All aspects of professional life both benefit and suffer from human input, and recruitment processes are no exception. Human involvement in recruitment, as in all professional processes, enriches and enhances the overall experience, but also opens up space for a myriad of errors. Thankfully Hiring Cycle is here now, and recruitment processes are much smoother, much fairer and much more productive.
The essential problem with human involvement in recruitment is the issue of bias. This problem takes precedence over problems of cost and timing. Humans are unintentionally biased and this inevitably affects the selection of candidates, sometimes resulting in counterproductive decisions. There are, therefore, procedures and protocols in place to mitigate this problem and pave the way for fairer and better recruitment processes. The problems however, had been, up until a very near past, impossible to completely get rid of. But now we’re here and we are intent on making recruitment bias truly a thing of the past.
In simple terms, recruitment bias is making a judgement about a candidate based on initial impressions and factors inherently unrelated to work. Gender bias is very common and it results in the disproportionately more common hiring of male candidates than female candidates. Beauty bias that causes the recruitment process to be affected by the attractiveness of certain candidates is also common, although there is no data to suggest attractive people are better employees. Biases related to intuition, halo effect, affinity and attribution, damage recruitment processes and possibly cause making poor decisions based on the wrong variables, ultimately harming the company’s productivity and employer brand.
HR experts have long been aware of these issues and have devised procedures to minimize recruitment bias. Mainstream solutions include forming recruitment boards and panels with experts from a variety of backgrounds, rewriting job descriptions in order to remove gendered or discriminatory language, structuring interviewing processes for the best results, and, making use of technology, which is where Hiring Cycle comes in.
Hiring Cycle makes it possible to make data-driven decisions by streamlining your recruitment processes and placing the power of its algorithm in your palm. With its extensive domain knowledge it can sift through candidates with ease, highlighting just the right ones for the job description. Hiring Cycle cleanses recruitment of any bias and prejudice, resulting in quicker, better-informed, to-the-point hiring processes, opening the doors to a new era of recruitment that will be for the benefit of both candidates and recruiters.