As recruiters, you only want to hire the best candidates for a role. Sometimes, that’s hard to do, especially when 67% of job seekers admit to attempting to bend the recruitment rules. At Toggl Hire, we’re passionate about fair chance hiring practices, and by the end of this article, we hope you will be too!
In this article, we’ll explore why fair chance hiring practices are so important for your business and your candidates. Once you’re convinced, we’ll finish by looking at ways you can implement fair hiring processes into your business, including how to tackle candidate cheating with Toggl Hire.
Ready? Let’s get into it!
Quick Links:
- Why Is It Important to Deliver Fair Chance Hiring Practices For Your Candidates?
- 4 Easy Ways to Implement Fair Chance Hiring Practices to Improve Your Talent Pool
Why Is It Important to Deliver Fair Chance Hiring Practices For Your Candidates?
At its simplest, fair hiring is all about creating an environment where candidates are hired on merit alone, not any other factor. A candidate’s ethnicity, gender, religion, disability, or any other personal characteristic shouldn’t count towards their suitability for the role, just their skills and abilities.
Delivering fair hiring doesn’t just mean beating discrimination, though. Organizations should also focus on other factors, such as removing forms of unconscious bias, boosting accessibility, and putting anti-cheating software at the heart of their processes (more on that later!)
But you might be wondering why fair hiring is so important? What’s the benefit to you and your organization? The top reasons to implement fair chance hiring practices include:
- It’s a legal requirement. First and foremost, many countries have discrimination laws that mandate organizations cannot reject a candidate based on personal characteristics. Failure to comply can lead to heavy fines and widespread reputational damage.
- It delivers the best people. If an organization wants the best people, it needs to be recruiting them on merit alone. Failure to create a fair environment puts organizations at risk of hiring sub-par talent, ultimately reducing their workforce capability.
- It’s a USP. In a competitive market, leveling the playing field is a fantastic way to stand out from the crowd. Not only will it give candidates confidence in your organization, but it also sets the tone for your commitment to equality across the entire business.
- It’s just the right thing to do. Not that we needed to give you a fourth reason, but fair hiring is purely and simply the right thing to do. In the 21st century, everyone should have the same opportunity to showcase their skills and why they’d be an excellent fit for the role – there are no excuses!
If your interest has been piqued, you can read more on removing bias and boosting diversity & inclusion within your hiring in some of our other Toggl Hire articles.
4 Easy Ways to Implement Fair Chance Hiring Practices to Improve Your Talent Pool
Now that you know why creating a fair hiring process is so important, it’s time to get on with leveling your own recruitment playing field. Here are four easy strategies you can implement in your organization.
#1 – Standardize Your Job Ads
One of the quickest and easiest ways to begin making your application process fairer is to review the language and structure of your job ads.
Focus on making your job description, roles and responsibilities, and expectations as straightforward and universal as possible. Remove jargon, organizational buzzwords, acronyms, and overly complex language to ensure your ad is easy to read and simple to understand.
Also, take time to review the requirements which underpin your job profiles. Think about the skills and experience candidates actually need to do the role, removing anything that isn’t essential.
A great example can be found within your senior PHP developer’s education requirements. Would skills and experience not be enough? By mandating a degree, you unconsciously favor those from wealthier economic backgrounds.
#2 – Ensure A Consistent Candidate Experience
Second, make sure that your recruitment process is the same for every candidate. If you allow certain candidates to skip steps, you’re invariably creating bias and unfairness within your operation.
If you ensure consistency, you check at every stage that the candidate you choose has got there on merit alone with no preferential treatment.
This is especially true within the interview process, where the opportunity for unconscious bias is enormous! But, having a consistent panel of interviewers who independently score against the same questions delivers a consistent candidate experience each and every time.
#3 – Implement Cheat-Proof Skills Testing
At Toggl Hire, we believe skills testing is the best way to go when it comes to fairly assessing candidates. Skills testing software doesn’t discriminate, it removes bias, and gives every candidate an equal chance to showcase their skills!
But, unfortunately, like with all tests, there are people out there who want to cheat the system. Having access to the right information means skills tests can sometimes be cheated, meaning your fair hiring plans go out the window.
But don’t worry! At Toggl Hire, we’ve built a number of great features to ensure you can keep cheating at bay and guarantee fair hiring for all. Here are some of the best ones:
- Unique Tests – Each candidate receives a different combination of questions for their chosen job role. That means no two tests are the same and stops candidates from sharing their answers with others!
- Browser Fingerprint – Flags if two candidates take the test from the same browser.
- Copy-Paste Detection – Flags candidates who paste an answer to a test question.
- Test Completion Time – Flags candidates who complete a test unusually fast.
- Email Similarity – Flags candidates who use similar emails
(e.g. james@toggl vs. james1@toggl). - Copy-Paste Coding Block – Prevents copy and paste for coding tests.
If you like the sound of these features, why not read our manifesto to hear more about why we think cheat-free skills testing is the best way to make recruitment fairer!
#4 – Create Candidate Transparency
As we mentioned in the first section, having a fair hiring process is a real USP for your business and helps to build confidence with candidates.
By making your recruitment process as transparent as possible, you also give your own organization nowhere to hide when it comes to creating fairness. Here are three ways to instantly create transparency:
- Share your recruitment policy and processes with all candidates upfront. That way, it sets everyone’s expectations while also giving your candidate’s a benchmark to hold you accountable against.
- If a candidate is unsuccessful, share feedback with them on where they have not met the standard. While it helps build transparency, it also allows you to check exactly why that candidate was unsuccessful and re-confirm that the decision was made on merit alone.
- Create an appeal process for candidates that feel they have been mistreated. While appeals can be uncomfortable, it shows you’re serious about fair chance hiring and might even help you shine a light on areas for you to improve upon in the future.
Summary
At Toggl Hire, we’re committed to promoting fair chance hiring practices in everything that we do. Alongside it being a legal requirement, ensuring hires are made based on merit alone is absolutely the right thing to be doing in any modern organization.
If you want to level up your fair hiring agenda, the good news is that there are many easy ways to do this. Whether it’s re-formulating your processes, creating candidate transparency, or implementing an anti-cheating skills test platform, we’re confident you’ll be well on your way to delivering a truly fair and equal experience for your candidates!
James Elliott is a Strategy Manager and Writer from London, UK. When not working on the day job, James writes on a variety of business and project management topics with a focus on content that enables readers to take action and improve their ways of working. You can check out James’ work on his website or by connecting on LinkedIn.
