During recruitment, HR professionals and recruiters get subconsciously influenced by the personal preferences that they have built over the years. These preferences culminate into cognitive bias, showing an inclination towards one type of candidate while rejecting the idea of considering others. These biases are not only difficult to treat but also almost impossible to detect in the first place. It happens while recruiters do not even realize how their unconscious bias affects hiring decisions.  

Diversity is now perceived as an organizational strength and not just a form of regulatory compliance. A study by McKinsey & Company indicates that businesses with gender and ethnic diversity outperform others by 25-33% in terms of profitability. A research study by Deloitte highlights that approximately 68% of leading organizations are recruiting diverse candidates and investing in technologies to reduce workplace bias.  

“A diverse mix of voices leads to better discussions, decisions, and outcomes for everyone.”

 — Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google

With the increased significance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace, technologies driven by artificial intelligence (AI) have been identified as tools that can help reduce recruitment bias and select candidates on merit, irrespective of their caste, ethnicity, and gender. And one of the ways how an organisation can utilize AI to its maximum is via the process of Equitable Hiring. Let’s take a look at how. 

Understanding Equitable Hiring

Equitable hiring is a phenomenon in recruitment that focuses on hiring a diverse workforce to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at the workplace. Equitable hiring focuses on aligning recruiters to deliver the best talent to the organisation irrespective of ethnicity, caste, religion, or sex. When businesses focus on equitable hiring to promote DEI at the workplace, they enjoy benefits from the competitive spirit of diverse talent. 

Eliminating biases

The toughest challenge to resolve biases during recruitment is to track them in the first place. Since biases are difficult to track and eliminate, AI-driven tools for equitable hiring seem to be the solution. AI technologies remove the scope of human intervention in selecting the right candidate, eliminating any cognitive bias resulting from stereotypes or personal mindset.  

AI tools level the playing field by choosing applicants with skills and experience pertinent to the specific job, thereby ensuring employers that they have access to the best talent. These types of intelligent software systems are being used to scout, engage, screen, and even interview diverse and prime candidates. It has been proved that AI-driven recruitment solutions significantly reduce the duration of the entire recruitment process, hire better candidates, and improve retention rates. 

Blind Hiring practices for Equitable Hiring

The key to using AI for equitable hiring is to follow blind hiring practices from the beginning of your recruitment process. Blind hiring is the phenomenon wherein recruiters judge the applicants based on their skills and aptitude, not knowing their ethnicity, gender, or educational background up till they are finally selected. It ensures only the most talented candidates get invited to interview, irrespective of their personal background. 

AI-driven technologies are critical to ensure blind hiring. Platforms enabled with AI can evaluate cognitive aptitude and measuring overall skills as a part of a pre-employment test, eliminating any biases. Using Artificial Intelligence, an online or remote assessment framework could be developed comprising a series of questions mocking real-life scenarios, video interviews, or games. Organisations have also been using facial recognition software to assess personality traits. 

Before the series of tests and interviews, you can define a series of competencies and traits that you are going to be looking at and set a benchmark score. Design the questions that would help you to evaluate the desired set of skills and feed your inputs in a program. To set up the scoring system, define the identifiable responses (positive and negative) according to which a candidate shall be scored.  

Platforms using AI with robust machine learning algorithms can learn to test, evaluate, score, and rank candidates based on personality traits, cognition, and communications skills, etc. Applicants with the highest scores will be shortlisted, and the ones with negative responses will be eliminated automatically. 

Sniper AI – an Intelligent Tool to ensure Equitable Hiring

Recruitment Smart, in association with Carnegie Melon University, has developed a game-changing product, Sniper AI, to help companies carry out unbiased recruitment. Sniper AI matches applicants’ resumes and finds a perfect fit for the given job specifications with stunning accuracy at blinding speed, not taking into account their ethnic or educational background. Its advanced machine learning algorithms identify the nature of bias, if any, and then address them through an AI-based recommendation engine, engendering ethical hiring while protecting the candidate’s identity, thus promoting equitable hiring.

 Digital Assistance via Chatbot

Recruitment Smart offers chatbot-enabled Digital Assistance to streamline pre-screening and interview rounds for selecting best-suited applicants. The conversational chatbot engages with candidates and guides them to upload the CV and list their attributes in the desired format. Candidates can chat with the AI-chatbot from any channel with questions and replies customised as per the business rule. 

The chatbot conducts consistent and structured interviews asking the same set of defined questions to every candidate, standardizing the entire interview process. It helps the client in its equitable hiring goals as the assessment of an applicant occurs on the factors potentially affecting organisation’s productivity and performance. 

Recruitment Smart pioneering AI-driven recruitment

As one of the leading HR tech companies, Recruitment Smart has been offering AI-driven recruitment solutions to recognize and implement different means of promoting diversity in businesses. Our advanced machine learning algorithms identify the nature of bias, if any, and then address them through an AI-based recommendation engine, engendering ethical and equitable hiring while protecting the candidate’s identity. Recruitment Smart, through its offering of Sniper AI, has been able to reduce about 40% of various types of biases, which existed in workplace settings of different clients. Our robust tools empower organisations to automate talent acquisition and reduce the initial screening funnel by 60%, the time spent on CV scanning by 53%, and sourcing cost by 37%.