Technology, training and recruitment

April 8th, 2019 | Industry News

A recent article in Personnel Today reveals that while many organisations are trying hard to find methods of blind recruitment, unconscious bias is almost impossible to eradicate unless there’s a sophisticated software solution that can remove the subtle indicators that allow unconscious bias to thrive.

Recruitment Software like ours is designed to help companies manage their recruitment processes effectively and one feature of the best recruitment software for agencies is the ability to remove language that gives hints to gender. For example, the report says that “analysing… the average number of words and unique words used by male and female candidates across all sectors showed that female candidate CVs tend to be longer and use a greater variety of words.” While no recruiting software can alter such information as the variety of word use, it is possible to harmonise CV length so that all candidates have a similar ‘feeling’ CV.

Online recruitment software can also engage with another frequent element that triggers unconscious bias – the tendency of men and women to express similar activities very differently. The most striking example came from the retail sector where men used words such as football, play, sport, business, club, technology, computer, mobile, IT, leadership while women described voluntary activity with art, child, volunteer, shop, assistant, assist, social, design, organise, create. Part of this does simply express a difference in activities – the number of women who play football is still relatively low, for example. But men and women do tend to be in a similar number of clubs and have similar levels of responsibilities – they just describe them very differently.

Powerful recruitment database software can reduce these evidences of gender so that candidates can be viewed neutrally, which is vital in the STEM sector, for example, where the supply of candidates is low and demand is high. Of course, recruitment consultants also need to be trained to be aware of the likelihood of unconscious gender bias, so they can do their best to eradicate it.

Boost hiring potential through digital footprint

For candidates, there’s a fascinating new study that shows individuals with a substantial LinkedIn profile were a massive 71% more likely to get to interview than those who didn’t. So what’s the difference? A basic LinkedIn profile contains less than 500 characters in the summary, fewer than five connections and no detail in their work experiences. This is a crucial point because an inadequate LinkedIn profile actually damages a candidate’s chances of being interviewed: detail rich LinkedIn profiles earned a 13.5% interview rate, no LinkedIn profile candidates had a 7.9% call to interview, whilst – astonishingly – those candidates who had a basic LinkedIn profile came off worst of all, with just a 7.2% interview chance.