Everyday, you make a multitude of choices, with your most recent one on whether to read this post or not. Data gathered by the Roberts Wesleyan College suggest that adults make around 35,000 decisions per day. Most of the time, you aren’t even consciously doing it.
The way you think is shaped by numerous subconscious biases that ultimately affect the way you perceive reality. The people you socialise with, the media you consume, the way you were raised, and your exposure to diversity to society are some aspects of bias that impact your decision-making process.
Ideally, outsourcing to the Philippines and other hiring decisions would be based on a candidate’s potential, skill set, and experience. The applicant would be approached pragmatically and objectively without bias and subjectivity. However, no matter how hard you try, sometimes outside factors cloud your judgement.
The problem with hiring bias
A person’s cognitive bias is most apparent when arranging for remote staffing in the Philippines or during any other recruitment process. For instance, when they’re told to trust their intuition or gut despite the facts presented to them and they follow this advice.
This is problematic because choosing the wrong person leads to higher employee turnover, costing your organisation thousands of dollars or up to double their annual salary. It also brings legal troubles when people comment about the lack of diversity in your workforce as you’re more likely to pick individuals like yourself.
Older research by Forbes reveals that ethnically diverse teams deliver 60% better results and make smarter decisions 87% of the time. Also, the 2020 Diversity Wins report by McKinsey shows that companies that are gender diverse were 25% more likely to have above-average profits than others.
The ways to reduce hiring bias
Biases prevent your company from hiring culturally and gender diverse workers thereby hindering your overall productivity. This is why it’s crucial to eliminate, if not reduce, them from the hiring process. It won’t be easy since you have to recruit based on different implicit concepts.
As much as you may try to make rational decisions to balance out any cognitive biases you know exist, there are more than one to consider. You might need to apply many of the following tips to see a noticeable difference in how or who you’re hiring.
Establish goals towards diversity
By setting objectives, you’re informing everyone that removing bias and building diversity is essential to your bottom line. Think about what diversity means for your company, particularly the sexual preferences, ages, and ethnicities that are underrepresented.
Follow that up with metrics to achieve at each step of the recruitment process. These include the application stage, interview conversions, and candidate acceptance rate. Communicate the progress and success you’ve had with your strategy to your team.
Identify biases in your recruitment
The hiring process currently practised by most organisations is full of structural bias against minority groups. To mitigate ableism, gender discrimination, ageism, and racism, first admit that unintended bias exists in workplaces and in most promotion processes.
Separate professional skills from social ones too. Likeability is highly weighted across all sectors though charm isn’t relevant for all jobs. Additionally, be careful of referrals even from your best employees or you’ll end up with teams from the same schools or with similar backgrounds.
Conduct a blind resume review
Level the playing field and focus on the candidate’s talents and qualifications over their other traits. Chances are, people with exotic-sounding names get less amounts of callbacks compared to people with Western-sounding names. However, you need to check what everyone brings to the table and pick from there.
Consider using artificial intelligence models that are designed to aid in hiring. This is because machines don’t experience emotions like humans do so they’re unable to have biases based on feelings too. You’d be surprised at how many hidden gems there are in your candidate pool.
Build a foundation of trust
Creating a foundation of collaboration, accountability, and commitment is essential to support your strategy for boosting inclusion, equity, and diversity. You want to set an atmosphere where your employees are comfortable in showing off their unique culture, hobbies, and more—a place where your personal assistants in the Philippines are proud to say they’re Filipino.
Offer programs about productive conflict development where participants learn how to communicate better. Doing so creates a unified space that is aligned with your values and vision, strengthens company culture, and opens up new opportunities for career growth.
Remove controversial questions
Familiarise yourself with hiring laws and regulations in your state or country so you know which attributes you’re prohibited from using as basis for recruitment. It aids you in evaluating your current processes to prevent unintended discrimination for religion, race, national origin, age, colour, civil status, and so on.
Use these criteria when reviewing applications and making interview questions. Get rid of any queries that are problematic and replace them with something more relevant to the role. Again, using AI tools is great for reducing bias when offshoring to the Philippines or elsewhere.
Give work sample tests
These are evaluations that mimic the kinds of responsibilities the person will be doing once hired. They serve as an excellent means for checking their potential or future job performance. Reviewing these tests from different candidates also helps you compare applicants better.
For instance, you want to hire a VA in the Philippines to assist in your homeowners association. Their tasks may involve contacting tenants to remind them about rent or making invoices for contractors working on renovations. A virtual assistant PH who knows how to write their messages or make their receipts better is your top choice.
Revise the job descriptions
Poor choice of words may deter people from applying to your company. For instance, mentioning “digital natives” may keep older applicants from applying while using “aggressive” may signal that only male candidates will be considered for the job.
Address this matter by focusing on skills rather than subjective descriptions. For instance, say you prefer someone who’s familiar with using different digital platforms. Rather than saying you want a native English speaker for a VA, specifically mention you want a Filipino outsource who’s excellent at English writing and speaking.
Make recruitment collective
In most cases, bias exists in the hiring process because the system is designed from one perspective. This is problematic because the HR manager might see the role as simple when it actually requires an entire team of Filipino virtual assistants to meet the standards.
When designing the process, ensure that it’s a team effort with input from different levels and the management. It may be wiser to find a virtual assistant agency in the Philippines instead when you’re getting staff leasing services to reduce any bias.
Arrange for offshore staffing solutions
Following the thought from the last point, the best way to reduce bias when hiring is to work with virtual assistant companies in the Philippines. Not only are they familiar with the culture of the Filipinos but they also know how to maximise their strengths to complement your existing team.
We at Remote Workmate specialise in outsourcing services in the Philippines. We’re connected to a large talent pool of virtual professionals who are comfortable in working in an AI-augmented workplace. We even provide VAs who specialise in recruitment altogether.
Click this button to start the process to hire a VA from the Philippines.
