Recruitment and Selection

Proven strategies for addressing unconscious bias in recruitment and selection

Inclusive recruitment is a core skill for managers. Their ability to recruit and select talent in an inclusive way has a direct impact on the quality and diversity of your talent. Our bespoke inclusive recruitment training draws on over 27 years of experience in building fair practice in attraction, recruitment and retention processes.

From design to delivery, we tailor our training to align with your business case and organisational culture. Our face-to-face training offers an immersive experience featuring an innovative live interview scenario with a real candidate. Interactive, pragmatic and engaging, delegates will leave our workshops able to find practical applications of their newfound diversity knowledge in every day work situations.

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Unconscious bias in recruitment and selection training – what to expect

Our one-day unconscious bias in recruitment and selection training course has four key elements:

  1. Legal context, company procedure and effective recruitment preparation
  2. Sifting and shortlisting candidates fairly and without bias
  3. The Live Interview: unconscious bias in interviewing and decision making
  4. Post-interview considerations.

Your recruiting managers can expect:

  • Fast-paced, engaging and upbeat delivery
  • A set of practical tools to take away and apply proactively to their day-to-day work
  • Exercises and facilitation that reinforce the business benefits of responding correctly to unfair and unwanted bias.

Your managers will leave with:

  • A comprehensive understanding of the types of unconscious bias, and their impact on the recruitment process
  • Awareness of the power of assumption, association and preference
  • Appreciation what drives ideas of cultural ‘fit’ in an organisation
  • The practical tools they need to design person specifications and selection criteria that are fair, clear and avoid adverse impact
  • Greater confidence in managing their own bias in interviews or decision-making
  • The ability to identify unconscious bias in others and challenge it
  • An understanding of the legal essentials on recruitment and selection, plus recent findings from research into bias and its effects.

How our live interviews address unconscious bias in recruitment and selection

Our unconscious bias in recruitment and selection workshop features an innovative ‘live interview’ scenario. This exercise is specially designed to illustrate how unconscious bias operates, and the impact it can have on recruitment and selection.

Bias is especially likely to appear when managers are under pressure to fill a given role. Our dynamic approach will develop your managers’ awareness of unconscious bias at every stage in the recruitment process. Practical and engaging, it will enable them to apply best practice immediately to their everyday activities at work.

Inclusive Recruitment Interview Panel diagram
"EW Group are flexible and accommodating to the needs of clients. Their staff and trainers are approachable and professional, and we consistently receive positive feedback from delegates on their subject matter expertise and innovative approach." Claire Thompson, Corporate Policy and Community Manager at London Borough of Havering

The Live Interview: our practical unconscious bias exercise for recruiting managers

Our innovative live interview exercise is peer learning at its most powerful. Your managers will become the panel of a simulated interview and closely observe one another. Our expert facilitator will then highlight the subtle ways in which unconscious bias can affect the recruitment process.

With a job candidate in the room (sourced either by you internally or by us), our facilitator will create a safe and constructive environment in which to consider and critique your managers’ behavioural tendencies. It’s an enlightening approach, and one which we find:

  • Reduces nervousness around unconscious bias in recruitment and selection
  • Takes away any fear of the unknown around the subject
  • Empowers recruiting managers to address the issue head-on.
Companies with at least 30% of women in leadership or executive positions adds 6% to net profit margin
Diverse businesses are 35% more likely to financially outperform their industry’s national average
Inclusive Recruitment Open Course

Our highly practical Inclusive Recruitment one-day workshop builds the skills and confidence needed to address unconscious bias in recruitment and selection. It’s also one of our most popular unconscious bias training courses. This is because:

  • It deals with unconscious bias in a specific decision-making moment for recruiting managers: the interviewing process.
  • The themes explored are universally relevant to overcoming unconscious bias in the workplace (when selecting project teams, having difficult conversations, giving feedback, etc.).

How does unconscious bias in recruitment and selection operate?

We all have unconscious bias in some form. When interviewers feel under pressure, it’s easy for them to take shortcuts, reverting to established associations and finding natural affinities with those candidates who are most like them. This affinity bias can lead to the recruitment of staff who mirror the recruiter. Interviewers also tend to become less flexible and culturally adaptable in their approach, making them less likely to bring the best out of their candidates. (Check out our ‘Everyone Guide’ on How to be an inclusive recruiter).

Illustration of a spotlight - EW Group

Why should we address recruitment bias?

We believe that workforce diversity has a measurable effect on business performance. 85% of the world’s CEOs agree with us, according to a PwC survey from 2015. Diverse teams are more innovative and perform better in problem-solving. They can also outperform homogeneous teams by 58% in team assessments.

Developing genuine awareness of how unconscious bias operates – and practical tools to minimise it – is key to your organisation harnessing the diversity at its disposal.

Our unconscious bias training will enable your managers to significantly enhance your talent pipeline, from better staff recruitment to fairer opportunities for career progression. Our focus will be to ensure any barriers to the progress of diverse candidates are removed. The course will also support your managers to have open, honest and constructive conversations with their direct reports, and to sensitively unpick their everyday interactions at work.

Learn more about our innovative approaches to unconscious bias.

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Teams with more than one member who represent your target customers are up to 158% more likely to understand their needs
Diverse organisations are 45% more likely to improve their market share

Related Work

Unconscious Bias Recruitment Selection City University case study

City University

At City University, our innovative close-observation workshops equip managers with an awareness of when and how unconscious bias might be operating, and what they can practically do to avoid it.

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