Blind Recruitment

A diverse workforce can bring a range of perspectives, experiences, and skills to a firm, which can lead to better decision-making, innovation, and overall performance. Inclusive recruitment practices can help to attract a diverse pool of candidates and create a more diverse workforce, including using anonymous resumes or blind recruitment.

What is Blind Recruitment?

Blind recruitment, also known as blind hiring or name-blind recruitment, is a recruitment process in which certain identifying information, such as a job applicant’s name, age, gender, or ethnicity, is removed from their application materials before they are reviewed by the people making the hiring decisions. The goal of blind recruitment is to reduce or eliminate unconscious bias in the hiring process.

What information should be removed?

In a blind recruitment process, certain identifying information should be removed from job applicants’ application materials before they are reviewed. This can include:

• Name: Removing a job applicant’s name from their application materials can help to reduce the influence of name bias. For example, your name can give an your age (roughly), gender, race or religion.
• Age: Removing a job applicant’s age (and/or the dates they went to school and university) from their application materials can help to reduce ageism in the hiring process.
• Gender: Removing a job applicant’s gender from their application materials can help to reduce gender bias in the hiring process.
• Ethnicity: Removing a job applicant’s ethnicity from their application materials can help to reduce racial bias in the hiring process.

Some firms go a step further a remove additional information such as location, school and university details.

Some might remove the requirement for a resume altogether and just rely on their own application process relying more on skills tests and interviews.

When to remove the information?

Blind recruitment can be implemented at various stages of the hiring process. For example, a firm may choose to remove personal information from resumes before they are reviewed , or may use software to anonymise applications during the initial screening process.

It is important to note that removing this information from job applicants’ application materials does not necessarily eliminate unconscious bias from the hiring process. However, it can help to reduce the influence of certain types of bias.