A Guide to Blind Recruitment

In simple terms, blind recruitment takes a CV and makes it anonymous so you can focus on assessing a candidate’s skills, qualifications and experience. The CV is displayed with no name, gender, age or ethnicity. Even educational institutions can be removed. The aim is to reduce the impact of any unconscious bias and, instead, hire people on merit.

Research trials have been run to assess the impact of blind hiring. The Behavioural Insights Team and Government Equalities Office, for example, showed a 15% increase in women being invited for interview when candidates listed their experience in number of years, rather than against specific dates. As employment gaps were no longer visible, recruiters focused on a candidate’s experience, and not on whether they had taken ‘time out’ from their career.

Using a blind recruitment process opens more opportunities to great candidates who may traditionally have been marginalised or ignored. And given 89% of candidates believe recruiters show bias when hiring, businesses must find ways to open their candidate pool and deliver more diverse and inclusive recruitment decisions. So, let’s consider the key advantages of blind hiring practices: 

Reducing unconscious bias

Anonymising applications minimises the influence of stereotypes or preconceived ideas about a candidate’s background. It helps recruiters to be more objective in their assessment and can attract better applicants to the role.

Introducing blind recruitment processes often goes hand-in-hand with training managers about their own unconscious bias. You help them recognise where they’re using ‘gut feel’ and replace it with questions and cues to help them look for evidence of skills and knowledge instead.

Enhancing diversity and inclusivity

Many businesses recognise the benefits of diverse and inclusive teams – more innovation, higher productivity, greater flexibility. Yet traditional recruitment methods lend themselves to recruiters making assumptions based on a very quick glance at a CV.

Anonymising those factors prevents that initial bias and encourages a more diverse applicant pool. Candidates who may previously have felt the need for ‘whitening’ their name to increase their chances of securing an initial interview, for example,  no longer need to. They can be confident the risk of discrimination is vastly reduced as blind recruitment puts everyone forward based on skills.

Increasing fairness and objectivity in hiring

How often have you conducted multiple interviews in one day, only to find yourself getting confused about who said what later? Blind hiring helps minimise that.

By developing scoring cards or similar templates, you can add notes against specific competencies as you go. Then, when you review at the end of the day, it’s easier to assess each candidate as you compare everyone’s responses accurately. As a result, hiring decisions become fairer and more objective, and much less based on whether someone had a nice watch. 

Helping employers focus on skills and competencies

Traditional recruitment methods allow people to get distracted by the university someone went to, or the month or year of their birthday. You might unconsciously shortlist them for sharing a birthday with your best friend or growing up in the same county as your mum.

Blind recruitment shifts that focus. It centres on the competencies you need for the job and uses those as the main assessment criteria. And that’s one of the biggest benefits of blind recruitment – it encourages managers to think about the essential skills for success, and then look for them across a wide pool of candidates.

Improves employer brand

Organisations who use blind recruitment are likely to have a better reputation with job seekers. People from diverse backgrounds are attracted to businesses actively looking to avoid discrimination. They want to know their application has an equal chance against anyone else, and blind hiring helps make that wish a reality.

Additionally, 86% of candidates research a prospective employer before even applying for a role. By using blind recruitment, you are likely to have more inclusive selection processes, so candidates will be more positive in ratings and reviews

The key to introducing blind recruitment practices is thinking about the practicalities of the process. You want to make it simple and consistent, so review these steps for your organisation:

Identify Bias-Prone Areas

Start by auditing your existing recruitment process and pinpoint stages where unconscious bias might occur. Use diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) metrics to help spot where your current process is failing:

●       Initial screening

●       Face-to-face interviews

●       Assessment days

●       Offer

Remove identifying details from CVs

Use software or manual methods to redact information which makes people identifiable. Names, photos, addresses, ages, and education details should be removed to encourage a fair assessment of everyone’s skills.

Using recruitment software that supports blind recruitment

Use recruitment software designed to streamline and automate your blind recruitment process. You can remove names and dates at the click of a button and use it to aid shortlisting too.

Training HR and hiring managers on bias reduction

Ensure managers and recruitment teams complete unconscious bias training to help them make more objective decisions. Help them embrace the change and challenge their own thinking and preconceptions about people’s experience and backgrounds.

Additional H3: Standardise Assessment Criteria
Introduce ratings sheets or scorecards to ensure people applying for the same role are being assessed consistently. Provide guidance on what ‘good’ looks like and how to complete a review.

Monitor and measure the success of blind hiring practices

Finally, make sure the changes you implement are working. Review every few months to check:

●       You are progressing applicants from a diverse pool of candidates. Consider if that’s true at all stages of the process, or whether unconscious bias is creeping back in along the way.

●       Your system is accurately removing identifiable data and nothing is ‘slipping through the net’. You want to be confident you are anonymising applicants and helping managers make informed selections.

●       Track where you were with where you are. Pre- and post-data comparisons can highlight those roles, managers and departments who are truly embracing the change, and those who need extra help.

Over the last ten years, many businesses have deployed blind recruitment practices. From the Civil Service to IBM, HSBC, Deloitte and more, they have all adopted processes to anonymise CVs and encourage diversity in their hiring practices. 

Deloitte UK

Two years after introducing blind recruitment, Deloitte reported increases in both female and ethnic minority hires. They have also introduced standardised assessments to minimise bias and apply a fairer recruitment process overall.

VirginMedia O2

Focusing on the recruitment process for apprenticeships and entry level roles, Virgin Media O2 are now assessing skills rather than work experience. It is allowing them to recruit those candidates with the right “strengths and motivations”, rather than asking them to submit a CV, and 98% of those people are happy working for them.

CFC Big Ideas

International Business Consultants, CFC Big Ideas, adopted a fully blind process for recruitment. The Ukrainian firm piloted a recruitment process which anonymised CVs, conducted asynchronous interviews, and also adjusted candidate voices so they all sounded the same. The first time a recruiting manager was given their name was when they reached the offer stage. While this might be seen as extreme by some, research suggests offers can reduce up to 20% just because the candidate has a regional accent.

While blind hiring has many advantages, it is not without its challenges, so it’s worth understanding those before you start:

Lack of Context

Removing information like educational institutions can sometimes take away context that might provide insight into a candidate’s achievements. Consider at what stage recruiting managers might need certain information to understand more about the applicant’s skills.

Bias Beyond CVs

We’ve talked about the importance of manager training as well as anonymisation. Without this, biases can reappear during later stages of the process. Checking your metrics and reviewing your processes help mitigate this risk.

Feels hard to implement

Anonymising CVs and removing dates of employment sounds like hard work. And if you have limited or old technology, that might be the case. When you have the right software, however, not only does blind hiring become simple, so does creating an end-to-end process for your employee life cycle.

 Resistance to Change

People who are unfamiliar with the concept may be resistant to its introduction.  This could be due to their own unconscious bias (in which case, training is a good place to start), but may also be a lack of understanding about what’s in it for them. Ensure you effectively communicate the benefits of blind recruitment before you start asking people to use it. 

Put simply, blind recruitment is hard without good technology. Removing names and dates from all CVs manually is a challenge very few HR professionals will relish. Using the right technology, however, improves your recruitment processes and your productivity at the same time:

1. Use a platform which will automate and streamline your process. That way you can not only anonymise CVs for recruitment teams and managers, but also schedule interviews, request manager feedback, and add the successful hire seamlessly into your HR Information System (HRIS)
2. Apply AI-Powered Screening. Many AI tools linked to recruitment platforms can evaluate candidates based on their skills and experience. This allows you to assess their suitability for first stage interviews objectively against the competencies required, reducing the likelihood of human bias.
3. Validate information and run background checks. Once you reach the offer stage, many organisations require at least factual references. The right software requests that for you, reducing the amount of time you need to spend chasing up dates of employment or positions held.
4. Make it easy to store everything. From CVs, covering letters, job descriptions and interview notes, recruitment platforms give you everything you need in one place. That way, in the unlikely event you’re accused of discrimination, you’ll have all the information you need to demonstrate it isn’t true.

Blind recruitment can help organisations build more inclusive and high-performing teams. By reducing unconscious bias, focusing on skills, and leveraging technology, companies can be more objective in their hiring practices, and recruit the best person for the job. And, as managers become more self-aware, the commitment to diversity and inclusion improves.

Implementing blind recruitment processes isn’t just an operational change though. It’s a cultural shift that signals your organisation’s dedication to fairness and equality. It helps position you as a leader in DEI and boosts your employer brand as more applicants become aware of your commitment to the approach.

None of this is easy if done as a manual process, however. The potential for errors, and the increase in manual activity means you need the support of technology. So, explore how The Access Group’s recruitment software can help your organisation implement blind recruitment and enhance your DEI efforts.