How Organizations Can Minimize Unintentional Healthcare Recruitment Bias
Despite major positive shifts towards an inclusive workforce, social stereotypes and biases continue to influence the hiring process in healthcare. This is understandable: recruiters are human, and we all carry a set of unconscious biases that lead us to favor one group over another.
Recruitment bias, whether intentional or not, means narrower opportunities for healthcare applicants based on their race, gender, age, cultural appearance (like ethnic clothing), or accent. So how can we reduce bias and promote a more diverse healthcare system?
Why Does Recruitment Bias Happen?
Hiring bias goes all the way back to a recruiter’s core beliefs, upbringing, experiences, and worldview. Even recruiters who emphasize a fair hiring process may unintentionally fall into stereotypes that make them give unfair preference to one candidate over another.
Some examples of recruitment bias include:
· Hiring a candidate similar to oneself (e.g., someone who comes from the same cultural background or alma mater)
· Making mistaken assumptions (e.g., dismissing a candidate with tattoos as “unpresentable” or underestimating someone’s capabilities because of a foreign accent)
· Making decisions based on intuition (“this person just doesn’t seem like a good fit”) rather than objective factors
Hiring bias may result in hiring the wrong person or, alternately, missing out on a high-potential candidate. In the long run, recruitment bias undermines the effort to create a diverse healthcare staff.
Why Healthcare Diversity Matters
As an industry that requires a lot of personal interaction, healthcare thrives on diversity. A diverse healthcare workforce makes it easier to understand, represent, and show empathy to patients from various ethnic, national, religious, cultural, and societal backgrounds. Furthermore, bilingual healthcare workers are invaluable when working with patients whose primary language is not English.
How to Reduce Bias in the Hiring Process
The following practices can help minimize hiring bias and move towards a fairer, more inclusive recruiting process in healthcare:
· Create job listings that use gender-neutral, inclusive wording
· Design a gender- and culture-neutral skill test that reflects the applicant’s capabilities in an objective way
· Develop structured interview and hiring procedures that leave less room for bias
· Make hiring decisions based on solid data and predictive analytics, not personal likes or dislikes
· Get more people involved in the hiring process to provide a more varied and balanced perspective
· Foster an organizational culture that promotes diversity, inclusion, and fair hiring
Some organizations use specialized software that removes any potentially bias-inducing data, like gender, name, age, address, and even school, from a candidate’s resume. This “blind” resume system helps avoid cultural and social stereotypes while hiring.
Fair Health Cares is a people-focused recruitment agency designed to answer all your healthcare staffing needs. Contact us to schedule a consultation.