How Turing’s Intelligent Vetting Eliminates Unconscious Bias in the Hiring Process
The prevalence of conscious and unconscious bias in the hiring process is quite common. Some biases are so deep-rooted in our systems that most people don’t realize how much these biases affect our decision-making process. Yet, when we look at our approach from the outside in, our unconscious and conscious biases become glaring. Biased hiring can hurt businesses by recruiting candidates who are not the best for business. Thus, it is important to create a system that leaves no wiggle room for biases.
How can we do that? The answer is quite simple, cut down the middle man, the ‘human’ element, and use an intelligent Artificial Intelligence-backed software that does the vetting and shortlisting for you.
Let’s take a look at unconscious bias in hiring and how Turing’s Intelligent AI-backed vetting process eliminates it!
What is unconscious bias?
As people, we grow up with a set of values that society, family, and even our communities condition us to believe in and live by. More often than not, our subjective conditioning ends up defining prejudices and stereotypes for us. No matter how rational, well-trained, and well-meaning we are, we can end up making critical decisions based on our biases.
When hiring someone for your company you may want to employ someone who looks, talks, and dresses a certain way. Often biases based on ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, cultural ‘fit’, and even social class, can hamper recruiter from hiring great talent.
How can an unbiased recruitment process help my business?
Biased recruitment results in a workforce that is homogeneous and un-varied. Studies suggest that such a workforce results in less diversity of ideas, a more stifled work culture, and less productivity.
- David Rock and Heidi Grant, in a recently published work, argue that diverse teams are more productive, more factually inclined, more innovative, and thus more productive.
- Studies establish that a diverse workforce promotes contradictory thinking, which helps churn new ideas and do away with stale ones.
- A recent study indicates that 61% of leading female candidates look for diverse leadership and gender inclusivity when applying to a company.
- Workplace review website Glassdoor, also found that 67% of applicants look for a diverse workforce when contemplating an offer.
- Another research on Venture Capitalist Firms found that more diverse teams, those with more women and people of color in leadership roles, lead to an overall better return on investments.
These stats prove that companies need to take a hard look at unconscious bias in hiring and find ways to mitigate them.
But is it relevant to remote hiring?
The short answer here is yes! When we speak of remote hiring and job interviews, we may think that surely biases have no ground here, especially with all the zoom interviews. Yet, newer studies have found that a candidate’s video background, camera quality, background noises, and even the availability of tech can lead to biased hiring. Recruiters often assume that people with fewer hi-tech gadgets, less privacy, or more noisy backgrounds would not be able to focus on their work.
This can lead to recruiters missing out on great talent solely based on arbitrary grounds, like a candidate’s zoom background and microphone quality. Consequently, if we add these new-found prejudices to the pre-existing ones, we would have a hefty list of biases to navigate through for remote hiring.
Turing’s Intelligent Vetting Process: What is it and how can it eliminate unconscious bias in hiring?
Turing’s AI-backed Intelligent Talent Cloud uses automation to source, vet, match, and manage talent from across the world. The coolest aspect of the matching engine is that AI manages every process, from start to finish! This further leads to professional, unbiased vetting and shortlisting of candidates.
How is Turing’s Intelligent Vetting different from an unbiased recruiter’s?
- Cutting out the middle man
Humans are subjected to and conditioned to form opinions and prejudices of varying intensities. We cannot truly say that any of us, even the most well-trained ones, lack bias. Conscious biases can be checked, however, unconscious biases remain with us far longer than any one of us would like to admit.
When looking for candidates for a particular role, the AI sorts and sifts through thousands of candidates from the Turing planetary pool of 2 Million+ developers. Turing’s intelligent vetting system does not have the understanding to be selective because of prejudices; hence, the sorting is as unbiased as can be. - No job description bias allowed
Job Descriptions are one of the first places recruiters can exhibit bias, whether that’s a conscious choice or an unconscious one. Often, the framing of sentences and words can trigger certain groups of individuals to feel like they cannot apply for the job role.
The Turing Intelligent Talent Cloud does not publish such job descriptions. Turing creates its own job description to ensure that the language and the framing are pretty straightforward. By ensuring that no individual or group feels targeted or left out, our partner companies never miss out on hiring great talent. - Standardized and rigorous vetting
Skill Tests and evaluations are another huge exhibitors of bias. Often, the practice of unstandardized interview questions and skill tests eliminates worthy candidates who would flourish on a standard testing scale.
Turing uses a standardized Vetting Process, wherein apart from critical skill tests, most developers go through the same set of questions (depending on the skill level and hierarchy disclosed in the resume).
The Turing vetting process allows any developer from any part of the world to apply for any job role, given that the developer passes the coding challenge and stack tests pertaining to the required tech stack/s. By shortlisting candidates on the basis of merit, skill, and talent, our partner companies receive an unbiased selection of thoroughly vetted candidates.
With diverse teams boasting of such significant benefits, it is essential to address and mitigate biases in our work cultures to the best of our efforts. Although you can implement certain business practices and tools to reduce biased hiring, nothing works better than investing in intelligent technology to do the hiring for you.
If you too are looking to eliminate the hiring bias at your firm, head to Turing’s Hire Page and let technology take the wheel.
