The need for quality candidates is greater now than ever—but sacrificing fair hiring practices for efficiency is a mistake you don’t want to make. Over the past half-century, laws surrounding Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) have grown stricter and more specific in order to protect candidates from bias. 

Failing to make your hiring process equal opportunity can result in legal complications, but even mild slip-ups can result in applicants losing interest. Here are 10 fair hiring practices that your organization should make a part of its recruitment process.

Use Inclusive Wording

While it may seem common practice to make job ads gender-neutral, oftentimes we can unconsciously insert gender-specific wording into our writing. If applicants catch the slip-up it can often be a turn-off and can cause employers to lose a significant amount of talent and some of their good reputation. When finalizing your advertisements make sure to avoid using words like “man”, “he”, “her”, and “she”, and default to words like “they” and “them”. 

Train Interviewers On Fair Hiring

To avoid legal complications and implement fair hiring practices properly, make sure to train your interviewers on what not to bring up. Questions about age, marital plans/status, and anything regarding religion or ethnicity are huge faux-pas. 

Make sure to have the interviewers and your team hold on to your selection records after the process, as a failure to do so is a violation of 29 C.F.R. §1602.14. This includes all interview notes, as well as any documents related to the interview.

Onboard Your Talent Effectively

Onboarding properly is an important piece of the fair hiring puzzle. To provide everyone with equal opportunity is to treat new employees with respect and ensure their transition into working for your organization is smooth. Providing them with benefits options, a proper orientation, and a sincere welcome before their first day on the job can improve retention rates and inclusion.

Standardize Interviews

Creating a script for interviewers to follow can help eliminate hiring bias from the interview process. Prepare a set of questions for your interview team to read off, and ensure that they stick to those questions. Hammer in the fact that going off-script should be avoided whenever possible. This should ensure that fair hiring practices stay a major part of your recruitment process. 

Prioritize Qualifications

The questions posed to the candidate during an interview, the priorities during screening, and the assessments you send to talent should be focused majorly around one thing—if they’re qualified. Ask about experience, test the knowledge of their field, and be on the lookout for soft skills. With ability at the top of your list of priorities, fair hiring practices should fall into place naturally.

Hold Regular HR Meetings

Keeping your HR team up to date on fair hiring practices should become a regular occurrence. Meeting and discussing the newest policies ensures that everyone is on the same page, and understands what needs to be done to create an equal opportunity workplace.

Consider Internal Promotions

What’s more in tune with fair hiring practices than giving your current employees a chance at a new position? Sourcing internally can improve your organization’s inclusion by allowing current employees the opportunity to advance. Other ways to take advantage of internal sourcing include surveying your team’s soft and transferable skills, or receiving referrals and growing your connections.

Utilize Pre-Employment Assessments

Making pre-employment assessments a part of your recruitment process can make hiring more objective—but shouldn’t be used all the time. Assessments are objective by nature, so bias is almost never going to impact testing. However, pre-employment assessments can become tedious and drive applicants away if made too long. Assessments aren’t necessary when hiring a high-level employee either, as references and past work should speak for their talent. 

Recruit For The Future

When creating a job description, crafting the interview process, and selecting candidates, thinking about the future of the role you’re hiring for is key to implementing fair hiring practices into the process. What advancement options will be available over time? How might the duties shift as technology and the industry change? These questions will benefit your organization, but they’ll also give your candidate/employee direction, and increase their satisfaction.

Use Resume Screening Tools

One of the simplest ways to remove human bias during the screening process is to remove the human from the equation. Taking advantage of AI screening software gives you a range of benefits:

• Information like Age, Race, Gender, and other factors are not taken into account at all, preventing bias to seep into the process in any shape or form.
• Resume screening technology is much faster than even a seasoned recruiter, scanning and processing resumes in a blink. 
• Allows your team to work on a range of human-specific tasks.

PandoLogic’s AI recruitment toolbox has everything you need to get started using resume screening software. If you’re looking to implement fair hiring practices, our flexible and self-learning software can do so while maintaining the quality of hire.