What I learnt about hiring diverse teams from conducting a fully-anonymous recruitment process
Bethan Vincent, 05/09/19
If we want to truly encourage diversity in our industry, we are going to have to listen and respond to feedback from under-represented groups that challenges our assumptions.
In 2015, my previous employer Bytemark built a fully-anonymous recruitment process in order to help address issues of hiring bias and to try and attract a diverse range of candidates.
You might think problem solved…. but no! Despite introducing a supposedly better process, we still weren’t receiving applications from a wide range of candidates.
We realised that in order to diagnose the issue, we would need to conduct user research. Through speaking to these candidates, successful and unsuccessful, alongside undertaking research at conferences and with peers, we found that some aspects of our “ideal” process were actually put off certain candidates, especially women, from applying.
I present some of our learnings from this research and offer examples of how they can be applied to any hiring process. I will also argue that in order to be a truly inclusive industry, we need to start gathering and really listening to feedback that makes us uncomfortable with the status quo.