Use of AI in recruitment process is known to unfold a plethora of advantages to the organization that embraces it. One of such profound advantages is how it completely eliminates bias from the whole recruitment process.  Did you know that a large number of companies, across the globe, face lawsuits for recruiting biases every year? The use of AI to eliminate bias has helped such organizations in eradicating this problem from its very root.

Great employers like Google that claim to have rock star status in the world of employment – have faced lawsuits against recruiting biases. Google alone has faced lawsuits for ageism, anti-white & anti-Asian bias and favoring women bias.

What’s funnier is that Google was actually putting up an effort to embrace workplace diversity in human capital, when they faced the lawsuits against anti-white and anti-Asian bias. However, it would be unfair to blame them, as the human mind does not work on an algorithm, it cannot be free of all biases.

Bias in recruitment is inevitable. Why? Because a human mind is an extremely complex organ. It works in ways that are not always comprehendible. Here’s an interesting point to ponder upon – Did you know that every 2.5 seconds, the human mind makes a solid decision?

Is it possible for the mind to take into account each and every factor before jumping to the decision? No – which is why companies that follow a conventional assessment system, find themselves falling prey to numerous recruitment biases like:

o   Confirmation bias

o   Affect heuristics

o   Expectation anchor

o   Halo effect

o   Horn effect

o   Overconfidence bias

o   Similarity attraction bias

o   Illusory correlation

o   Affinity bias

o   Beauty bias

o   Conformity bias

o   Intuition

o   Contrast effect / judgement bias

Problem is, biases are not always intentional in nature. In fact, most of them are Unconscious Biases. So you as an organization might be thinking that you’re very inclusive and diverse but you never know that you might be hiring certain kinds of candidates unconsciously.

This sort of bias not only destroys a company’s reputation but also becomes a root-cause for bad hiring.

According to a survey conducted by Careerbuilder, 75% of employers claimed to have hired the wrong resource for a position. This news by all means is flabbergasting, because not only does bad hiring waste your precious time but also your company’s hard-earned revenue and other valuable resources – the average cost of a bad hire is a big fat $15000!

Use of AI in eliminating the unconscious bias can only be comprehended once we discuss what Unconscious bias actually stands for and how big – rather huge – companies are unaware of having recruitment processes that are plagued with unconscious bias.

So, what is an unconscious bias? It is an automatic, mental shortcut used to process information and make decisions quickly.

According to research, CVs or resumes that have names that sound more English, are 40% more likely to get a call for the interview than the resumes that have Asian sounding names.

One of the problems that need to be addressed is how our existing hiring tools are flawed and biased; yet they are legal. Even though using AI is an amazing way to eliminate bias from the recruitment process – it is important to understand that AI works on an algorithm that is set by a human.

So a chance of human error still remains in AI operated recruitment.

To eradicate the same, we need to work on the existing hiring tools and make audits to have a better understanding of the underlying biases that ruin our recruitment process. Amazon was chastised greatly for months because of using a hiring algorithm that was immensely male-biased.

Even after this happened, majority of the companies around the world continue to use the same flawed, traditional assessments that are highly biased, sexist, ageist and classist. Why is that?

The reason is simple – most companies are completely ignorant of the fact that their assessments are biased, because such assessments are much widely used in the industry.

Even though it is not entirely possible to absolutely get rid of human bias, it is somewhat manageable to recognize and rectify it with AI. With the right steps in the right direction, we can surely gear ourselves with technology that helps us diversify our organizations.

To understand how AI tools can help us eliminate bias from our recruitment process, it is important to understand the kind of impact our biases have on us and on the decision-making process itself.

• Perception: We begin to see people subjectively rather than treating them as unique individuals
• Attitude: Our attitude automatically changes with the person as we get biased unconsciously
• Behaviour: We start behaving in a certain way because of the bias
• Attention: We begin to pay attention to certain characteristics of the person
• Listening Skills: Our listening skills get hampered and we shift to selective listening
• Micro-affirmations: Our gestures become more or less comforting depending on the bias

AI will make your recruitment life a lot easier and this is how:

• As opposed to going through only a limited number of resumes before jumping on to shortlisting candidates, AI actually processes a huge number of potential candidates and uses a tailored algorithm to shortlist the best talent pool, a feat that the human mind just cannot do.
• Zero mental fatigue, which results in zero biases and assumptions that a human mind is susceptible to.
• You can go back and validate the results.
• On-the-Job performance is evaluated through different situational tests that are not only precise but also very interesting!
• You can program your AI to ignore demographic information, which results in no biases.

One crucial proposition for AI is that it should be programmed in a way that it could be regularly audited in order to recognize any or all biases and remove them. With rightly crafted AI, its use can help organizations eliminate bias in their recruitment process and eventually diversify their workforce for the better.