A great deal has been written about removing biases when interviewing candidates for jobs, but to some degree it’s easier said than done. All human beings have their own set of biases on a range of things that include; gender, race, religion, class and it’s influenced when hiring employees or simply offering a promotion. The fact that this is being discussed in many online forums is good first step, but, this type of paradigm shift will take perhaps a generation or two for significant change to take effect. Change, after all, is always a difficult proposition for humans.

Will Yakowicz, Staff writer for Inc, article titled How to Remove Gender Bias From the Hiring Process offers three tips. These tips are derived from a posting in Harvard Business Review by Avivah Wittenberg-Cox.

The gender bias tips are as follows:

“Make gender bias a business issue.
If the results of the test don’t bother you initially, think about the fact that under- qualified men were hired over more talented women. Wittenberg-Cox says you should reframe gender bias as a business issue, not a women’s issue. “If managers are choosing less qualified men over more qualified women, the company is clearly losing valuable talent,” she writes. “Even if hiring managers are choosing equally qualified men, if they’re doing it in dramatically greater numbers (as the study above shows they do), the company is still missing an opportunity to build the kind of balanced workforce that we know produces more creative results.”

Change people’s minds
Wittenberg-Cox says leaders need to start educating themselves and managers about the issue of gender bias instead of putting the burden on women to change themselves. “You can expect all your women to suddenly change their behavior and start overselling their skills, as the men in the study above did–but frankly, do you really want them to?” she writes. Research shows when women boast about their skills they are perceived negatively, instead of as confident and ambitious. You need to teach your staff, male and female, about the different behaviors men and women exhibit and how to effectively and accurately perceive them.”

Change your hiring systems
If gender bias runs deep in the corporate world that means HR policies are often rife with bias too. Wittenberg-Cox writes that many large companies consider “ambition” to be an important character trait for their leadership candidates. When candidates are seen as “ambitious,” they’re usually boasting, or overselling their talents–a trait studies have shown to be predominately male, she writes. Hiring managers typically believe erroneously that the most self-promotional candidates are objectively the best. “This does not make room to develop the majority of today’s talent for tomorrow’s world. Nor allow a variety of leadership styles to co-exist,” she adds.”

Social media and online career job boards, while all great tools can also hurt prospective candidates. Many of today’s hiring managers will scan sites like LinkedIn to view a candidates profile and formed an opinion about the person before they walk through the door for an interview. And in some cases, based on what they see online, these hiring managers might cut candidates from consideration. Thus, asking people to eliminate or at least, separate their biases from the hiring decision is not as easy as it sounds.

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