A spring clean for your bias – how to dump hiring stereotypes

Even with the best intentions, there’s probably bias lurking in every step of your hiring structure. So how can you identify where it’s hiding and remove it from your processes? 

Andrea Ho is the Discipline Lead at Australian Film, Television, and Radio School. She’ll give you helpful strategies and practical examples to ensure your hiring process is free of unconscious bias. 

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Getting It Right is a Jobsbank podcast. It was produced by Deadset Studios and hosted by Rae Johnston.  

To find your downloadable Getting It Right Guide click here. Visit the Jobsbank Resource Centre for more information on inclusive employment and social procurement.   

CREDITS

Host: Rae Johnston 

Deadset Studios executive producers: Kellie Riordan, Ann Chesterman, Rachel Fountain 

Deadset Studios producer: Luci McAfee 

Sound Design: Scott Stronach 

 

We acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Australians and Traditional Custodians of the land on which this show was made. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Employer (00:00):
You see if you got your great, that's just great.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Anyway, Maria, in this
part of the interview, we're going to talk about your
experience and suitability for the position. I can see here
in your resume, you headed up product development for Star
Crunch Cereals. How many direct reports did you have in
that role?

Maria (00:20):
Yeah. So it varied depending on projects, but anywhere from
25 to 60 people day to day, I'd obviously created
smaller teams within those teams to align with various stages
of the delivery process. And then those deputized team leaders
would report into me for our individual meetings and at
our weekly stand up

Employer (00:42):
and just read between the lines here. It looks like
you were there for the big merger. What did you
learn from that process?

Maria (00:48):
That's right. I actually chaired the change management team and look,
I'm happy to say that I managed to shepherd us
through a huge re skilling process. So through that merger,
we only lost 2% of our staffing base. We came
through that process, a much more agile business

Employer (01:06):
and not to fanboy too much, but you are personally responsible
for inventing the crunchy space cowboy breakfast flakes.

Maria (01:14):
They're my favorite. I, I did. Yes, they were my idea.
And look, I think that they're still Starcraft best selling line.
Millions of units a month.

Employer (01:24):
See, you don't know. Do you, because you're not there anymore?

Maria (01:28):
Oh, yeah. Well, there's an explanation for that.

Employer (01:32):
Yeah, it's a, it's a bit awkward but there's a
big old gap in your resume here. What have you
been doing for the last four years?

Maria (01:39):
I guess you could say I've been doing some product
testing in the field.

Employer (01:44):
Have you even kept up with the latest in serial technology?

Maria (01:47):
I was working on customer development.

Employer (01:49):
Well, I definitely wouldn't have wanted to miss the international
fiber and flake symposium last year.

Maria (01:55):
Yeah, I was um I was bringing a new customer
into the world that day.

Employer (02:02):
What??

Maria (02:03):
Kids! I've been having kids!

Employer (02:08):
that kind of thing is gonna knock you back quite
a bit in the salary stakes.

Rae Johnston (02:15):
Look who wouldn't take time out of the workplace if
it meant skipping the international fiber and flake symposium. I'm
Rae Johnston and this is getting it right. A podcast
from Jobsbank that helps you understand, buying and hiring with purpose.

(02:37):
In season one, we helped you with social procurement, how
to buy goods or higher services from a more varied
pool of companies. And this season we're all about inclusive hiring.
We'll give you practical tips on how you can attract
a more dynamic, flexible and diverse workforce. And we'll also

(02:58):
help you design your workplace to keep those hires.

Andrea Ho (03:02):
My name's Andrea Ho and I'm the Discipline Lead for
radio and podcasting at the Australian Film television and radio school.
But before that, I have an entire history of work
in radio and broadcasting, including on air in production, in
front line leadership and in executive leadership,

Rae Johnston (03:19):
Andrea when it comes to those initial stages of hiring
application selection and then an interview, unconscious bias can be present.
What exactly is unconscious bias?

Andrea Ho (03:33):
Though unconscious bias put simply is the kinds of thoughts
that we have in our head through learned experience that
we don't even know that we have. But that predispose
us to think a certain way about certain kinds of
situations or people, an easy way to think about it
is stereotypes. That's a pretty common example. Everybody has bias,

(03:55):
everybody has biases that we are unaware of. That's why
we call them unconscious.

Rae Johnston (04:00):
So in an ideal world, we'd love to create a
completely bias free recruitment process, but let's unpack that a
little bit and how to achieve it. So what steps
can hr managers take in that initial stage of hiring
that application process to create that bias free zone we're
looking for?

Andrea Ho (04:21):
I think a bias free zone in hiring and recruitment
is the holy grail that we are all aiming for
to begin by unpacking what unconscious bias looks like in
this space. It's usually to do with thinking about certain
kinds of people as being appropriate for certain kinds of roles.
So to use some pretty blunt examples, people often think

(04:41):
that nurses should be women or that tray should be
men or that leaders should be older men.
Those are the kinds of quite obvious unconscious biases that
I think that we are becoming more and more aware of.
But there are many subtle layers of bias underneath that say,
for example, that young people won't make good leaders or
that older people won't be good at new technologies. So ideally,

(05:04):
what we want to do is to try and be
aware of the biases that we all have biases are
things that we've learned over years, if not decades of
life experience,
and we can't wash them away overnight. But what we
can do first and foremost is have a good hard
look at ourselves and the people around us and say,
what are the things we're likely to be biased about

(05:25):
and then account for those. So,

Rae Johnston (05:28):
Andrea, where are we seeing unconscious bias in the hiring process?
So

Andrea Ho (05:33):
first and foremost, have a look at your organization. What
do you have in your organization? What are your strengths
and what are you missing? Who are you missing
that tells you something about your organizational biases that are
unconscious to you. Then you start to look at how
you design the job. What does the job do? What
does it need to deliver and then some of your
expectations around that. So you might say, for example, I

(05:56):
have a full time job that needs to be 9
to 5 and that's how we want to deliver the job. Now,
there's a lot of reasons why that simple example alone
may actually exclude certain applicants that you might really want.
So for example,
some person who you might want, who might want to
apply might say, look, five days a week is too
much for me or it's not something I can manage

(06:16):
because I have caring responsibilities, but perhaps that person could
do four days a week, they could do flexi time.
Does it have to be 9 to 5 does every
day have to be in the office? So thinking about
your requirements for the job is the next step,
then you advertise the job. If you want to catch
the applicants that you're so keen to get, build in

(06:39):
the flexibility that we've just discussed around the design of
the job, say there is the opportunity for flexible working
or to discuss hours. These are the tasks that we
need done to this level. Then you come to the
hiring process, the selection process.
So firstly, when the applications come in some of the

(06:59):
basics that are there in the application can really play
into the biases that we hold within us. That's a
natural part of the way that humans are socialized. But
if you want to get past that you can put
in some steps that are not too difficult to do.
If you
work with your HR department, for example, you can remove some
of those details, deidentify the cover letter and the resume.

(07:21):
But another way is to say you can leave all
those things in. And what we will do is actively
look through our resumes and our cover letters and choose
to interview the people who actually embody the diversity that
we're looking for. The important thing is to try something
different if you want a different result.

Rae Johnston (07:38):
So over your career, what structures have you put in
place that have worked out to create those great processes?

Andrea Ho (07:48):
So best principles are you go back to the start
and you say, what's our mission as an organization? What
do we need to do? What is my role in
that and my team's role,
what then are the deliverables that we have to deliver
in order to achieve our part of the mission? So
that's our KPIs and then you look at the team that

(08:09):
you already have and you say, what have we got?
What are our strengths? And finally, you say, what are
we missing? When you look at that gap, honestly, there
is your opportunity to include the possibility of diversity in
doing that. You're not changing some of the other basic
competition
that you're looking for, you're adding or refining the competencies

(08:30):
that you want. So that takes a change in the
way that you think about hiring, but it's perfectly achievable.

Rae Johnston (08:36):
It makes it feel like something really exciting rather than
a chore or a box that needs to be ticked.

Andrea Ho (08:42):
That's exactly it.

Rae Johnston (08:44):
So, being from a mixed cultural heritage myself, I understand
that with you being Eurasian, you would be more finely
attuned to bias than some of the people that you
might work with. So how do you encourage other colleagues
who maybe haven't experienced discrimination to be able to understand

(09:04):
bias better and avoid it in the future?

Andrea Ho (09:07):
That's interesting, isn't it? In the end when people haven't
experienced something? It's hard for them to imagine for myself
because this is an area that I'm very interested in.
I try and be proactive when I can see a
colleague is seeking to understand because to me that
are trying to make the effort. So it's a small
contribution for me to be able to explain, you can
ask your colleagues around you to share a little bit

(09:28):
if you feel confident to do so. And if you
can do so in a way, which makes that person
feel included and that they are contributing towards a change
for the better within the organization. So let's say

Rae Johnston (09:40):
now we're at the interview process itself. Could you please
share a few helpful tips for interview panelists?

Andrea Ho (09:49):
So thinking about setting up your questions for recruitment, make
sure that you allow time for people to tell stories
about their experience and stories that aren't necessarily specific to
your industry, but can include the opportunity for them to
demonstrate a skill in situ in the industry that they
are from.

(10:09):
Something that happened to me in applying for my most
recent job was new though. And I had never thought
about this. They sent me my interview questions two days
beforehand and they did that for every person applying because
what they wanted was to get the very best answers
from me. And they acknowledged that most people have time
to think

(10:29):
about how they might tackle a problem. Now, that time
might be a half an hour or an hour, it
might be a day or two days, but it gave
me a little bit of time to think about how
I would respond. And I felt so much more comfortable
going into the workplace to do that interview. I've thought
a lot about that experience since and I've thought,

(10:50):
do I really need to catch everybody by surprise in
an interview process or actually can I give people a
little bit of time to prepare just as I would
in the workplace and get a much better performance from them?

Rae Johnston (11:02):
So I'm an employer, I'm conducting an interview today. What
can I do differently?

Andrea Ho (11:07):
So some things that you can do, you can make
sure that you have the interview at a time when your,
your interviewee is able to easily come to see you
or potentially do it remotely if that's going to help.
Do they need some assistance getting to see you if
you expect them to come in, face to face a
taxi fare or a train ride may not be a
big deal for you, but it may be a big

(11:27):
deal for your interviewee. Make sure that they can get
into
building that they know how to get in so that
they're not flustered when they're there. Do they have any
accessibility needs that you need to take into account when
you sit them down? Make sure that they know everybody
who is around the table. These are the kinds of
things that you can simply do to make a person
feel welcome and you don't even have to do anything special.

(11:50):
Just remember that you are in a position of power
and authority, your interviewee is not and to help you
get the best performance out of them on the day.
Some of those small things can make a very big difference,

Rae Johnston (12:04):
Andrea Ho who's led work in the inclusion space at
several media companies.
Don't forget there's more resources to help you create a
better hiring process on the Jobsbank resource center. Find it
at jobs bank dot org dot A U and make
sure you download our other episodes. They can help you
on topics like creating a more diverse leadership team, the

(12:28):
role of a diversity and inclusion manager and how to
remove unconscious bias across your organization
getting it right is a podcast from Jobsbank and it's
produced by Deadset Studios. I'm Rae Johnston. his episode was recorded on the unceded lands of the sovereign Darug, Gandangara and Wiradjuri peoples produced and edited on the lands of the Turrbal and Jagera people. We wish to pay our deepest respects to their elders past and present. And we ask that you too acknowledge the Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander Lands on which you're listening from.