The Risks Of Blind Hiring Done Bad

Last week we had a future client meeting about bias in hiring.

The meeting went great, because the client got clear about the finer points of blind hiring so they can decide what way to implement it.

So what is blind hiring? It’s removing criteria with no relation or correlation to job performance from the decision making process.

The foundation was created with an academically verified study: the Orchestra study, using screens to ‘blind’ music auditions.

Researchers have determined, amongst other things, that blind auditions make it 50% more likely that a woman will advance to the finals.

Since then, two paths have been blazed to help businesses gain some of these benefits:

1: Blinding of resumes (redacting data on documents)
2. Blind skills auditions (designed by GapJumpers).

The client thought that we had a tool to redact resume data, because that was all they had been told.

Not their fault and not true.

We’ve designed a solution that replicates the original method to ensure the powerful elements that worked for orchestra’s are available to you.

With GapJumpers you create blind auditions to test candidate work readiness. Completely anonymously and bias free.

The client was surprised, and asked for data to understand the risks and rewards of both paths.

Now, your experts might also not have shared all blind hiring data. Nothing angers me quite as getting important data AFTER buying something AND it doesn’t work.

So we want to help, just in case.

Here is the data on the risks of blind resumes and benefits of blind auditions.

Now blind resumes might work for them, or you. We don’t know how risk tolerant you are. For now we just want to ensure you understand both paths.

Full disclosure:

We’re a bit biased towards blind auditions. Decades of evidence proves them to be effective.

Also, blind auditions aren’t a magic cure and even today orchestra’s have serious workplace problems. They do one thing really well.