Creating a diverse workplace should be at the top of mind for businesses of all sizes. A diverse workplace includes employees with remarkable thoughts and backgrounds in the world. The decision to hire a candidate would be based solely on their skills and ability to perform. Bias occurs when a person's brain makes a quick judgment based on a person's experience and background. Even the recruiter often doesn't know that he/she is making such a quick biased decision.

To remove bias from your recruitment process, you must recognize a situation from where bias can popup, which can transfer through a variety of powerful non-human solutions: Technology. Recruiters should always keep asking the question: Is my recruitment process biased? Doing so will naturally improve your hiring process and promote diversification. 

I have seen unconscious bias occurring in multiple organizations when recruiters pay more attention to favouritism. To create diversification in the workplace, blind hiring is an effective concept to adopt. I am adding a few tips to keep in mind about promoting diversification. 

1. Job Description: Job description is the beginning of your recruitment process. It has the power to influence potential job applicants with its content. When it comes to drafting the perfect job description, the gender implication of words can have a significant impact on the recruitment process. The term which focuses on competition over support and commitment seems to be far less attractive to female candidates. Limiting the number of superlative words and perspective on a job application will support far more potential employees to submit their duties.  

2. Choosing the Right AI Solution: AI is taking the recruitment world by a storm for a good reason. It makes the hiring process faster by removing repetitive tasks and simplifies the recruitment process. AI brings systematization in recruitment with numerous software; one of them is resume parser. With the introduction of resume parsing, sorting of resumes is a smooth breeze. It extracts candidate data from resumes and saves it in fields created for skill, experience, contact details, education, etc. You can also enable/disable fields as per your requirement to avoid bias in recruitment. Now you can disable fields that can bring bias in your hiring process. Sometimes, selected candidates do not join the organization due to some reasons. In this case, using matching technology will give you a similar resume and job recommendations relevant to resumes/jobs. This automation saves time for recruiters and fastens the recruitment process. The combination of technology and human resource is changing the working of recruiters and proving to be beneficial for the candidates. This enhances the efficiency of the organization.

3. Predictive Data decision:Data analysis has become an essential part of all business activities. An analysis of the candidate’s performance and career alignment, along with the skills, helps employers in finding the right fit. Through data-driven predictive models, companies can solve long-standing problems. Predictive data helps the company to stay proactive, assessing the candidate behavior through actual data, and removing bias from the recruitment process. With this process, the result will be extraordinary and informative.

4. Structured Interview: When recruiters conduct informal interviews, they will confront unintended bias. The structured interviews are more effective at reducing hiring bias than a non-structured interview. Without having a set of structured questions for candidates, bias will creep into the interview process. Recruiters should structure interview questions that should be consistent among every interview. Secondly, the interviewer should complete the follow-up process like completing a scorecard, feedback tool so that recruiters can assess each candidate's performance. These scorecards will help recruiters to rank candidates objectively. Structured interviews will level the playing fields of all candidates and make it easier to evaluate each candidate. Recruiters can ask for feedback from their candidates to explore how the candidate experiences the whole interview process. By giving such kinds of different experiences to every candidate, you are not leaving any room for inherent bias to take over.

I usually feel that conscious bias hinders the growth of an organization. However, we must remove that unconscious bias, which can also become a massive barrier to having better productivity.