The words ‘fairness’, ‘inclusivity’, and ‘diversity’ are commonplace in professional language, particularly when it comes to recruitment. But what do they really mean, and how do you know for sure that your hiring process isn’t excluding great candidates?
It’s important to practice fair hiring and make sure your methods of recruitment allow everyone the same chance to get the job. Doing so isn’t just the morally right thing to do — it can also have benefits for your business. Inclusive recruitment means you can access a broader range of talent while providing equal opportunities, and you’ll be more likely to find the best employees to fill your roles. Plus, ensuring you employ people with a variety of insights, skillsets, and approaches to working can help with things like ideation, and even make your company more efficient.
Below, we’ll take you through ways of defining and identifying discrimination in recruitment, plus three important steps to making your job advert, selection process, and interview questions fair.
Defining and identifying discrimination in recruitment
Discrimination in the workplace is illegal under the Equality Act 2010, which means that unfair recruitment processes are against the law. This act identifies eight protected characteristics or types of hiring discrimination when it comes to choosing candidates:
- Gender reassignment
- Marriage and civil partnership
- Religion or belief
- Sexual orientation
This means you need to avoid making decisions based on things like a person’s racial or religious identity, gender, sexual orientation, and their relationship status. The act also requires you to practice other methods of inclusive recruitment, such as avoiding discriminating against pregnant candidates or those with children. Personal circumstances like these cannot factor into your selection process at all.
Examples of discrimination during the recruitment process
Even if you don’t set out to discriminate as part of your recruitment process, indirect discrimination is surprisingly common. One 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,