Remove Hiring Bias: 5 Objective Ways To Find A+ International Hires

The lack of skilled workers poses a risk to economic growth, and hiring managers are feeling the pressure to look in every corner to find the best talent they can.

At the same time, hiring bias prevents many companies from really taking their hiring game to the next level.

But the cost of a bad hire should scare any hiring manager enough to think twice about how bias might be affecting their decisions. As tricky as it can be, removing hiring bias from your team is a great way to find truly amazing candidates who will elevate your business.

Here are five ways to assess if someone is an A+ hire. Designed to help eliminate hiring bias, each of these methods will help you gauge skills and identify behaviors that are critical to on-the-job success.

Have candidates identify problems in your process

Give your candidates a quick summary of a process that needs improvement at your company. This task will help you identify organizational skills, understanding of processes, and evaluate their critical thinking skills. For example, you might notice it takes too long to get blog posts approved and published. Ask candidates to identify bottlenecks and show you how they might structure it differently. Ask them to include any tools they would use to speed things up and increase efficiency.

Ask prospective employees to solve a current (non-sensitive) issue

If you’re facing an issue, or have a recurring problem, assign it to them as you would to a team member. Have them explain how they would resolve the issue and ensure it doesn’t come up again.

This task helps you identify your candidates’ problem-solving ability, but make sure the issue you give them doesn’t involve any sensitive information. For example, change or remove client names for anonymity.

Gauge their foresight for the industry

Have your candidates make 2–5 long-term and short-term industry predictions. The caliber of their answers will show you how invested they are in the industry, because it indicates they’ve either done their research or are fully immersed in your world already. Look for thoughtful, insightful predictions that your company and team members would find valuable.

Use a proven assessment tool

Assessment tools are perfect objective evaluators for a candidate’s ability to rock a job. Whereas a resume and interview can only tell you so much, an assessment tool that’s backed by science and benchmarking (more on that later) will provide an unbiased analysis of your candidate.

Assessments can give you details about your candidates’ behaviors and values, as well as their skill level. That means you’ll know whether someone lacks empathy, is introverted or extroverted, or has strong leadership traits.

Create a candidate success profile

A benchmark is a profile of the ideal candidate for a job. For example, you can create benchmarks by having your top performers take assessments, then using their results to evaluate incoming candidates. The closer a profile looks (skills, traits, behaviors, etc) to your top performers, the closer they are to your benchmark.

Create a benchmark of your best employees, and look for similar soft skills and other traits in your future candidates. If you are starting from scratch, take a look at these 7 traits that are great predictors of candidate success.

Learn what’s important to your candidate

Money, opportunity, career, benefits… Different motivators drive different people. Learn whether your candidate is career-focused or job-focused to differentiate the people who will push the limits (in a good way) from those who will do the bare minimum to not get fired.

Ensure you have incentive alignment between your business goals and employees’ goals. If someone is motivated by results, they will work differently than someone who is motivated by a salary.

That doesn’t mean your candidates should ignore what they’re worth financially, but when your employees have motivations that also contribute to business success, it’ll be easier to retain happy, effective A players.

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