Removing the blinders of unconscious bias in recruitment

Imagine a kaleidoscope of unique perspectives and experiences coming together to form a powerful force. That’s what diversity brings to the table – a dynamic melting pot of ideas that ignites creativity and propels us to bring unparalleled solutions to our clients - in our case, to our colleagues across A.P. Moller-Maersk.

In Maersk Management Consulting (MMC), we have embarked on a journey to strengthen our commitment to creating a more diverse, equitable and inclusive environment, not only for our colleagues, but also for the talented candidates that we meet during our recruitment process. The driving force for investing in this commitment is eloquently captured by our Head of MMC, Jonas Linnebjerg:

The fundamental belief for us is that the more diverse our team can become – in terms of our backgrounds, nationalities, and gender – the better equipped we are to solve the complex challenges that we are facing in the industry."

We believe that talent has no boundaries, and we strive to create a workplace where all employees feel valued and appreciated, empowered to bring their authentic selves to work. To us, inclusiveness is more than just a buzzword; it’s a guiding principle that should permeate every aspect of our team. That's why we have made significant efforts to debias our recruitment process, ensuring a level playing field for every candidate that applies to join our team.

Understanding the impact of unconscious bias

Our team is dedicated to hiring the best candidates for the job, but sometimes unconscious bias can get in the way and prevent us from making objective and fair hiring decisions. It is human nature to have unconscious biases and these biases affect how we treat others and how we respond to or interpret situations. Our brains are incredibly quick to make judgments and assessments of people and situations without us realizing based on race, gender, age and education just to name a few. Our biased beliefs do not make us bad people, but we must be aware of our biases and how to mitigate these if we want to be equipped to select the best talents, not just who we think may be the best.

“We are experts in a lot of things,” says Ida Marie Elgaard Eghammer, Growth Enablement Manager in MMC, “but understanding unconscious bias, and how to mitigate it, is not one of them.”

That’s when we decided to partner with Living Institute.

Rooting out unconscious bias in our recruitment process

Living Institute is a diversity consultancy that applies the latest evidence-based research to make companies more diverse and inclusive, and – as a result – more innovative and sustainable. Before partnering with Living Institute, we had launched a number of initiatives without the desired outcome of being able to attract and ultimately hire more diverse talents. Therefore, we wanted Living Institute to help us identify where in the recruitment process we were impacted by our unconscious biases and help present strategies for us to mitigate them.

Living Institute observed several of our interviews to get first-hand exposure to our current processes. Moreover, they joined our debrief sessions, which are the sessions where we discuss the interviewed candidates with the group of interviewers. After a thorough process of surveying, interviewing and discussions with our team, Living Institute identified unconscious bias as the root cause of many of our challenges. To ensure that we were hiring the best candidates – and not just who we thought were the best – we began an extensive journey into the realm of understanding unconscious bias, creating psychological safety and tweaking our recruitment process to remove the impact of biases to the widest extent possible.

Naturally, there were some initial concerns when we launched this initiative, as some of our team members feared that we would let people through the process based on their diverse profiles rather than hiring the best talents. But we never lost our commitment to attracting the absolute best candidates – we simply widened the pool and sharpened our team’s abilities to select the best candidates without the blinders of unconscious bias.

Living Institute ran a series of training sessions with our team, starting with our leaders before moving on to the rest of the team. The trainings focused on defining unconscious bias and identifying strategies for our team to mitigate these. These strategies included being aware of our own biases and flagging these upfront:

“In case there are some characteristics that make us like or dislike or defend candidates without even getting to know them, we now flag this upfront. This is helpful for the rest of the team to have in the back of their minds when we are discussing the candidate,” says Ida Marie Elgaard Eghammer.

The training sessions prompted creativity among the recruitment team to build on the strategies that we had identified with the Living Institute. For instance, to avoid groupthink when discussing the performance of candidates, our team of interviewers now submit their feedback individually before starting to discuss the candidate within the group. Further, we nominate a devil’s advocate who challenges the perceptions of the interviewers during the debrief sessions.

In MMC, we are already putting into practice everything we learned while partnering with Living Institute. We have analysed our job posts and our website, increasing our inclusiveness scores of the wording by leveraging online tools that analyse text and provide suggestions for more inclusive language-use. Further, we started using multiple screeners in our bi-annual Intern and Business Analyst recruitment rounds to ensure a more unbiased selection of candidates.

To help level the playing field for candidates with a non-business background, we have done a number of things to make our recruitment process more transparent. We started by sharing an article with our top 5 tips for how to successfully complete your first case interview , as this interview format is very specific to management consulting jobs. Moreover, we wanted candidates to know what to expect at every stage of the recruitment process, so we decided to create a dedicated section on this process on our website .

Finally, we learned that we could help reduce biases and increase fairness in the hiring process by having a more structured approach to the questions that we ask candidates in interviews as this creates a more objective assessment. By introducing semi-structured interview guides, the assessment is reliant on a standardized set of questions and evaluation criteria. As a result, we defined key capability spikes within each role and now use these themes to structure our interviews accordingly.

The powerful results of removing unconscious bias from recruitment

The journey that we have been on with Living Institute since the beginning of 2022 has already rendered some impressive results, leaving us humbled and excited to continue this journey. Before starting this journey, we received 745 applications in 2021. This number rose significantly the following year to 1226 in 2022 and during the first four months of 2023 we had already received 657 applications.

When assessing the diversity in our team prior to partnering with Living Institute, one of our main goals was to attract and retain more female talent in MMC. In 2021, only 20.40% of our applicants were female. During the last 12 months, this number has risen to 29% female applicants. We are proud to see these numbers also reflected at the end of the recruitment funnel, as we now have more than doubled the number of female colleagues in our team compared to when we started this journey in 2021.

Based on our experiences so far, we urge other companies to also prioritize taking the first step towards investing in understanding unconscious bias and how this impacts your recruitment process. Jonas Linnebjerg's recommendation is clear:

“Be ambitious. You need to push yourself and your own team because it’s also easy to just keep the status quo and not see the advancement potential you have.”?

On a final note, we want to remind everyone currently improving their DE&I processes to remember that it is a journey – one we still find ourselves on.?

A warm thanks to all our dedicated colleagues in MMC for taking on this change and seeing opportunities in strengthening our recruitment processes. A special thanks to Living Institute who have helped us accelerate our mission to become more diverse.