How to Keep Discrimination Away from Your Employment Process

| February 19, 2016

How to Keep Discrimination Away from Your Employment Process

No one wants to be accused of discrimination. Not only is it unethical, it’s bad for business. In today’s highly connected world, you don’t want to be the business owner with the reputation of being biased and discriminatory. Your customers would just avoid your business on principle, even if your products are good.

Sometimes, you don’t even realize that discrimination is coming into play when you’re hiring people. You might have a subconscious bias against people based on their gender, religion, origins, caste, etc. There are some ways you can avoid this problem. Consider the following points:

Learn to Embrace All Kinds of People

People from different backgrounds have different experiences. They can bring a unique perspective to the table. If you hire employees from the same background, you’re limiting your company’s potential. That’s why you need to be committed to a diverse employee pool from the very beginning. You need to understand the merits of hiring people from different walks of life.

Focus on Merit  

It’s vital to focus on merit if you want your company to succeed. If you find an employee who’s excellent at what they do, don’t hesitate to hire them, regardless of their religion, caste, gender, or birthplace. If you do that, you’ll lose a great asset to your competitors and that could affect your business. If you have great employees, you’re more likely to succeed in these highly competitive times. You can’t afford to ignore talent just because you’re uncomfortable with their background.

Alter Your Interview Process 

You can eliminate any chance of discrimination by making sure that the interview process stays the same for all candidates. Instead of asking different questions to different candidates, ask them the same set of questions. That would allow you to judge all of the candidates fairly and ensure that you won’t have to worry about bias.

Naturally, there’s a need to ask candidates questions that are related to their personal skills and employment history. You can use follow-up questions that would help you understand the candidate’s skills without leaving much room for discrimination.

Review Your Hiring Process

If you start to notice a distinct lack of diversity amongst your employees, you should take a look at your employment process. Even if you don’t notice anything wrong with the process, it’s a good idea to review it regularly. The idea is to ensure that only skilled and qualified people get hired and no talent is ignored because of their background.

Set Disqualification Criteria  

You know what kind of qualities you want in your candidates. You should also make a list of qualities that you don’t want in your future employees. You should ensure that the list is fair and your bias has slipped in any way. If you do this, you’ll have solid reasons for disqualifying each candidate from consideration.

If you are accused of bias or discrimination, you can show people that you had a solid reason for not hiring that particular person. The disqualification list would also show that several other candidates where dismissed on the same grounds.