How HR Teams Can Use CV/Resume Parsing Tools to Improve Diversity

If your company has made the decision to cut bias, unconscious or not, out of the hiring process, there's one clear way to make it happen: using CV/resume parsing tools.

One of the biggest challenges in recruitment for HR teams is mitigating bias in the hiring process. If your company is not looking as diverse as it should, it’s likely that some unconscious bias is occurring during recruitment. Switching to a blind recruitment process is both possible and practical if you use Affinda’s CV/resume parsing tool.

What is Recruitment Bias?

Bias is a form of prejudice based on characteristics of candidates such as their age, race, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, education status, and more. While there is still intentional bias in the world today, much of the bias that happens during recruitment is unconscious.

As an HR professional, you already know that you cannot reject someone’s application based on any of these traits. However, you may be doing so unintentionally.

Even when simply reading through CVs, there are many details that can show you the various characteristics of the candidates. For example, the name of a candidate may suggest their ethnicity or the year they graduated university may reveal their age. This irrelevant information can influence your decision whether to interview them or not far more than you might think.

How Blind Recruitment Can Improve Diversity

Blind recruitment is a highly effective way of reducing unconscious bias during the recruitment process. Many organisations find that once they implement blind recruitment processes, the diversity in their company goes up as they are no longer making hiring decisions based on prejudice against certain traits.

Blind recruitment involves redacting candidate details which may be subject to bias. Information such as name, age, photo, university, gender, and other identifying details of candidates are removed from their applications. That way, the hiring manager must choose candidates based solely on their skills and experiences.

You will never know how many ideal candidates you’ve been turning away until you try out a blind recruitment process. You may be shocked by how many more good candidates have applied than you expected.

Improving Diversity Using CV/Resume Parsing Tools

Affinda’s resume parser can now help you to more easily implement blind hiring processes in your company. Instead of having someone manually redact the information, you can use our resume parsing tool.

By using the Affinda resume redactor software, you will be able to customise your output so that CVs have the identifying details removed. That way, you can screen job applicants without bias and end up hiring the best person for the job based on their abilities alone.

You’ll still want to interview the candidates, but during the initial recruitment phases you will know nothing about their personal characteristics. This helps to mitigate bias right at the beginning of the recruitment process, allowing you to put through excellent candidates that you may have otherwise rejected.

This can help you to consider candidates you may have turned down, and you will end up finding far better staff than you otherwise might have. CV/resume parsing tools enable you to remove prejudice from the hiring process, resulting in the strongest, most talented team possible.

This isn’t just a theory: at Affinda, we use this process ourselves and have experienced the results firsthand. We have seen our team grow into such a diverse and successful group that we’d recommend it to any business hoping to increase their diversity!

If you are interested in using Affinda to reduce bias and improve diversity in your organisation, get in touch with us today.