Does your sourcing software have diversity built in?

Let’s do an experiment. Close your eyes and picture in your mind, a doctor and a nurse reviewing charts in a hospital. 

Got it? 

Now, what are the genders of the doctor and nurse?  

Your answers will depend on your culture and your life experience. We are all conditioned to think certain ways and make certain assumptions, which we unconsciously apply to our daily decisions. Our conditioned responses make up our implicit bias, always working behind the scenes to tell us how the world should look. This doesn’t make us bad or wrong, it just makes us human.  

Suggested reading on DEI hiring: Blueprint to drive DEI hiring in the workplace

Implicit and historical bias in recruiting

Everyone in the hiring process should be aware of implicit biases in selecting candidates. We subconsciously respond when we encounter a candidate who attended the same school or was born in the same country. None of these factors affect how successful a candidate might be in the open position, but they can end up affecting who we shortlist and who we reject during the sourcing process. Presumptions about a competent applicant may prevent us from discovering the ideal match.

Another kind of bias – historical bias – appears in poorly designed recruiting tools using artificial intelligence (AI). AI can be designed to do what humans do and can even mimic our human biases. If a recruitment tool is just geared to discover people who look like top achievers, we get new hires who look like today’s workforce. If a company’s best engineers are all men, the AI might only highlight men for new roles. That’s no way to increase diversity in an organization!  

Suggested reading for unbias hiring: Combatting Bias in Machine Learning Algorithms: For Recruiting

Diversity job sites…effective and expensive

Recruiting firms are doing everything possible to eliminate implicit prejudice, overcome past bias, and discover more diverse applicants. A host of new job sites are springing up that offer self-identified candidates who might be overlooked because of bias.  

These are very effective and should be a part of your diversity strategy. But they can be expensive. It may not be practical to pay an extra fee for every job when you want to increase diversity across the board. And posting to extra job boards can complicate workflows, result in duplicate candidates, and add complexity to the already time-consuming sourcing process.  

At Leoforce, we believe you shouldn’t have to pay extra or change your workflows to find more diverse candidates for every job. We’ve built diversity into every aspect of our Arya recruiting tool. Our no-cost options help you more quickly meet your individual diversity goals. 

Diversity recruiting is built into Arya

Diversity has always been a design goal for the Arya AI system, from the very first line of code we wrote. Our AI rules – or algorithms – have been built to identify the candidates most likely to succeed in a job, rather than to simply look for candidates who look like your current workforce. Arya examines a candidate’s complete professional path to better match talents, experience, and potential to job success determinants.

For example, you might think that someone who graduated from a top-rated school will surely do better than those who attend lesser-known schools. But in practice, that turns out to be a very small predictor for job success. So, by design, Arya offers a more diverse stream of qualified candidates for every job, without weighing useless factors.

Arya goes further by building in two optional diversity tools that can accelerate your diversity goals. Every Arya Quantum and Fusion customer in the US can use these options at no extra cost.  

Masking against implicit bias

Overcoming implicit human bias is hard (and we should never stop trying), but we can easily hide what triggers bias among recruiters. The Arya masking feature hides certain candidate data during the sourcing process that can trigger implicit bias, such as name and school. The recruiter can then evaluate the factors that really matter without being swayed by unconscious bias. These fields are revealed only after you have a shortlist, or when the candidate enters the applicant tracking system (ATS). In addition, masking can be applied by the administrator to all jobs for all recruiters, or individually.  

However, masking is not enough. Organizations can help recruiters identify their own biases and make more objective judgments throughout the interview and selection processes.

Diversity filters

With our diversity filters, you can fine-tune your diversity strategy by promoting in your pipeline members of a protected class: women, minorities, and veterans. Arya analyzes public data to forecast which eligible applicants are most likely to fulfill the customer’s diversity objectives. The algorithm is predictive and does not claim to identify diverse candidates with certainty. But, over a short time, your success in recruiting diverse candidates should be greatly improved. Our research indicates, gender is accurately predicted in 85% of instances, while ethnicity is correctly predicted in 70% of cases. Overall, identifying diverse candidates has been ~75% successful.

It’s your choice! Wish to hire more veterans? Simply indicate that when you create the job, the sourcing process will be customized to help you reach that goal. 

Technology isn’t the whole answer

Above all, none of us can think that we can “outsource” diversity to a technology solution. Even a successful diversity recruiting strategy will fail if new hires find themselves in a non-inclusive work environment. The new hires will simply quit and tell others about their bad experience, harming your employer brand and business performance.

A diversified recruiting approach will help you bring about significant changes in your organization. Choose a recruitment tool that evaluates talent equitably, balancing historical bias that keeps tomorrow’s workforce looking like today’s.

Arya – the world’s premier recruiting platform – helps your organization meet its individual diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) goals.  There’s no need to pay for specialty job boards, complicate your workflows, or invest in new technology. You get a more diverse pipeline every day, for any job, because Arya has built-in features to promote diversity.