ne unconscious bias that might catch you out is age discrimination. This often manifests as only hiring people with so many years of experience, which can exclude young generations of candidates, or exclusively taking on people below a certain age, which discriminates against older workforces.
Another example of unfair recruitment practices may include stereotyping and only hiring men for manual labour roles, or women for customer care, rather than reviewing each candidate on the basis of their experience or ability to do the job well. In many cases, it’s better to remove or ignore personal information from CVs and go purely off skills and experience instead to ensure an inclusive recruitment and selection process — but there are still ways that indirect discrimination can creep in.
How to ensure your recruitment and selection processes are fair
Even if you know what discrimination is, it can be difficult to know how to keep it out of your recruitment process. There are three main steps you’ll have to consider to make sure your recruitment and selection processes are fair and inclusive: advertising the position, choosing candidates to interview, and writing interview questions.
1. Write a fair job application form or advert
When putting together your advert, try to refrain from describing a person or writing with a certain type of individual in mind. You can avoid indirectly discriminatory elements by simply sticking to the facts and giving an outline of the job instead, so talk about the responsibilities the role entails and identify the most crucial skills needed to do it well. Being too specific could put off some candidates even though they may be qualified to apply.
Applicants make decisions about which jobs to apply for in different ways. For example, women are generally less likely to put themselves forward for jobs if they don’t feel they meet 100% of the criteria. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to apply even if they don’t fulfil all the prerequisites (Harvard Business Review). With this in mind, try to stick to only the most relevant requirements for the role rather than ‘nice-to-haves’. This way, you can avoid putting people off and more candidates will feel confident enough to apply.
Another element of job application writing that could catch you out is gendered language. Gendered language can be as simple as using pronouns such as “he” and “she” in your content. It also includes gendered nouns, such as “businessman” or “businesswoman”, that are best made neutral where possible (i.e. “business person”).
Similarly, in foreign languages such as French, words can be either masculine or feminine. This system doesn’t exist in the English language, but words can still be biased towards gender stereotypes: for example, using words like “competitive” (masculine) and “collaborative” (feminine) will attract different kinds of candidates to apply. Inclusive language includes a fair balance of masculine and feminine biased words, which can help you ensure equality in recruitment.
There are plenty of tools online that can help you identify issues like gendered language and write more inclusive job descriptions, so when you’re happy with what you’ve written, you may wish to run your adverts through text analysing software to make sure you’ve got it right.
You may also wish to include an equal opportunities statement on your job advert. This should be a few short sentences explaining that everyone has the right to apply for the role and that your company strives to be an equal opportunities employer. Including this will communicate to potential applicants that they can expect an inclusive culture at your company. They should then feel safe applying to work for you and you may see a more diverse candidate pool as a result.
Once written, it’s a good idea to advertise your position through as many outlets as possible to make sure you’re reaching all types of jobseeker. Even posting an advert on more than one job board website is a step in the right direction, as different sites will have different users and demographic