Inclusive recruitment

We become better versions of ourselves and do better work when we’re curious, open-minded and accepting of others and their ideas. That’s why we want to be chosen as an employer for the inclusive environment we create.

How often do we as a business unintentionally prevent talented people who can bring fresh thinking, new ideas and experience from applying for roles at Carnival UK?  How often do our preconceptions of what ‘the best’ candidate looks like, stop us from seeing the talent and potential of someone who would come at a role with a different approach?

The truth is, we simply don’t know and so to overcome these challenges, we sometimes have to push ourselves to disrupt our own thinking.

Here are five practical tips on how you can overcome your unconscious biases when recruiting:

Open it up

No one, especially in our highly-collaborative business, operates in a vacuum. And to be able to think critically about how we can each do our jobs better and more effectively every day, it’s important to have different personalities, capabilities and life experiences represented in teams. If your existing team is fairly homogeneous in its make-up, why not take the opportunity to call out that you’re looking for something different and be really explicit about that up front in the job advert?
For example: To operate two of the world’s leading cruise brands, we have to be able to connect with guests and colleagues with a huge range of backgrounds and life experiences. We’re looking for someone who can bring different perspectives and fresh ideas to our organisation as part of our {DEPT} team.
This is a proven strategy that many organisations employ to attract applications from a wider pool of talent.

Unlock the language

As you’ll know if you’ve been to an Athena event, language is both emotive and powerful and can have a really big impact on who does or doesn’t apply for a role. Language is often ‘gender-coded’: that means there are words that appeal more to females and words that appeal more to males. There is also neutral language. There’s a load of research that proves females are deterred by male-coded language in job descriptions (while males are not deterred by female-coding). If you make your job advert and role description more neutral, you will make it more appealing, and potentially double the number of applications!
Use can use this free tool to check the gender-coding of your job text (http://gender-decoder.katmatfield.com/). It’s also fascinating to use it to see where else in life you’re gender-coding your language!

Core capability assessment

The first step of candidate assessment is a CV review, right? Not necessarily…what is the core competency required for the role? And how could you test that? You could try designing a task and asking applicants to complete it before you ever even click open a CV. This practice of ‘blind hiring’ allows you to filter your applicants in a way that eliminates the natural prejudices associated with age, gender, educational background, previous role titles, and even name.

Better balance

When you have short-listed candidates for your role, who will join you to interview them? Will it be people who look and think bit like you? Or could it be someone who will come at the appointment from a completely different perspective, or even from a different part of the business?

Stick to the script

You will also want to consider the structure of interviews. While it doesn’t completely remove bias, ensuring assessments are structured in approach, rather than more fluid conversations, suggests you’re more likely to make a more balanced assessment as the conversations should explore similar territories. Asking candidates the same questions gives them equal opportunity to present their skills, experience and personality.

As part of our strategy to reduce our gender pay gap, we’ve committed to working with gender-balanced short lists and gender-balanced interview panels for role levels CUK06 and above. There’s so much more we can all do to take that balanced approach across more demographics and across all role levels.
Speak to a member of the Shore Resourcing and Onboarding team, or your HR Business Partner about how you might shake up your recruitment approach for your current vacancies.