How Bias-Free Assessment Tests Make DE&I Efforts Easier

Hiring a truly diverse team is easier when you incorporate bias-free assessment tests into your talent acquisition process. 

These assessment tests can help you increase diversity in recruitment and bolster your DE&I efforts significantly — and deliver better-quality candidates to boot. Here’s what you need to know. 

How Bias in the Hiring Process Hurts Your Company

The hiring process has always had significant biases built into it. Humans have a typically unconscious preference for people who are similar to us. And that affinity bias combined with the old systems of societal power meant that most workplaces were homogenous, and hiring processes tended to bring in more of the same people. 

Even as awareness grows of the potential for bias in recruitment, it’s hard to uncover and shift attitudes and practices—though it’s vitally important in DE&I. These unconscious and often sneaky preferences can lead even companies with the best intentions to continue the hiring practices that hurt their diversity aims.

“Culture fit” can too often become a way to hire only candidates who are just like the employees you already have. If it’s easier for recruiters to connect with candidates with similar backgrounds and interests, that can lead to affinity bias and reduce your hiring of diverse groups, even if you’ve made an effort to bring more diversity to your recruiting pools. 

These shortcuts are especially tempting during times when recruiters are stretched thin because of a high volume of open job listings, low candidate availability, and the need to do more with less—all of which are a factor right now. 

But that doesn’t mean diversity is any less important. 

Why Commitment to DE&I Matters

Diverse companies have greater innovation, creativity, productivity, and profitability—plus they’re more attractive to talented candidates. Even small amounts of bias lead to significantly worse outcomes for employers. 

The benefits of DE&I efforts have been extensively studied and are too well-established to contest, and your organization can’t afford to miss out because of problems in your hiring process. 

How Bias-Free Assessment Tests Increase Diversity in Recruitment

Bias-free assessment tests simplify DE&I efforts. 

Assessment tests in the hiring process allow you to evaluate candidates based on the qualities they need for a role, instead of how familiar their background is or their rapport with a recruiter. They give every candidate the same criteria for assessing their qualifications which makes the process more equitable. 

Removing bias from your assessments means you can find the top candidates instead of hiring a person who “feels” like a fit. This will get you stronger candidates who are a better fit for your organization. It also increases diversity because you have quantifiable criteria to evaluate candidates, instead of relying on those same old shortcuts. 

(Notice how we’ve specified bias-free here? It’s because not all assessments are created equal—take a peek at the instance where Amazon built an AI hiring model that discriminated against women.) 

The effectiveness of your assessments at increasing diversity relies on getting the right assessments. A poorly executed test will simply get you the same results and hinder your efforts to increase diversity in the hiring process. 

Cangrade’s patented bias-removal technology takes the potential for bias out of the talent acquisition process. You can rest assured that your entire hiring process, from writing job descriptions to pre-hire assessments to video interviews, is free from the biases that have long been a barrier to more equal workplaces and DE&I efforts. 

Want to learn more? Book your demo call now.