaders, you need to form a visible, purposeful A-team.
Your crack recruitment task force should comprise:
Once your team is formed, you need to complete a basic audit to see where your recruitment pipeline is at – and the roadblocks stopping you from securing the talent you need.
This step sounds obvious on the face of it, but it actually requires some speculation and problem-solving. Consider this simple matrix, filled in with examples – it’s a good starting point on getting alignment with the A-team on your hiring needs.
Role | Critical skills | Priority | Existing org. strength | Applicants/candidate declined | Advertised salary | Market salary | Notes/suggestions |
Head of marketing |
|
Very high | Low (no marketing leadership) | 40/38 | $150k p/a | $190k p/a |
|
Software engineer |
|
Low | High (replacing a team of 20) | 10/10 | $120k p/a | $130k p/a |
|
Office manager |
|
High | Low (no office manager for ~3 months) | 0/0 | $100k p/a | $100k p/a |
|
Once you’ve filled out your Talent Requirements Matrix, the next step is effective triage. Almost everyone in the A-team will already be aware of your highest hiring priorities, but by filling out this matrix, you can focus talent acquisition efforts on coming up with weird and wonderful ideas for attracting the right candidates. Times like these require outside-the-box thinking!
Is unconscious bias holding your business back? When it comes to building your team, it’s easy to fall into a pattern of choosing a candidate who seems like a good ‘cultural fit’.
But what if that means you’re missing out on a candidate who would be a great ‘cultural add’? Or the candidate that’s actually the perfect fit for the role and the team. When you make an effort to overcome bias and cultivate a workplace that values diversity – of background, experience, world view and so many more attributes – you’ll cultivate a workplace that’s not just great for your team, it’s great for your business too.
Hiring on a gut feeling that someone will be a good fit for the team is just one indication that your decision has probably been influenced by unconscious bias. Don’t be alarmed, it’s more common than you think. In fact, we all have unconscious bias and we are all affected by it.
You might observe it in the way someone treats or talks about others, or perhaps you’ve been at the uncomfortable end of bias yourself. When it comes to recognising our own ‘built-in’ biases, however, it can be challenging. And that’s why they call it unconscious.
Unconscious bias training has become not just a buzzword but a big business in itself. In this article, we explore the big questions around bias: What is unconscious bias? How does it impact the hiring process? Can unconscious bias be defeated? If you’ve already jumped to your own conclusions on those questions, that’s unconscious bias too!
Since the first humans gathered around campfires, bias has existed.
It is simply the way we feel in favour of something – an idea, a thing, a person or group – or how we feel against that something. Bias usually suggests that these feelings are judgemental, unfair or discriminatory.
Bias is about making assumptions, stereotyping or a fear of the unknown. It can be innate or it can be learned and unconscious bias is created and reinforced by our personal experiences, our cultural background and environment. Bias can be of little consequence – I hate broccoli – or potentially very damaging – I hate {insert name here!}.
The objective of overcoming bias in the workplace is creating a work environment where every employee can feel that the workplace is welcoming, safe and free from discrimination, harassment or unfair treatment. While that may sound ‘warm and fuzzy’, diverse and inclusive workplaces can help lift employee satisfaction, boost engagement and productivity and enhance the reputation of your business as a great employer. It can also lower your exposure to potential legal action from unfair or unjust employment practices.
When it comes to hiring, there are some biases that are more common than others. Some need no explanation – gender bias, ageism, racism, name bias – however psychologists and researchers have identified over 150 types of bias that impact the way we engage and interact with others. Here, we look at just a few. Chances are you’ve let one or more of these biases influence your decisions and, as a result, missed out on a perfect candidate.
Confirmation bias – where an opinion is formed quickly on a single detail (bad suit, good school) and the interviewer ‘fills in’ their own assessment of the candidate with questions that they believe confirm or justify their initial impression or judgement.
Overconfidence bias – can be closely connected to confirmation bias, when the recruiter lets their confidence in their own ability choose the best candidate in the way of objective assessment.
Illusory correlation – where a recruiter believes certain questions are revealing insights about the candidate that actually don’t exist or are not relevant to their ability to perform in a role.
Beauty Bias – this one speaks for itself. Will a great looking person necessarily be the most successful choice for the role? The simple answer? No.
Conformity bias – this bias can occur with group assessments when recruiters fall in with the majority even if their opinion about a candidate differs. Peer pressure can have a lot to answer for.
Contrast effect – also called judgement bias, this is where a candidate is compared with the resume and candidate that went before, rather than being reviewed on their own skills and merit against the requirements of the role.
Here’s some more:
Affect heuristics – this unconscious bias sounds very scientific, but it’s one that’s being a very human survival mechanism throughout history. It’s simply about making snap judgements on someone’s ability to do a job based on superficial and irrelevant factors and your own preconceptions – someone’s appearance, tattoos, the colour of their lipstick.
Similarity attraction – where hirers can fall into the trap of essentially hiring themselves; candidates with whom they share similar traits, interests or backgrounds. They may be fun to hang out with, but maybe not the best match for the job or building diversity.
Affinity bias – so you went to the same school, followed the same football team and maybe know the same people. That’s nice, but is it really of any relevance to the hiring decision?
Expectation anchor – where the hirer is stuck on what’s possibly an unrealistic preconception of what and who the candidate should be
Halo effect – Your candidate is great at one thing, so that means they’re great at everything else, right? Judging candidates on one achievement or life experience doesn’t make up for a proper assessment of their qualifications and credentials
Horn effect – It’s the devil’s work. The opposite of the halo effect where one negative answer or trait darkens the hirer’s judgement and clouds the assessment process.
Intuition – going with that gut feeling again? While the emotional and intellectual connection may come into the process, it’s largely irrelevant. Focus on their actual experience and capabilities instead.
In an ideal world, every hire would be approached in an objective way, free of unconscious basis and based on the candidate’s ability to do the job well. However, we don’t live in that perfect world and, time and time again, bias can cloud our judgement and lead to the wrong recruitment decisions. So what can we do? Let’s first talk about what doesn’t work.
The efforts of any business to drive affirmative change in their business are to be respected. However, there’s a very good reason why unconscious bias training simply can’t work. Why?
Because unconscious bias is a universal and inherently human condition. Training targets individuals and their well-worn attitudes and world views.
While awareness and attitudes may change, inherent bias will remain because that’s the human condition.
So if humans can’t solve a very human problem, what can? Sapia is challenging the issue of unconscious bias in hiring by promoting ‘top-of-funnel’ screening that entirely avoids humans and their bias. Instead, candidates are interviewed and assessed through automation and algorithms. The data that trains the machine is continuously tested so that if ever the slightest bias is found, it can be corrected.
According to an Article Published By Fast Company:
(Ref. https://www.fastcompany.com/90515678/science-explains-why-unconscious-bias-training-wont-reduce-workplace-racism-heres-what-will)
From a scientific perspective, there are reasons to be cautious that unconscious bias training will have a significant impact on racism, sexism, and other forms of workplace discrimination.
Contrary to what unconscious bias training programs would suggest, people are largely aware of their biases, attitudes, and beliefs, particularly when they concern stereotypes and prejudices. Such biases are an integral part of their self and social identity.
Contrary to popular belief, our beliefs and attitudes are not strongly related to our behaviours. There is rarely more than 16% overlap (correlation of r = 0.4) between attitudes and behavior, and even lower for engagement and performance, or prejudice and discrimination.
The closest science has come to measuring unconscious biases is via so-called Implicit Association Tests (IAT), like Harvard’s racism or sexism test. (Over 30 million people have taken it, and you can try it for free here. These have come under significant academic criticism for being weak predictors of actual behaviours. For example, on race questions (black vs. white), the reported meta-analytic correlations range from 0.15 to 0.24.
The hardest thing to influence through any D&I initiative is how people feel about concepts such as gender or race. Systematic reviews of diversity training concluded: “The positive effects of diversity training rarely last beyond a day or two, and a number of studies suggest that it can activate bias or spark a backlash.”
Using machines and artificial intelligence to augment and challenge decisions is fast becoming mainstream across many applications and industries. To reduce the impact of unconscious bias in hiring decisions, testing for bias and removing it using algorithms is possible. With humans, it’s not.
Sappia tackles bias by screening and evaluating candidates with a simple open, transparent interview via a text conversation. Candidates know text and trust text.
Unlike other Ai Hiring Tools, Sapia has no video hookups and no visual content. No CVs.
All of these factors carry the risk that unconscious bias can come into play. Nor is data extracted from social channels as our solution is designed to provide every candidate with a great experience that respects and recognises them as the individual they are.
A research study by The Ladders found that recruiters only spend about 6 seconds looking at a resume. With bulk-hiring, it’s probably less. That’s 6 seconds to make or break a candidate’s hope.
Sapia’s AI-based screening comes into to its own with high volume briefs, with the capability to conduct unlimited interviews in a single hour/day, assessing >85 factors – from personality traits to language fluency and other valuable talent insights. Candidates receive personalised feedback, coaching tips for their next interview and faster decisions on their progress in the hiring process.
Sapia is not out to replace human recruiters but we are here to work as your co-pilot, helping you to make smarter, faster and unbiased hiring decisions.
AI-enabled enabled interviewing and assessment also tracks and measures bias at a micro level so businesses can understand the level and type of bias that may previously have influenced decisions. With candidate and client satisfaction rated 95%+, it’s a game-changer for changing behaviours.
The ability to measure unconscious bias is just one more reason to use AI-based screening tools over traditional processes.
Sapia gives every candidate an opportunity to tell theirs. Through our engaging, non-threatening process where unconscious bias can be taken out of the equation (literally!), we will help you get to the best candidates sooner.
You’ll get a shortlist of candidates with the right traits and values for your business so you can move ahead to interviews with confidence and clarity. With time and resources saved on upfront screening, your team can concentrate on making the interviewing stage more rewarding for hirers and candidates alike.
With Sapia, you can soon be on your way to building more diverse, inclusive and happier workplaces. We know we can work for your business, so we’d love to work with your business. Let’s talk.
Get diversity and inclusion right whilst hiring on time and on budget. In this Inclusivity e-Book, you’ll learn: