What is blind hiring?

Blind hiring reduces biases during the talent acquisition process by removing information like name, gender, religion, or socioeconomic background. It also removes things like academic qualifications or experience, meaning candidates are judged based on skills––not where they came from.

Theoretically, when the characteristics that may lead to a biased hire are removed from the equation, companies can guarantee they’re selecting the top talent for their open positions.

Therefore, if implemented thoughtfully, blind hiring can increase diversity and help your organization make stronger hires.

Blind hiring is mostly used during the screening stage, including removing names, candidate addresses, and schools attended from resumes, or in pre-employment testing, when data about applicants’ skills and characterifstics is collected through (a series of) assessments and the results are compared to pre-set benchmarks.

But there are limitations of blind hiring. Even with names removed from resumes and tests, certain identity cues can still make their way through. Things like hobbies and sports, volunteering experience and club memberships can give hiring managers an idea of who their candidates are and the environments they come from. Marginalized candidates might still experience subconscious penalties throughout the hiring process. Just implementing blind resume screening practices won’t be enough to fill those leaks.

Introducing principles of blind hiring to the interviewing stage of the recruitment process is also rather difficult. Anonymized written response is one way to conduct a blind interview, but this method often fails to pick up key skills and characteristics that might be important to the open role.

But blind hiring practices are still worth introducing to your organization. Let’s look at the ways you can implement it.

While 1 in 5 women experienced gender discrimination in recruitment, only 5% of men did. Blind hiring practices can help mitigate against bias in the hiring process.