There is no debate: a diverse workforce is good for business. Study after study shows diversity improves innovation, broadens a company’s market reach and, close to the heart of every CFO and CEO, adds to the bottom line. Encouraged by the business case and spurred by sociocultural dynamics, companies of every size and in every industry are scrambling to diversify their workforce. But as research shows, humans (and by extension recruiters and hiring managers) have a natural tendency to favor individuals of similar backgrounds and similar ethnicity and gender, creating an unintentional hurdle to diversity. This can be more insidious than outright discrimination because we are unaware of it. For that reason it is called implicit or unconscious bias. More than a few studies have shown that resumes with Black sounding names are more likely to be passed over by recruiters. In one study, candidates with white sounding names were 50% more likely to receive an interview call than were identical resumes with Black sounding names. When a similar study was done in 2013, recently graduated students with white sounding names had a 14% advantage in being called for an interview. For jobs that involved interacting with customers, the white resumes had a 28% advantage.  In a real world example, when the Space Telescope Science Institute fully anonymized the process for deciding who gets time on the Hubble telescope, women scientists came out ahead of their male counterparts for the first time in 18 years.

In addition, we know that in today’s incredibly challenging times, “the great rehiring” and “great resigning” has talent acquisition teams facing an unprecedented uphill battle to impossible hiring goals. More often than not, recruiters rely solely on active applications, forcing a hire from a limited pool of candidates and by extension limiting the diversity potential. Passive candidate sourcing is far superior for matching skill sets and ensuring unbiased diversity considerations, but TA teams struggle to find the bandwidth to effectively source passive candidates.

Luckily, software has come a long way to help offset these two unintentional hurdles. At Visage, we have not only created the software to help TA teams scale their passive candidate pool within 24hrs, but we also have a dedicated team of diversity sourcers. And we walk the talk, as a winner of The Startup Weekly’s 2021 Diverse & Inclusive Employer Award, our employees recognize our commitment to diversity within our own organization. This in turn helps us to ensure that it is designed into our software and sourcing community training every step of the way.

Within our software, we build in features that help “anonymize” a resume, like eliminating photographs and parsing uploaded resumes so that our clients review each candidate’s information in a similar manner, putting most prominence on matching the required skill set. And our crowd of 4,000 global on-demand sourcers come from diverse backgrounds and have been trained to effectively source for diversity.  This year, we worked with our client Siemens AG to help source for hard-to-fill technology and engineering roles – focused on female diversity. We sourced over 20,000 qualified candidates and Siemens is now expanding our sourcing program’s success to include additional countries. 

It’s safe to say that most companies want to hire the best, most talented people and it doesn’t matter their race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation or national origin. Putting that into practice is still harder than it should be, awareness goes a long way but having additional tools, like Visage, to help offset any unintentional bias is the key to success. When we know better, we can do better.