In simple terms, ethical hiring is the process of assessing candidates without discrimination. While every company has its own idea of what this means, it’s critical to maintain a consistent, well-organized hiring process that promotes diversity and improves your reputation within the industry. An ethical, streamlined recruiting system can also help attract quality candidates who become satisfied new hires. The more time you focus on implementing ethical hiring procedures, the more you’ll realize the power of these benefits among others.
The more you know about a candidate, the more likely it is for bias to come into play. A name alone can impact your decision to move a candidate to the next step in the hiring process. Rather than let unconscious bias sneak into the hiring process, anonymize all applications. Remove identifying details—such as candidates’ names and school information, including attendance dates—to reduce the likelihood of assumptions or preferential treatment based on this information.
Candidate scoring allows you to identify the skills, experiences, and traits that a person needs to succeed in a role and determine which criteria are most relevant at the various stages of the recruiting process. You can assign values to each item you add to the scorecard to weigh how each candidate performs.
This system is beneficial because it allows you to objectively rank and compare candidates based on their performance. Since every candidate will have their pros and cons, being able to see how everyone scores will create a more transparent, ethical hiring process. You’ll also be able to collect and analyze data to further refine your recruiting approach over time.
A structured interview ensures you’re using the same questions in the same order for each candidate. This may not sound like a big deal, but slight variations in phrasing or sequence can impact a candidate’s answers and how you assess them.
Even at a small company, it’s always best to have an interview panel. Bias is much more likely to impact hiring with a single interviewer when they assess a conversation and relay information to the rest of the recruiting team. A diverse interview panel allows multiple individuals to work together to score candidates and make a final decision. Since there are many different points of view involved, the team is less likely to encounter bias in their decisions.
When recruiting candidates and hiring new employees, you can expect ethical dilemmas to emerge. Some of the most common situations that affect hiring choices inlude:
The ability to pinpoint ethical dilemmas allows you to take steps to keep them out of the hiring process.
Regardless of what you’ve done in the past, there’s always room for improvement in the future. Studying the ethical underpinnings of your recruitment process allows you to make the proper adjustments. Here are some questions to help you determine whether you’re hiring ethically:
Even if you’ve failed to meet these criteria in the past, you don’t have to continue down the same path.
With all this information about ethical hiring practices, it’s time to review your approach and make changes for the better.
Oyster can help with this in many ways, such as with tools for finding and hiring refugee talent. With Oyster for Refugees, you can find refugee talent, onboard them to your team compliantly—at no or discounted costs—and build a brilliant, diverse team.
Oyster is a global employment platform designed to enable visionary HR leaders to find, hire, pay, manage, develop, and take care of a thriving distributed workforce. Oyster lets growing companies give valued international team members the experience they deserve, without the usual headaches and expense.