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6 methods for reducing bias in candidate sourcing and screening



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Steve Bartel
Contributor

Steve Bartel is the CEO of Gem, a talent engagement platform backed by Greylock, Accel and ICONIQ.

Over the last several years, an increasing number of companies have pledged to hire a more diverse workforce and begun releasing their diversity numbers annually. The results have been a mixed bag at best.
With so many organizations saying that diversity hiring is among their top goals and making good-faith efforts to revamp their recruiting practices accordingly, our team wanted to better understand why the results have fallen short. What we found surprised us: Subconscious bias tends to have the strongest impact on historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups in the early stages of the interview process.
For example, the data revealed that while white candidates see higher passthrough rates at the very top of the funnel, Black and Hispanic/Latinx talent see higher passthrough rates across the remaining funnel stages: 62% of Black talent and 57% of Hispanic/Latinx talent are extended offers after on-sites, compared to just 54% of white talent.
This suggests that diversity is most often an issue in earlier stages of the interview process, driven at least in part by subconscious bias. Candidates from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups have to work harder to prove themselves than their white counterparts, despite seeing high …

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