Blind Hiring and Workplace Diversity: Strategies That Work

Introduction

Improving diversity in the workplace depends on a variety of strategies that a company must adopt in order to be open to a broad range of workers. From blind hiring to closing the skills gap to creating educational pathways, organizations have multiple options available to them that have all been shown to work. Creating or improving diversity in the workplace starts with a state of mind, and from there that mindset can be supported with the right tools and techniques. This paper describes those tools and techniques that organizations can use to improve diversity in their workplace environments.

Blind Hiring and Removing Bias from Recruitment

Blind hiring is an excellent way to remove bias from the hiring process. Bias can arise whenever a human decision-maker evaluates people from groups different from their own. Because implicit bias can be found in nearly every human being, it is necessary to use tools like blind hiring that take inherent and often unrealized biases out of the equation.

The right mindset is the necessary starting point. That mindset begins with valuing diversity — a pro-social attitude that enhances one's appreciation for different people's backgrounds, customs, and cultures (Nelissen, Hülsheger, van Ruitenbeek, & Zijlstra, 2017). Valuing diversity is an important first step in creating a culture wherein blind hiring can be seen as an appropriate tool to increase workplace diversity. If one does not make the initial cognitive step of identifying diversity as a positive influence in the workplace, internal bias will remain and go unaddressed. One must therefore proceed from a bias-free principle and then take concrete actions to support that principle in execution.

Once diversity is recognized as a value worth pursuing, blind hiring becomes an obvious mechanism for achieving that goal (Bortz, 2018). Blind hiring gives recruiters and hiring managers a way to base their decisions on a candidate's skill level, job knowledge, experience, and ability to succeed. Factors such as age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, educational institution, and culture are removed from the equation entirely.

In practice, blind hiring is conducted by using a pre-hire test to assess the candidate's knowledge, skill level, and aptitude. The candidate is assigned an anonymous ID, and no identifying characteristics are provided beyond that ID. The only data the recruiter or hiring manager receives are the results from the pre-hire test. This eliminates the risk of inherent bias disqualifying a potential candidate due to some aspect of their personal background, and it opens the door to a wider range of diverse candidates who are evaluated purely on their merits.

Blind hiring can also be conducted using recruitment technology that anonymizes résumés. Anonymous interviews can be arranged through take-home questions submitted under an anonymous ID. In short, organizations have a variety of methods available to support blind hiring in the effort to increase diversity and reduce bias in recruitment.

Tech Startups and Blind Hiring Platforms

Tech startups since the early 2000s have been developing software to help HR teams implement blind hiring practices. Their focus has been on creating programs that assess applicants based on demonstrated performance rather than personal characteristics.

One notable example is the GapJumpers platform, which provides HR teams with a way to evaluate candidates through performance challenges. As Bussin and Christos (2018) demonstrate, GapJumpers is a real-world illustration of how tech startups are making it easier for HR teams to integrate blind hiring into standard hiring procedures.

GapJumpers works as follows: the HR team first develops a challenge relevant to the role they are trying to fill. Once they have identified the required skills and knowledge, they create a problem that a qualified candidate would be able to solve. The GapJumpers software includes a plug-in that can be linked to the company's website, redirecting job applicants to the GapJumpers page to complete the challenge.

This process allows GapJumpers to collect candidate data and return it to the HR team without revealing anything about the candidate beyond their demonstrated skill level. The team can therefore make early-stage decisions based solely on performance — not on gender, race, age, or any other characteristic that might trigger bias in a decision-maker.

An additional feature of GapJumpers is that the platform can independently assess and rank all applicants based on the metrics established by the HR team, without requiring ongoing team involvement during the assessment stage. The team simply receives a ranked list of candidates and uses those rankings to decide whom to invite for an interview.

This software is already in use by real-world companies. One such company is Return Path, an international email data solutions provider with more than 400 employees worldwide and headquarters in New York City. Return Path uses GapJumpers to remove potential bias from its talent selection process, ensuring it identifies top available talent regardless of background. The software eliminates the need for the HR team to manually strip identifying characteristics from applications — the platform handles that automatically, and the HR team assesses only the outcomes.

Conclusion

Improving diversity in the workplace is an essential element of success in today's world. Without diversity, a company will have a narrow perspective and may lack generational talent, skill variety, or labor diversity. The more diverse the workplace, the more perspectives and problem-solving approaches it can bring to bear. Blind hiring is one powerful way to increase diversity, enabling HR teams to evaluate candidates based solely on their performance on skill challenges, with platforms like GapJumpers making the process straightforward and bias-free. Closing the skills gap is another avenue, achievable through mentoring, training, and white-collar apprenticeships — as demonstrated by The Hartford and Zurich North America — in which organizations partner with local colleges to build structured learning-to-employment pipelines. Finally, companies must develop strategies to help workers and community members access educational pathways. Incentivization is often the critical ingredient, and both Starbucks and Amazon have shown that financial support for university attendance is a practical and effective way to make that happen. Together, these three strategies give organizations a comprehensive toolkit for building a more diverse, capable, and resilient workforce.

Bortz, D. (2018). Can blind hiring improve workplace diversity? SHRM HR Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-magazine/0418/pages/can-blind-hiring-improve-workplace-diversity.aspx

Bussin, M., & Christos, D. (2018). Blind hiring not as crazy as it sounds. HR Future, 2018(Sep 2018), 36–39.

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