How to Improve Fairness in Recruiting

At Recruiting Toolbox, we’ve worked with executives and top HR leaders at hundreds of companies in 20+ countries. If you’re like most organizations, fairness remains a priority even as DEI has been largely deprioritized across many organizations. This page has some curated content that’s designed to help you win in your job as a recruiting professional focused on fairness and quality hiring practices.

• Diversity Recruiting Efforts Won’t Significantly Improve Until We Address These Two Barriers: John Vlastelica wrote an article for the LinkedIn Talent Blog outlining two significant internal cultural barriers to equitable recruiting success. A hyper-focus on speed/time to fill and the perceived safeness of only hiring candidates from hiring manager preferred backgrounds.
• What Recruiters Can Do to Ensure Every Candidate Has a Fair Shot at the Interview: John Vlastelica writes this LinkedIn Talent Blog post about the things we can and should do to improve access to opportunities for all candidates. How are you – as a recruiting team – ensuring the people you want to hire are set up for success?

Attraction and Sourcing Strategy

Good sourcing starts with a deep understanding of must-have requirements, multiple candidate success profiles, and strategies that ensure you look for talent across many sources.

• Why It’s Time to End the ‘Ideal Target Candidate Profile’: John Vlastelica wrote this popular post on LinkedIn’s Talent Blog to address a root issue that’s preventing us from getting more talent from under-represented groups.  John admits he was part of the problem earlier in his recruiting career, as he enabled a lot of “ideal, single target candidate profile” sourcing work with hiring managers.  Now he wants to fix that by widening the aperture.

• Reframe the way you talk about talent from under-represented groups to focus more on #FOMO and untapped talent: LinkedIn’s Talent Blog featured John’s suggestions on how to influence hiring managers to think about diversity differently.  Traditionally, Influencing hiring teams to focus more on hiring from under-represented groups is framed up around social justice, innovation, legal issues/compliance, equal opportunity/fairness, etc. – all important and powerful reasons. But why don’t we talk more about missing out on great talent (#FOMO) or use terms like “untapped” or “under-employed” versus under-represented or diverse?

• Degree Inflation: Relax your degree requirements to expand your pool of potential candidates. “The capacity to create economic inclusion is affected by degree requirements. When you say ‘college required,’ you’re excluding 80 percent-plus of African Americans and 85 percent-plus of the Latinx population.” Check out the research and company examples here.

• Widen your aperture by considering adjacent jobs with similar skill sets.  This data visualization tool – designed by a UK innovation firm – was built to help identify jobs most at risk for automation, but it serves another purpose.  It can help you identify jobs that have workers that may be similarly-skilled to the job you’re working on, so that you can broaden your search and consider people who may be able to make an easy transition into a new job.

If you talk to a typical hiring manager, they’ll argue that 80%+ of their challenge in hiring more people from under-represented groups is all about sourcing. “Just find me more!” But, in our work with hundreds of companies, the majority of the challenges are actually mid-funnel, in the interviewing and selection process.

It doesn’t work to base hiring decisions on intuition and “culture fit” – turns out, we’ve all got assumptions and cognitive biases that shape our decisions. To make the best hires using fair hiring practices, you need to make sure your interview process uses valid selection methods and hires for culture add.