How Hired Can Help Remove Unconscious Bias From Your Interview Process

Since Hired’s founding, we have set out to do things differently. Back in 2012, we noticed the traditional model of hiring and recruitment wasn’t very effective, efficient or fast. Everybody was focusing on employers, whereby we ultimately believed that talent needed a more painless, transparent, and efficient job search experience that didn’t involve submitting resumes into a blackhole against job ads that might be outdated (or merely used to build a “pipeline” for possible future needs).

Fast forward to the present, we’re still on a mission to get everyone a job they love. And the results are exciting! We’ve helped introduce tens of thousands of people to hiring managers at a myriad of companies ranging from Amazon to Zillow.

We’ve gone from exclusively serving Software Engineers in San Francisco to helping professionals with tech, marketing, and sales backgrounds connect with employers not just in SF, but across the world including Australia, Singapore, London and Paris where we now have offices. Furthermore, we’ve launched support for contractors and freelancers on Hired, even further widening our reach.
By now, most companies realize that there are significant business advantages to diversity in the workplace. Yet, even the most open-minded and well-meaning individuals unwittingly allow unconscious feelings to guide their decision making. It’s an innate human characteristic. But this is a problem for employers and hiring managers that we can’t ignore. And it’s one that I’m particularly passionate about and recently penned a piece about for Inc.

With our new features, any company using Hired will be able to choose whether or not to see candidate photos and names, to help them remove unconscious or hidden biases from their recruiting process. Here’s an example of how candidate profiles appear in the Hired platform with both features enabled:

In order to enable this feature on your Hired account, please click on your name in the top-right hand corner and navigate to the “My Account” page. You’ll find the checkbox at the bottom of the screen.

Hired is a proud supporter of gender and race equality, committed to driving change in the companies we work with while providing employees with diverse working environments. We hope more companies across industries follow suit – sharing information, raising awareness and taking action to counteract unconscious biases.