Are you Discriminatory?
Yes, that’s an inflammatory title. Sorry.
We’re pretty sure you’d say: “No”. But it’s more complicated than that.
You might have heard of unconscious bias. That’s when we make decisions based on our deep-seated thought patterns and assumptions, without being aware of them.
Neuro-science tells us that’s not a bad thing. It sometimes helps human beings to make snap judgments.
But, when recruiting, you have to bring your unconscious biases into consciousness in order to give all candidates an equal chance.
Unconscious bias in recruitment – some evidence
A Romanian woman with a BA Hons degree who’s lived in Leeds since 2015 applied for 40 jobs using identical CVs with different names.
She got 11 interviews when she applied as ‘Sarah C’ but no responses to identical applications in her own name of ‘Georgiana Popescu’.
In Germany, it’s the norm for people to submit a photo with their application. In a 2017 study, three identical applications were submitted to 1,500 jobs – one in the name of Sandra Bauer, and two in the name of Meryem Öztürk. In one of the Meryem photos, she was wearing a headscarf.
Meryem with a headscarf had to submit 4.5 times as many applications as Sandra Bauer to get the same number of callbacks for interview. Meryem without a headscarf had to submit 1.4 times as many.
Promoting diversity in the recruitment industry?
When trying to show an organisation as inclusive, many companies show photos and videos. But it’s important to be authentic, as these stories demonstrate:
- Levi’s are planning to use AI-generated models to increase diversity
- A bank repeated the same photos to show ‘diversity’ in a collage
It’s nothing new
Sadly, this has been going on for years – Lisa Wade, PhD, spoke about this in 2009 in her article Doctoring Diversity: Race and Photoshop.
So, maybe the question isn’t “Are you discriminatory?”, but “When was the last time you checked your unconscious bias?”
If you would like more thoughts and musings on recruitment, you might want to download Mitch’s free book “On Recruitment”.
Read more from Jackie on LinkedIn.
