Inclusive hiring practices will reduce your gender pay gap

April is when companies with a headcount of more than 250 have to submit their gender pay gap, and according to the latest data, there is still plenty of work to be done. The Guardian reports that women are paid 90p for £1 earned by men.

The gender pay-gap law has existed since 2017. Most of us are now familiar with the key reasons a company may have a more significant pay gap than the industry average. They also differ from industry to industry; the ones I observe most are:

• Presence of women in senior roles

• Availability of flexible/part-time roles, especially at a senior level

• Pay parity and equal pay

• Un-addressed bias influencing recruitment, pay, promotion, recognition, L&D

• Underpowered people policies, e.g. parental leave, menopause

• Lack of investment in attracting women

Inclusive hiring practices won’t solve your gender pay gap. They will undoubtedly help reduce it and prevent you from widening it as your company expands.

What do these inclusive hiring practices look like? Here are my favourite for achieving measurable impact

• Review your job advertisements and job descriptions. Is the language inclusive and gender-neutral? Is your job ad an infinite list of requirements, bonus skills, nice to haves? If so, you’ll receive fewer female applicants. Women are more selective than men when applying for jobs (based on LinkedIn data). They tend to screen themselves out and apply for 20% fewer jobs. Read this insightful LinkedIn report on how women find jobs.

• If you haven’t already, implement formal Salary Bands for every role in your organisation. These are the secret weapon against the gender pay gap. Salary bands need to be regularly benchmarked internally and externally across various data sources to work effectively. Salary bands help mitigate bias from impacting salary negotiations and give your entire hiring team a framework to work within. They will also allow you to advertise the salary when hiring transparently.

• Increase the availability of part-time opportunities, especially at the senior level and advertise the roles as part-time/flexible. Why can’t a CEO, MD, or CSO be four days a week from day one? As long as part-time work is something you have to earn through tenure, you will reduce your chances of hiring / retaining women.

• Train your entire hiring community (recruiters, hiring managers, decision-makers, people/HR team) on inclusive and intentionally bias-free hiring fundamentals. Tactics such as balanced shortlists, anonymised CVs, and banning existing salary conversations will only go so far. Until your hiring community has developed a robust awareness of individual and systemic biases and how to mitigate said biases during recruitment, you may continue to discriminate against women inadvertently. This could lead to fewer female hires or lower salaries negotiated for female candidates.

Author Jennie Child, Founder of Balance

Risk Aversion Bias and its implications for inclusive hiring

Let’s talk about Risk Aversion Bias and its implications for inclusive and intentionally bias-free recruitment.

 We usually think of risk aversion within the context of investing money or gambling (or maybe extreme sports!); however, throughout my time in recruitment, I’ve observed this bias influencing an entire recruitment lifecycle. 

The simple psychology of risk aversion means that we have a bias for a sure outcome over a gamble with a higher or equal expected value as hiring managers or recruiters. This type of bias is also completely natural and understandable. The costs of a poor hiring decision are estimated to be at least 30% of the employee’s first year’s earnings, not considering the impact on culture, morale and productivity.

In short, risk aversion bias isn’t going away anytime soon, so it’s important to highlight how it influences our hiring behaviour.

• Unchecked, this bias causes us to be disproportionality focused on minimising risk versus maximising potential when assessing candidates for a role.

• During interviews, we will give candidates more space and attention to allay our concerns than allow them to evidence their skills and knowledge.

• We create incredibly long job descriptions and advertisements with lengthy shopping lists of criteria, alienating many great potential candidates from applying.

• We become overly obsessed with career breaks, gaps in CVs and job movement as an immediate red flag that something must be wrong. We will probably reject their CV at the application stage. However, suppose they get through to an interview. In that case, we will go into ‘horns’ mode, giving them a more challenging interview than all the other candidates. 

• We allow culture fit to drive our hiring decisions, even though culture fit = are you like us? We subconsciously ask the question, will you acclimatise quickly to our culture? Living safely knowing that we will never need to acclimatise to someone different and perpetuating the cycle of homogenous hiring.

There are solutions to managing this type of bias; here are a few things to think about.

• Like all biases, you need to check them at the start of the process and acknowledge that you may inadvertently overlook incredible talent by being too risk-averse. Can you afford to be doing this in a marketplace with a talent shortage?

• Agree on the minimum criteria for the role and only advertise for that; this will considerably open up and diversify your talent pool.

• As best you can overlook career gaps and career movement that triggers your risk-averse bias. Focus every interview on giving the candidate space to evidence their skills and knowledge. Don’t deviate from the structure and questions you’ve used for other candidates. If you still have concerns at the end of the interview, address them then.   

• Focus on culture add rather than culture fit. Culture fit will reinforce your bias and encourage you to hire someone similar to all the other people you’ve hired. Imagine what could be achieved by hiring someone different who brings something you’re missing. You’ll receive new perspectives and ideas, and there will be less groupthink and more creativity.

Author Jennie Child, Founder of Balance

Employments references and their implications for inclusive and bias-free recruitment

This topic frequently comes up in our inclusive hiring workshops and leads to interesting debates (which I'm sometimes alone on one side of). I should start by saying that I understand certain types of referencing are mandatory for employers to obtain for compliance reasons, such as employment verification and background checks.

I'm referring to the scenario where a line manager, co-worker or subordinate is asked to give a point of view on a candidate's potential performance. In particular close-knit industries, this is sometimes without the candidate's knowledge or consent.

Over the many years I spent in recruitment, hiring managers asked me to seek these references as part of the decision-making process. My hiring managers would also frequently reach out to their connections to obtain a point of view on someone whose CV I had put forward for a role.

One time, whilst handling a senior-level vacancy, my hiring manager reached out to a connection to ask for a point of view on a female candidate I had interviewed and put forward for the next stage. The feedback from said connection was that this candidate could sometimes come across as aggressive. I pushed back, of course, and highlighted that if the candidate were a man, it was likely he would be regarded as assertive. This kind of unconscious gender bias is prevalent in referencing, and it doesn't end there.

Referencing of this kind doesn't favour inclusion or mitigate bias for the following reasons.

It doesn't consider mitigating circumstances such as bad company culture, poor leadership, under-supported or overworked employee, mental or physical health....the list could go on.

- Unless your referee is uniquely aware of your selection criteria, it is unlikely that any opinion they give you will be anything other than subjective and less reliable to you than a solid structured interview.

- You perpetuate the cycle of privilege as it is easier for candidates from privileged backgrounds to source impressive and well-connected referrers. It's just nepotism 2.0

What is the motivation for obtaining this type of reference? Are they a valid indicator of future performance or simply a way of reinforcing an already bias driven hiring decision? I'd love to understand some other points of view on this topic.

My preference for an inclusive approach would be to only take references for compliance reasons and opt for the referrer confirming dates of employment and job title rather than giving subjective opinions. Agree or disagree? Join the debate on LinkedIn

Author: Jennie Child, Founder of Balance