How to Make Hiring More Equitable

Adapting hiring processes need to find talent in the new labor market

Many companies still rely on outdated practices when hiring new employees. One of the main criteria these companies look for in a candidate is a history of full-time employment in their chosen field. This bias excludes many qualified candidates, including workers who have done part-time and freelance work, have taken career breaks, and pursued career switches.

In the wake of massive layoffs and unemployment due to the pandemic and recession, even more people have varied and unique résumés. Since March 2020, workers have lost their jobs, quit working full-time to become caretakers, or been pushed into nonstandard positions out of their field. Companies will immediately reject these workers using standard algorithms that screen applicants for gaps in their work history.

Since the start of the pandemic, this hiring bias has affected parents — mostly mothers — especially harshly. Over 1.5 million mothers left the workforce to care for their children at the start of the pandemic because of reduced access to child care, a lack of attractive jobs, and the demands of home and virtual schooling. Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that women's participation in the workforce fell to levels not seen since the mid-1980s.

For those parents who continued to work throughout the pandemic, many are still experiencing negative impacts on their careers. They have worked fewer hours, declined assignments, or decided not to take a promotion or pursue a new job.

Employed parents have slowed their careers to manage childcare schedules. In the short term, this can affect their professional contribution, but in the long term, it can greatly impact their careers because employers often penalize employees and applicants who don't work at full capacity.

David Pedulla, a sociologist at Harvard, tested how working at less than full capacity can have career repercussions. Pedulla submitted fake résumés to employers and found that part-time work hurt male applicants as much as if they had been unemployed. In follow-up interviews with hiring professionals, Pedulla found that employers assumed women had a reason for working part-time — raising families, for example — while they assumed men were unambitious.

What companies can do to make the hiring process more equitable

In order to make the hiring process more equitable, companies should set clear goals and then collect the right metrics over time that measure performance on those different key outcomes. Most importantly, companies need to share this data with key stakeholders — both internal and external — as a way for organizations to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion, and in a lot of ways to hold themselves accountable to the goals that they set out.

Technology in the workplace has the potential to increase efficiency and productivity, but there is also the risk that it can reproduce and even exacerbate group-based inequalities by race, gender, or other social categories. In order to reduce the likelihood that biases and discrimination creep into new technologies, companies need to test new tech before it's used in the field, and they need to audit the procedures and results to ensure that biases are not present.

It is also increasingly important that the data used for corporate screening, hiring, and evaluation processes are evaluated and found to be fair to different groups, including socio-demographic and racial groups. It is this combination of building solutions that screen out discrimination and then double-checking for discrimination on the backend that will create fairer systems for hiring.

Equitable hiring is not possible without organizations assigning someone to manage the process from the start. Technology can only go so far in ensuring that the hiring process isn't excluding qualified applicants with untraditional résumés.

To learn more about what senior HR leaders are doing to reduce bias, click here to read The Road to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: What Companies Are Doing and Why report.