BGA | BUSINESS IMPACT
GUEST COLUMN
Equitable recruiting
T alent intelligence platforms use a form of artificial intelligence (AI) called ‘deep learning’ to leverage internal and external datasets and optimise talent decisions. Talent intelligence self-learns until it fully understands the availability, maturity, relevance, learnability and evolution of skills within specific organisations and the larger market. As such, it has the power to break us out of our siloed systems and closed, limited thinking and can help organisations achieve their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) objectives. Here’s how: CAPABILITY MATCHING Talent intelligence can help you create candidate lists without reference to factors like age, gender, ethnicity, veteran status and disability status. It can therefore ensure organisations go beyond hiring quotas with capability matching that removes any potential biasing factors. CANDIDATE FOCUS Talent intelligence insights can help organisations reconfigure their career sites to focus on candidate needs. In a candidate-focused career site, available jobs are ranked for an individual candidate so they can see exactly where and why they are a match. This reduces self-selection bias caused by candidates’ varying degrees of risk tolerance. CANDIDATE MASKING The interview process is naturally prone to bias. Recruiters and hiring managers see a candidate’s personal characteristics, such as
their perceived gender, ethnicity, age and educational credentials. They then make selection decisions based on these factors rather than on each person’s potential to succeed. The result is reduced diversity. Candidate masking at the initial stages of hiring removes all potential pieces of bias from applications so only objective data points remain. BIAS-FREE ALGORITHMS Equal opportunity algorithms can identify unwanted trends in source data to deliver less biased predictions. Here’s an example: if most scientists in a company are men, and most of the applications are from men, being a man still does not automatically make someone a better scientist. Equal opportunity algorithms ensure that candidate recommendations do not consider gender as a qualification. DEI ANALYTICS DEI analytics programmes find biases in hiring and measure the impact of equity policies. These programmes show the hiring funnel for each stage and for each diversity category, detecting statistically significant biases. Suppose, for example, that 10 per cent of all applicants are members of an under‑represented group. This suggests that approximately 10 per cent of all hires should also be members of this group. If, instead, nine per cent of hires are members of this group, that might be due to chance. However, if it’s only five per cent, there may be a problem – and this is what DEI analytics can flag.
It’s then up to you to investigate where and why this discrepancy is occurring. It may be that there is a step in the hiring process that turns away a specific group of candidates but, unfortunately, in many cases, the cause is a person making biased decisions. ONE FINAL NOTE Placing a talent intelligence platform behind your talent management services will create an inclusive basis for those services. This is important because, with a skills-based approach to talent management, the standard for career advancement becomes what each employee can do, not who they are. It’s also important to create a transparent career experience where every employee finds the available options, knows that the same options are available to others and sees how the organisation will make decisions. When employees can understand how a decision, such as a promotion, is made, they gain confidence in the process. Additionally, when a platform is equally accessible to all employees, those with social advantages can’t work around it. Mentors can’t choose who to coach based on their biases. Important projects can’t be staffed at happy hour or by people in the office versus those who work remotely. That’s when your DEI aspirations really start to take hold from within.
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Alexandra Levit is a workforce consultant, futurist and the co-author of Deep talent (Kogan Page, 2023)
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