"Raise your hand if you've judged a candidate based on the college on their résumé," says Kelly Grossart, recruiting manager for Evernote. She's standing before a crowd of attentive employees at the startup's Redwood City, California, headquarters, leading an interactive training session on implicit bias. And when only half the group sheepishly raise their hands in response to Grossart's request, she exhales loudly and asks, "Are you guys serious?"
No one wants to admit they're anything less than objective, of course--which is what makes implicit or hidden bias so hard to stamp out. "Research shows that we find people more persuasive when we like them, and the most common reason we like them is they're similar to us," says Cade Massey, a professor who studies behavior and judgment at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
But your subconscious assumptions could be hampering your company's bottom line, leading you to overlook great candidates, take longer to fill openings, and build a less-than-stellar team. Studies show that the most racially diverse companies outperform industry norms by 35 percent, while companies with the greatest gender diversity boost their performance by 15 percent. Teams with diverse backgrounds also tend to generate more innovative ideas.
Now there are a number of new recruitment websites, tech platforms, and services that can help you push past implicit bias. Depending on the tool, résumés can be scrubbed clean of certain details, like names, which often signal race and gender, and colleges, which can indicate socioeconomic background. Voice modulation software can also be used to make it impossible to discern the gender of the person on the other end of a phone interview. And computer-based skills tests mean the first thing you see about an applicant isn't a laundry list of companies she's worked for, but an objective assessment of how well she'd probably perform on the job.
Companies including Google, Dolby, and Wieden+Kennedy are deliberately putting on opaque glasses to find talent they otherwise might never have considered. All three use GapJumpers, a recruitment platform where candidates perform skills-based challenges specifically tailored to an open position. "We want to shift the focus from the person to the output," says Petar Vujosevic, co-founder of GapJumpers. When the company crunched the data on 1,200 blind auditions performed for its clients, it found that its method increased the proportion of qualified candidates who are not white, male, and from "elite" schools from about 20 to 60 percent.