Being a good people person has never been easy. We‘ve witnessed how diversity recruitment lifts up a business’s productivity. We’ve seen how costly and ugly it gets to be fined for discriminatory hiring. And we’ve learned how determined employees can be to quit a company rather than navigate unfair internal hiring practices.

Yet, despite all this, illegal and unethical hiring practices persist, whether we find ourselves in the recruiter’s chair or on the candidate’s side of the table. Perhaps, at times, both. 

But can we honestly claim that our choices are entirely untainted when we stumble upon a candidate who shares our background or experiences?

What immediate image pops into our minds when we spot “Harvard University” on a candidate’s resume?

And how open are we to considering individuals with past criminal records?

It’s a humbling experience to realize that, no matter how objective we think we are, biases lurk within us—whether related to race, gender, age, or disability.

Yet, your presence here tells me you’re not content with complacency. So, I genuinely thank you for being part of this dialogue.

Before we dive deeper, let me be brutally honest—this post won’t magically purge us of all our biases in hiring. However, it’s a stark and, admittedly, uncomfortable reminder for each one of us (myself included) to strive for fairness and balance in our daily recruitment endeavors.

Are you prepared to step into the discomfort?

Unethical vs. Illegal Recruitment Practices

What did I mean by ‘bad recruitment practices’?

Recruitment processes can go wrong for many reasons. But in this post, I want to talk about the two worst kinds of ‘bad’ practices: unethical and illegal.

An employment practice is ‘unethical’ when it lacks transparency and propriety. This could entail misinforming a job candidate about the true nature of the position or the compensation they can expect. It also includes using inconsistent criteria to evaluate candidates. For instance, declining to hire someone based on an unfavorable in-person interview while favoring another solely based on their resume.

Now, it’s important to acknowledge that all illegal hiring practices are inherently unfair, but not every unfair practice is necessarily illegal. To be deemed illegal, a hiring practice must actively discriminate against a job candidate in a manner that violates their civil rights or contravenes labor, disability, or related laws. 

That said, if something isn’t illegal, it can still hurt a company so badly. This includes their reputation being damaged, resentment of the public, supposed-to-be hires, and demotivating current employees.

That’s why it’s really important to look at how you hire people and make sure it’s fair and honest.

7 Hiring Practices That Require Immediate Attention

Discriminatory Job Ads

It’s hard to believe but there is this job posting from a Virginia-based IT services firm that stated, “Only Born US Citizens [White] who are local within 60 miles from Dallas, TX.” The shocker? It wasn’t a relic from a decade ago but happened just a few months back.

Job listings, after all, serve as the initial introduction to a company’s culture. Ironically, it’s alarmingly easy to let gender-coded language creep into job advertisements. Whether intentional or not, studies have shown that gender-biased job descriptions can inadvertently deter certain candidates from even considering applying.

Ghost Job Postings

Today’s job seekers encounter more and more job ads that were never meant to be filled. The dirty truth about this action as revealed in current research is that these postings claim to be “always open to new people,” all while striving to keep employees motivated and giving off the impression that the company is growing.

Solely Resume-Based Hiring Decisions

Studies confirm that employers seeing identical resumes were 57% more likely to call back an applicant with stereotypically white names compared to those with ethnic names. To counteract this, some minority job candidates “whiten” their names on resumes to secure more job interviews. The irony is, that it actually works.

Job-Washing

This unethical practice often rears its head in occupations seeing shortages, or when the pressure to meet recruitment quotas becomes overwhelming. But no one wants to be fooled. Outcomes of overselling a role during recruitment but under-delivering in reality are clear: dissatisfied hires, negative company reviews, and poor retention.

Unstructured Interviews

Lack of clear evaluation criteria opens the door to decisions tainted by implicit biases. Human nature often leads us down the path of informal and gut-driven decision-making. Consequently, we get new hires who mirror our background and shared experiences and neglect all diversity and inclusion efforts.

The Pitfall of Referral Hiring

It’s not just a coincidence that companies often prefer to hire people through referrals. A fat body of research shows employers spend less time, less money, and get better retention with referral hires compared to job board hires. It occurred to us, though, that we haven’t really looked at referrals from an ethical perspective. It’s not always about how qualified a candidate is; sometimes, it’s about who they know or who’s doing them a favor.

Let me take you back a bit to J.P. Morgan’s case. High-ranking employees within the bank, including senior executives, were referring the sons and daughters of influential Chinese businessmen and businesswomen for highly sought-after positions. This established system fueled resentment among the bank’s existing employees, particularly during the 2008 financial crisis, when layoffs were widespread, but those with influential referrals retained their positions.

What if the referrals had come from less powerful employees at J. P. Morgan? It’s likely they wouldn’t have triggered the same reactions—studies back this up.

The Dark Side of Social Media in Hiring

Using protected information (like age, ethnicity, or religion) against job applicants not only carries legal risks but also raises ethical concerns.

In some extreme cases, unethical actions involve recruiters going as far as creating fake social media accounts to access applicant profiles, dig into private details, and even connect with the applicants’ friends. Even if candidates are informed that their social media accounts will be reviewed, it’s still crossing a line into their personal lives and accessing non-job-related information. Once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it. Ethically and legally, there are constraints on using such data.

Why Our Hiring Practices Go Wrong

When we look at the sort of bad hiring practices mentioned earlier, it becomes clear that various underlying biases are at play.

Unconscious Bias

Even good people, like us, carry unconscious biases (you can test yourself at implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/). These biases often operate beneath our conscious awareness, which is why we refer to them as ‘unconscious’ biases. They stem from the way our brains work, relying on shortcuts and snap judgments rather than deliberate analysis. Here are the most common ones in hiring I’ve observed.

• Confirmation Bias: We tend to favor information that supports our existing beliefs while ignoring conflicting data.
• Affect Heuristic Bias: Our brains often rely on quick, intuitive ‘gut feelings’ to judge situations or people without deep analysis.
• Beauty Bias: It’s when we judge others based on appearance rather than considering their true abilities.
• The Halo Effect: This bias makes us see a person more favorably overall, often causing us to overlook their flaws.
• The Horns Effect: In contrast, this bias makes us excessively focus on a single negative trait in a candidate.
• Conformity Bias: It leads us to go along with group opinions, rather than expressing our own thoughts.
• Gender Bias: This bias favors one gender over another, leading to unequal opportunities and perpetuating stereotypes.

AI Could Prevent Hiring Bias. It Could Make It Worse Too

Artificial Intelligence, which doesn’t have a race, gender, or thoughts like humans do, should, in theory, make unbiased decisions. However, real-world outcomes tell a different story.

In fact, current AI systems are far from perfect. Instead of avoiding bias, they tend to copy human biases and break down in unexpected situations. Take, for instance, Stable Diffusion—an AI that generates images based on text prompts. The world according to the machine is run by White male CEOs. Women are rarely doctors, lawyers, or judges. Men with dark skin commit crimes, while women with dark skin flip burgers.

Why does this happen? Part of the problem lies in the data used to train AI systems. While we often see AI bias as a tech issue, the NIST report acknowledges that much of it arises from human and systemic biases.

As explained by Professor of Computer Science and of Communication Emilio Ferrara at the University of Southern California, AI bias can come from various sources, including problematic training data, biased learning algorithms, and societal factors like weak regulations or financial incentives.

Now that we’ve identified the culprits behind our bad hiring practices, time to figure out what to do to prevent them from getting in the way of our hiring decisions.

7 Practical Ways to Prevent These Bad Practices in Your Hiring Process

Killing bias from AI and us humans is a laughable goal. So let’s work on taming it from your recruitment instead. Here are some steps you can take:

Rework Your Job Ads

Start by rethinking how you describe job openings. Use inclusive language and avoid subtle biases in your job descriptions. Tools like the Gender Decoder or Textio can be invaluable in crafting job advertisements that transcend gender stereotypes. And, of course, ensure your job ad promotes Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) by including a statement to that effect.

Be Honest About Your Hiring Policy

Another way to make sure your hiring process is fair is to tell candidates what your policy is right from the start. Your EEO policy should be more than just a sentence in your job ad. Tell candidates how you pick people, what tools you use, and how you make sure you’re not being unfair when hiring or at work. Being open and honest with applicants about what the job involves is a good way to keep things ethical and show your company is trustworthy.

Go Blind Hiring

Do you really need men only in your engineering team? Must your creative talents be from Gen Z? Of course not! But sometimes we stick with these biases because it’s what we’ve always seen.

Blind hiring is a way to make sure we hire the best people for the job while being fair. It helps us get rid of biases and look at all candidates with an open mind.

Here are two things you can do for blind hiring:

Resume Blindness

Resumes are important, but they don’t and should never be the sole basis for your hiring decisions. Studies show that as we get to know someone better, the discriminatory influence of a name tends to fade. So, when you’re checking candidate resumes, pay no attention to things like skin color or nationality. Modern applicant tracking systems and recruiting software today can help hide these details, but be careful because not all of them work the same way. And remember, if you use automation or AI, it’s your company that is legally responsible for unbiased hiring decisions, not the software provider.

Be Careful with Social Media Pre-Screening

If you check a person’s social media before hiring, make sure it’s only for jobs that need a social media presence or skills. At the very least, engage in a thorough risk-benefit analysis, involving your legal counsel, to ascertain the advisability of such screening. If it proves necessary, devise standardized assessments and enlist multiple evaluators in the process. In all cases, ensure the accuracy of any information uncovered that could potentially be used against an applicant.

Focus on Skills and Abilities

Besides blind hiring, consider using work sample assessments to make sure you don’t pick candidates based on hidden biases but on their proficiency. Moreover, cognitive ability evaluations, situational judgment tests, and personality questionnaires can offer invaluable insights. But remember, these tests should always measure the skills and qualities you really need for the job. Overdoing your assessments is just as bad as underdoing it.

Implement Standardized Interviews

Research underlines the unreliability of unstructured interviews in predicting job success. So while structured interviews aren’t perfect, they’re more objective than unstructured ones. Ideally, interviewers shouldn’t know how candidates performed in other parts of the hiring process. The goal is to make the interview a separate and impartial evaluation.

Revise Referral Systems

Consider setting up a referral system that temporarily keeps referrers’ identities anonymous. At the same time, provide clear reasons for the referrals. This shift focuses attention on the referred candidate’s suitability and potential performance.

Be aware that high-power referrers should use this practice sparingly. It’s also crucial to continuously monitor any referral system, including getting confidential feedback from employees, to ensure it meets ethical standards.

Keep your AI in Check

AI undoubtedly has changed our recruitment world for the better in certain ways. A recent report from the hiring platform Greenhouse reveals that around 80% of HR professionals now use AI in hiring. Surprisingly and alarmingly, though, about half of them confess that their companies aren’t actively overseeing or evaluating these AI tools for biases.

Rather than aiming for a zero-bias process—something that neither humans nor robots have achieved to date—consider leveraging the strengths of a combined approach. Let the machines work their magic on blind hiring, and then have human brains step in to review their output and make the calls. Equally crucial is the choice of recruitment automation partners. Look for those who commit to transparency in actively addressing both adverse impact and algorithmic bias.

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