Blind hiring aims to eliminate bias in the recruitment process by withholding candidate information, but how much blindness is too much? Tobias Kühr, Managing Partner at Berndson HR Consulting, and Dagmar-Elena Markworth, Partner at Odgers Berndtson, discuss how recruiters can navigate this delicate balance to make fair and informed decisions.
Imagine you recently enjoyed a very good dinner at a renowned restaurant. You most likely didn’t ask yourself what the chef looked like or what he was wearing. Rather, your focus was on the taste and appealing presentation of the dishes. Just as in this example, companies could also exclude external appearance when selecting personnel and instead focus on the skills and qualifications of applicants. As early as 2017 at the Cologne job fair, there was a black box for these “blind job interviews”. Aldi Süd was one of the pioneers here. And last year, the auditors at Ernst & Young followed this concept for their vacancies in Austria.
Outwitting psychology
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The idea behind this so-called blind hiring is initially as simple as it is good: the recruiters are unbiased. Because whether we like it or not, we are influenced by psychological phenomena such as the halo effect or the similarity principle. The halo effect is based on classic prejudices. A person with glasses is smart, branded clothes suggest that someone is successful, slim people are active, more weight means lazy. And the similarity principle says that we simply feel more comfortable in the company of like-minded people – one reason why Thomas likes to hire another Thomas.
If these subconscious biases are eliminated, the diversity in the workforce automatically increases, or so the theory goes. At the same time, the risk of being led up the garden path by applicants is reduced. With targeted preparation, anyone can come across as more personable in an interview – for example, by making eye contact, leaning towards the interviewer, smiling slightly, actively listening and asking questions.
Does blind hiring lead to more diversity?
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Incidentally, blind recruiting does not necessarily require absolute darkness. Companies can also pursue the concept in a watered-down form – for example, by leaving out age, gender and origin in the application documents, which is standard practice in English-speaking countries anyway. The research in this area is actually very interesting. For example, in a study published in 2012, Swedish researchers found that more women and ethnic minorities were selected for interviews when their applications were anonymized. A Dutch study in 2011 came to similar conclusions for applicants of non-Western origin.
However, these results should be viewed in a differentiated way, as shown by a large study also published in 2012 by German researchers. According to this study, blind hiring only increases diversity in companies if there was already a discrimination problem with certain minorities. For employers who tended to hire applicants from minority groups using a traditional process, blind hiring nullified this tendency, leading to poorer selection rates for applicants from minority groups.
What does my workforce ideally look like?
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The key finding of this study for modern recruiting – very fitting for the keyword blind: Companies must first answer the question of what their own workforce should ideally look like. After all, those who focus too much on optics and prioritize diversity regardless of the skillsets of the respective applicants run the risk of having a diverse workforce but compromising on skills, knowledge and experience.
However, this is not an argument against blind recruiting – quite the opposite. Because a company today can neither afford to hire Thomas the Thomas his namesake and Gaby only Gaby because of psychological phenomena, nor can it leave out suitable skills in favor of diversity in order to fulfill a quota.
As always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. A workforce should be as diverse as possible, yes, but not only in terms of gender, origin or age. It is the different abilities, experiences, perspectives and skills that are diverse that lead to new innovations.
The tiresome discussion about quotas
It is essential to regularly question your own recruiting strategy. Sometimes quotas can be useful – for your own discipline, so to speak. However, quotas alone do not lead to success in the long run and can also leave a bad taste in the mouths of applicants. People do not want to be discriminated against or hired solely on the basis of gender, skin color, or origin. Here, too, the world is not just black or white.
It is also important to be aware of this and to set your own priorities correctly. As a first step, recruiting can be done on a blind basis and focus exclusively on the content-related aspects that are important for the respective position. If there are then several applications that meet the criteria, quotas and/or personal preference in the interview can be used to make the decision. This approach is called “blind-then-see” on the other side of the Atlantic. Various research results suggest that such an approach can reduce bias in favor of members of disadvantaged groups, while maintaining the advantages of a blind initial assessment of qualifications.
Some companies are taking blind hiring to the extreme: after an anonymized process, the management consultancy CFC Big Ideas invites applicants to an online interview in which they record their answers to predefined questions. The recruiters then see the applicants as faceless avatars with robotic voices. This may have advantages, since applicants’ regional accents are often given sympathy points. But whether this blind hiring-at-its-best really leads to ultimate success remains questionable. In a restaurant, one thing is undoubtedly certain: the true measure of quality is taste. What the cook looks like becomes an unimportant side note.
Tobias Kühr is the founder and managing director of Berndtson HR Consulting, a management consultancy focusing on the co-creation and implementation of transformation and HR projects. He has over 20 years of international professional experience in management consulting and large corporations with a focus on HR, transformation and business development, including as Vice President at Deutsche Telekom AG. Foto: Berndtson HR Consulting/Julia Reisinger
Dagmar-Elena Markworth is a Partner at Odgers Berndtson. She recruits executives in the financial services sector. She has been with Odgers Berndtson since 2004 and is a member of the Financial Services practice group. Foto: Odgers Berndtson
