Blind hiring is a recruitment strategy that blocks out candidates’ personal information. It can promote a more inclusive work environment by removing hiring prejudices that exclude candidates from underrepresented groups.
Implementing blind hiring practices can boost your DEI efforts for the following reasons:
- Minimizes the recruitment partialities related to gender, age, race/ethnicity, and abilities so candidates are assessed based on their capabilities
- Focuses on merit by highlighting the candidate’s actual skills and work experience. This ensures that individuals from marginalized individuals have a fair chance to compete based on their abilities.
- Increases your talent pool by encouraging a wider range of candidates to apply, including those who might have been discouraged by bias in the past. This increases the diversity of the applicant pool.
- Leads to better decision-making. Candidates are selected based on their qualifications and fit for the role, which can result in hires who are more likely to excel in their positions.
- Enhances the organization’s legal compliance by mitigating the risk of discrimination lawsuits and claims related to unfair hiring practices
Blind hiring addresses prejudices prevalent in recruitment, as cited in some studies:
- Candidates with Black names were 10% less likely to receive a callback than their counterparts with White-sounding names – National Bureau of Research
- Older candidates get job offers 68% lower than their younger colleagues – AARP
- Across all age groups, persons with a disability were much less likely to be employed than those with no disability – US Bureau of Labor Statistics
Different Types of Blind Hiring Tools
There are different types of blind hiring software recruiters can use during the different stages of the hiring process:
1. Anonymous resume screening software
These tools remove personally identifiable information from resumes and applications like photos, names, and age:
Pinpoint – Firstly, the candidate’s resume is shown without personal details such as name, race, ethnicity, address, age, gender, and photo. Then, if the applicant makes it to the shortlist and is invited for an interview, their anonymization is lifted.
Clovers – To make fair decisions, the tool helps by taking away biases in resumes and giving scores based on specific job skills. In addition, it automatically hides information that can trigger biases like affinity bias, stereotypes, and halo bias.
2. Blind interview platforms
Blind interview platforms start with initial interviews using chat, email, or audio calls, all while keeping candidates’ details private. So, this way, recruiters can assess answers without considering personal details.
Interview.io – To ensure safety and privacy, the software conducts interviews anonymously. So, it uses voice-masking technology to hide gender, preventing bias and making the technical hiring process easier.
Sapia.ai – To evaluate applications, the platform conducts open and clear interviews through text conversations. So, after candidates finish and submit their interviews, AI and machine learning are used to test and assess them for the job. It also ranks them based on values, traits, personality, communication skills, and more.
3. Skills-based assessment platforms
These platforms evaluate job seekers’ performances through skills-based tests or challenges
Toggle Hire – The platform provides ready-made assessment templates for an easy evaluation of candidates’ technical and soft skills. So, recruiters can swiftly grasp candidates’ strengths and weaknesses, thanks to a score breakdown by skill. In addition, they can design custom tests tailored to the specific role.
Harver – The assessments are checked by in-house psychologists and data scientists to collect job-related information scientifically. They provide various types of assessments, including gamified behavioral, cognitive, job knowledge, and skills tests.
Gapjumpers – The tool helps recruiters evaluate applicants based on how well they perform, not just their background or advantages. In addition, it offers Implicit Association Tests supported by Harvard to identify any hidden biases in candidates.
4. AI-powered screening and matching tools
These tools use algorithms to match candidates with job requirements, not looking at personal information. They analyze skills, experience, and qualifications to find the best-fit candidates.
Turing – This tool, powered by AI, helps match tech talent with organizations. It cuts down on hiring bias by focusing on a candidate’s skills as the main factor for selection.
5. Diverse candidate sourcing tools
Use these tools to source candidates from diverse talent pools by aggregating resumes and profiles from various sources. Recruiters can use the filter option to hide applicant’s personal information.
Seekout – Find talent from underrepresented groups with the software’s diversity filters. Its Talent Intelligence feature can assess representation and diversity within any talent pool, company, or location.
Entelo – Track down underrepresented candidates in minutes. It also has diversity pipeline reporting and assists them in eliminating unconscious bias in sourcing.
Celential.ai – This AI-powered hiring tool can reach a big group of 10 million engineering and sales professionals in the US, Canada, and Latin America. It specifically focuses on minority candidates.
6. Applicant tracking systems (ATS)
Most new ATS platforms have features for blind hiring or tools to automatically take out personal information from candidate profiles and applications.
FairHire – The company has a fully anonymized blind hiring program to make the recruitment process fair from start to finish. In addition, it uses smart people analytics supported by behavioral science.
Access People HR– Offers an advanced ATS with blind recruitment software, allowing recruiters to score applicants based on set questions. So, this way, the best candidate will stand out at the top of the pipeline.
7. Diversity analytics and reporting software
Track and study diversity numbers in the hiring process. So, this helps recruiters see how well their blind hiring efforts are working. And it also gives them ideas on how to make things better.
MeVitae – Review diversity hiring from attracting candidates to screening, figure out candidates’ engagement levels, and connect diversity and inclusion metrics with how well the business is doing. Also, it finds areas to improve for future changes in hiring strategies.
Included – Claims to be the first people analytics platform built with DEI data science, focusing on diversity in promotions and equity gap analysis.
8. Job Description and management software
JD management tools help recruiters write inclusive and bias-free job posts and ads.
Ongig – Gets rid of biased words and phrases in job descriptions to attract a diverse group of candidates, focusing on avoiding gender and racial biases. So, this tool easily makes job description templates and posts them fast. Also, you can keep all your job descriptions in one place.
Textio – This software uses AI to improve job descriptions by following data-driven advice on inclusivity, ensuring a great experience for candidates.
Why I wrote this:
When starting a blind hiring strategy, organizations need to think about their goals, needs, and the HR technology they already use. It’s also important to make sure that the blind hiring tools follow data privacy rules and don’t accidentally add other biases to the hiring process. Writing inclusive job descriptions can be valuable in your blind hiring process. Ongig can help you with that. Ready to see our tool in action? Book a demo, today.
