Eliminating Recruitment Bias

When quizzed on the 23rd November by the Womens & Equalities Committee, on the political balance of the Social Mobility Commission, its chair Katharine Birbalsingh told MPs that looking at CVs in detail can make you biased.

Research by Ladders showed that recruiters spend an average of 7.4 seconds looking at a CV before deciding whether to interview, during which they looked at just 6 things, of which name was one. The National Bureau of Economic Research revealed that CVs with Caucasian sounding names were 50% more likely to get an interview than those with an identical CV with non-Caucasian names. In 2015 David Cameron declared the issue of Bias against ‘ethnic sounding names’ as part of his NHS agenda.

Recruitment Bias is not just against ethnicity. Insync Surveys asked over 1,000 hiring managers to evaluate 2 CV’s with the exact qualifications except for one difference. One was from Simon Cook, the other from Susan Campbell.  Even among female recruiters Simon was the favourite.

What Can Recruiters Do?

Recruitment bias is prevalent, especially when it is sub-conscious. When asked what safeguards are in place against it, recruiters could ask ‘what can we do about it?’, especially as training has proved to be ineffective, as are name blind CVs.

HMRC and ONS report that for the 29.8 million employees on PAYE, the median monthly pay was £2,100 (£25,200 p.a.).  The HMRC reports that in 2022, 75% of the working population earned less than £40,000.  For a recruiter looking to fill a vacancy with a remuneration of say £30,000 there is a limit to both the time and cost that can be afforded. In the current recruitment environment, there is a limit to how much the applicant is prepared to engage at the early stage of application.

The Equality Act 2010 says that bias is discriminatory, yet bias is prevalent in recruitment, partially because it is so hard to police it. 

Low Cost Solution

There is a low cost fool-proof solution that can also provide the recruiter with a credible audit trail that proves the elimination of recruitment bias, its called TR Recruiter.

It takes the applicant 70 seconds to apply for the vacancy using TR Recruiter, during which (from 1.8 billion data end points) it generates a soft skills analysis which it compares to the template created for the vacancy. Using the psychologists objective baseline, the Five Factor Model, TR Recruiter immediately identifies the best people to interview first (cutting Time To Fill by up to 70%). 

Populating the interview pool with applicants based upon their soft skills, TR Recruiter excludes gender bias, ethnicity bias, age and background bias from the decision making process.

By using TR Recruiter you can program unconscious bias out of your recruitment program.