Bias in recruiting isn’t just unfair, it’s also bad for business. Bias in the recruiting process means many employers miss out on top talent simply because they’re not seeing the full picture. Most organizations focus their anti-bias efforts on the interview stage, but the real damage happens much earlier in the process. With AI as a new complicating factor, how can we properly address bias and make recruiting fairer for everyone?
My guest this week is Bas van de Haterd, recruiting polymath and also now co-founder of TA Audit Institute. As usual, Bas brings a vast amount of data and research to the conversation. In our discussion, we explore where bias really lives in the process, why current solutions miss the mark, and what the future of recruiting could look like.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The impact of biased hiring on employers
• How most bias happens at the start of the recruiting process
• Why current approaches to eliminating bias aren’t working
• Research findings on gender bias
• Job experience versus job knowledge
• Open hiring
• Does AI make things better or worse?
• Potential solutions
• What does the future look like?
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00:00
Matt Alder
Are employers focusing on the right things when trying to reduce bias in the recruiting process? Reducing bias at the interview stage is important, but is this treating the symptoms while ignoring the real problem? Keep listening to find out. Support for this podcast comes from Greenhouse. Greenhouse is the only hiring software you’ll ever need from Outreach to offer. Greenhouse helps companies get measurably better at hiring with smarter, more efficient solutions powered by built in AI. With Greenhouse AI, you can generate stronger candidate pools faster and source high quality talent with more precision. Streamline the interview process with automation tools and make faster, more confident hiring decisions with AI powered reporting. Greenhouse has helped over 7,500 customers across diverse industry verticals from early stage to enterprise become great at hiring, including companies like Airbnb, HubSpot, Lyft, SeatGeek, HelloFresh, and DoorDash.
01:13
Matt Alder
If you’re ready to put the power of AI into the hands of your hiring team, you can visit greenhouse.com to learn more. Welcome to episode 728 of Recruiting Future with me. Hi there and welcome to episode 728 with me, Matt Alder. Recruiting Future helps talent acquisition teams drive measurable impact by developing their strategic capability in foresight, influence talent and technology. If you’re interested in finding out how your TA function measures up in these four critical areas, I’ve created the Free Fit for the Future assessment. It’ll give you personalized insights to help you build strategic clarity and drive greater impact immediately. Just head over to Mattalder.me/podcast. That’s Mattalder.me/podcast to complete the assessment. It only takes a few minutes. This episode is about talent and technology. Bias in recruiting isn’t just unfair, it’s also bad for business.
02:38
Matt Alder
Bias means that many employers miss out on top talent simply because they’re not seeing the full picture. Most organizations focus their anti bias efforts on the interview stage, but the real damage happens much earlier in the process. With AI as a new complicating factor, how can we properly address bias and make recruiting fairer for everyone? Always a pleasure to have you on the show and you’ve been on many times. As usual, Bas brings a vast amount of data and research to the conversation. Well, my name is Bas van de Haterd and I don’t call myself a generalist.
03:27
Matt Alder
Hi Bas, and welcome back to the podcast.
03:30
Bas van de Haterd
Amazing to be here Matt.
03:31
Matt Alder
Always a pleasure to have you on the show and you’ve been on many times. But let’s still start with you introducing yourself for people who may not have heard previous episodes or may not have come across you and your work before.
03:43
Bas van de Haterd
Well, my name is Bas van der Hartud and I don’t call myself a generalist. I’m a multi specialist. So on previous shows we’ve talked about corporate career sites, something I’ve been running a research in for close to 20 years now and I’m doing consulting on. But this time we’re going to be talking about bias and maybe even AI and bias and everything which has to do with basically actually selecting the very best candidate. And that’s something else I’ve been helping companies with for ages. And I’ve actually founded a company called TA Audit Institute now which is going to do that very structurally starting only in the Netherlands for corporates trying to measure their, or not trying to just measuring their actual first stage application bias.
04:34
Matt Alder
Fantastic. I always like talking to you on a podcast because you’re sort of very research based in what you do. So we’re talking about bias and bias is something that’s been discussed extensively over the last few years in lots of different forums around ta.
04:49
Matt Alder
Why is it important?
04:50
Matt Alder
Why is it important that we talk about this? What is the impact of biased recruitment processes?
04:57
Bas van de Haterd
It’s very simple, Matt. Bias prevents you from hiring the best candidate and it’s hiring the candidate that looks like you but isn’t necessarily the best. And to give you an example, very statistically, there’s a really interesting research being done by Harvard University that they did before the financial crisis, before Lehman Brothers fell, they had a really interesting labor market discrimination research. And then after the financial crisis they looked at which of the companies are still in business. And this was mainly small and medium sized companies. They found out that your chance of increasing for going out of business being biased in the labor market research doubled. So 17% of all the non discriminating companies went bankrupt. 36% of all the discriminating companies went bankrupt during the financial crisis.
05:58
Bas van de Haterd
I mean if that isn’t a business case, why we should be looking at bias, I don’t know.
06:03
Matt Alder
Interesting. And I suppose that’s what I kind of want to dig into really that bias at the front end of the recruiting process. I mean, how does that manifest itself? What have you found that’s going on right at the start of that process?
06:17
Bas van de Haterd
The interesting thing is there’s a research, and this is probably the most well funded academic research I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s French and it research by the ilo, so the International Labor Organization and they also funded it and they found that 85% or technically 85.6% of all the labor market discrimination was in pre selection. So basically submitting CVs, but they also did some walk ins and some companies had call ins and they basically saw that almost everything is before a candidate is ever seen. And how did they measure this? That’s the interesting thing is if both candidates were invited, they actually trained actors to go on a job interview and do the same simulated interview. I don’t know how many hiring managers will be completely and totally pissed off by this research, to be honest.
07:18
Bas van de Haterd
I mean think you’ve been interviewing actors, but they found out that actually 85% of all the labor market discrimination was before a candidate was ever seen.
07:30
Matt Alder
Wow, that’s kind of really interesting. And it’s obviously something that talent acquisition has been aware of for a very long time. We see bias awareness training, all these kind of things is that are the approaches that employers are currently taking to deal with that bias, are they working or employing, is it not getting to the kind of crux of the issue?
07:53
Bas van de Haterd
The thing with bias awareness training, man, is it’s almost always interview based. So it’s almost always training to make you aware of your bias during the interview stage. While that’s the smallest portion, we’ve already selected everybody out at the CV stage and now we’re training people not to be biased on the interviews then. So the fact that there’s little bias in the interviews might suggest it works, but it probably suggests that all the bias has been in there before, basically. So we’re spending insane amounts of money on the smallest part of the problem, yet not addressing the biggest part of the problem. Another really interesting, two really interesting researchers I want to talk to you about is actually on the gender bias because you mentioned we put a lot of money in training and do the practices work.
08:55
Bas van de Haterd
There’s actually an American research on law firms where they found that the more female partners a law firm had, the more gender bias they were in hiring graduates. They found out that the more female partners, so the more women on the highest level of the organizations there were, the lesser the chance was on actually having a DNI program that makes people aware of the bias and the less women were selected because unconscious bias creeps in and eventually we still think that massively women are less, especially in high end, much demanding jobs like a lawyer. That’s. It’s not true. Consciously. We all know it’s not true. But subconsciously, I mean, just turn on your bloody television and there’s a talk show and there’s an expert and I’ll tell you, there’s an 80% chance that the expert is a male.
10:01
Bas van de Haterd
And that’s how we’re wiring brains to say experts are men and usually white men. So research still shows that when a woman says the exact same thing, she’s usually deemed about 20% less competent than the man who said it. Another really interesting research I came across is from. It’s a global research from one of the major global corporates. They won’t name who it is, so I’m not going to guess. I have a good idea, but I’m not going to guess about it. It’s a global corporate who switched CV screening from line managers to talent acquisition. And the beauty of this was that they actually did it at different times in different countries. This, this multinational conglomerate was acting. So it’s the perfect natural experiment.
10:57
Bas van de Haterd
And what they found was that when TA was doing the screening in they were screening in more women, so less women were rejected on the cv. And after the interviews they had about the same hiring rate for women. So the interview process wasn’t biased against women, or maybe it was a little bit because they still had 60 over 60% of the men hires were men. But they actually saw that the main gender bias was in the application. And when they had TA and they had a training program on ta, on skill selection and they actually also said, like we now with TA have better conversations with the hiring managers. What are you actually looking for? What are the skills we have to look at because now we have to select them. So their intake talks became longer.
11:54
Bas van de Haterd
They actually went from 15 to over 30 minute intakes for jaw crack. And they saw less bias in the first selection. So is there improvement? For sure. But we still tend to focus very often on the wrong side of the equation. Basically the interviews, while this also showed the problem is usually in resume selection.
12:25
Matt Alder
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13:33
Matt Alder
Do you think that the system of recruiting, the system of hiring that we’ve had embedded for hundreds of years, it seems with resumes and obviously over the last 20 years with ATS and those kind of tools. Is this part of the problem? Is it the way that recruiting works at that sort of selection stage is not removing bias or even making the bias even worse?
14:01
Bas van de Haterd
Absolutely. I’m now looking at one of the biggest researchers, basically a research on predictability, validity levels and one of the least predicting measurements. Actually, the second to least predicting measurement is job experience. When measured in years, it has a validity of less than 0.1. So basically, and that’s what a resume tells me. A resume tells me what you’ve done, for how long and for who. What matters is how well you’ve done it. One of the most predicting things is actually job knowledge, but we don’t measure job knowledge because we measure if you’ve done it, not how well you did. And I know you have a lot of non American or non European listeners as well, but if you allow me, I want to use a soccer example to describe this.
14:58
Bas van de Haterd
I recently found out that a goalkeeper for Inter Milan, well known club, retired after being at that club for 15 years. During his time, they won the Champions League, they won multiple cups, they won the Scudetto, you know, the championship, the Italian League a few times. But in all that time he literally played two matches. So his resume reads, I was a goalkeeper during the golden age of Inter for 15 bloody years, but he literally played twice and the only reason he played the second match was because he was retiring and they let him play the last 15 minutes of his retirement match.
15:42
Matt Alder
No, that’s really interesting. I think that’s a really great way of summing up that issue and sticking on this before we kind of talk about some of the newer ways of measuring things in your. You kind of presented on this in retfest and there is something in one of your slides that I just find extraordinary, which is about a global retailer and surname starting with A, B or C. Just, just tell us that story because I’m desperate to know more.
16:09
Bas van de Haterd
I’m not allowed. This is actually what their head of ta, their global head of TA told me this and I’m not allowed to mention which retailer it is, but he said were talking about Bias. And he literally said to me, yeah, they use one of the major atss, he says, and usually resumes come in by date of application. Right. He said, but in one of our countries, we accidentally had the resume screening said on last name. So by accident, somebody changed the setting from how do we present it to our TA team, From moment of application to last name. He says, literally every person working in our store right now, their last name starts with an A, B or C.
17:00
Matt Alder
And again, I think that really kind of underlines the, you know, the fact that the tools and the process and these things kind of don’t, you know, don’t really work and amplify this.
17:10
Bas van de Haterd
Yeah. And I literally said to him, like, why don’t you switch to open hiring? Because apparently you’re not selecting at all.
17:18
Matt Alder
Yeah, well, exactly. It’s just like literally we take on alphabetical orders, just looking at who applied.
17:27
Bas van de Haterd
And yeah, they can probably do the job, which is. And I actually know the funny thing is I actually have another Dutch retailer who at some point said, let’s move to open hiring because we’re just spending time on interviews. I don’t think it really matters. So they went to open hiring and they literally saw no change in the turnover the stores were doing. They saw no change in the attrition rates. Everything pretty much stayed the same. So they said, yeah, we just made an efficiency call here that right now we’re not doing interviews anymore.
18:07
Matt Alder
Wow, that’s kind of like shocking, but. But also not surprising. So in terms of the way that the market’s going, AI obviously is the. Seems to be the cause of all our problems and the solution to all of our problems all at the same time. How is that dealing with. With bias? What’s going on with a newer technology and newer ways of working that are coming into the market.
18:30
Bas van de Haterd
The question is, what is loading the AI? The most interesting thing is, and I actually have to credit Glenn Ketley for this because it was from one of his presentations that he showed me, he said at Claude, they had them do resume selection and it was very biased. And then they literally put in the line. And this was anthropic testing it themselves. You’re not allowed to discriminate, so you’re not allowed to use things like gender, age and ethnic backgrounds as a marker to select somebody’s if somebody’s fit for the job. And it stopped discriminating. Now, one might wonder why this isn’t a standard thing to put in there. But so actually telling an LLM not to discriminate it won’t discriminate anymore. That’s, that’s weird. Part number one.
19:28
Bas van de Haterd
Weird part number two of it is if you tell an LLM to rank your candidates, it will be biased. If you tell it to just grade your candidates, there’s hardly any bias there anymore. So it. Because it will do what you tell them. So if you’re like rank them 1 to 3, it will be biased. Interestingly enough, LLMs are biased pro women. If the CVS are generated by another LLM, and for my own company, TA Audit Institute, I’m now actually seeing that as well, that if we tell the LLM to write, for example, a short summary of the candidate, put it on top of the resume, it will write other summaries for men than for women.
20:13
Matt Alder
Interesting. But I suppose that fundamentally though, I mean, I know there’s a huge conversation we could have about AI and bias and legislation and guardrails and all that kind of stuff, but actually fundamentally we’re still talking about the same data, the kind of the resume that. The goalkeeper problem that you kind of identified there and the things that are causing all of this bias at this stage of the process. So what’s the solution to this? How do we need to change or adjust the recruiting process to make sure that there’s kind of more information and we’re not seeing this BIA this early in the process.
20:51
Bas van de Haterd
As long as we’re using cvs, there will be bias because like I said, there’s very little relevant information in a resume. Now are we going to get rid of the resume? We’ve been talking about that for as long as I’m in this industry. Probably for as long as you’re in the industry. And we’re actually been talking about this for as long as Kevin Wheeler is in this industry and he’s over 80 now. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t augment it. So let’s start with actually doing bias audits. Having people pair apply on your with similar CVs and checking out which are my most biased recruiters, which are my most biased hiring managers. That’s what we are doing. And you could also try replace them or augment them with assessments with actual assessment data that’s relevant for the job.
21:47
Bas van de Haterd
Again, you do need to know what’s relevant for the job. The thing with for example, work sample tests and job knowledge is that it’s very predictable, yet also it has a negative effect on actually inclusivity because if you’ve done a job, your job knowledge and your work will better. And we haven’t given jobs to everybody in the past equally. So basically what you see is that actually a work sample test is one of the most, and this is again American research, discriminating blacks to whites because they haven’t been given the chance to do the work. And if you’ve done the work once, your work sample will turn out better. So if we’re looking at, for example, the cognitive traits and for those thinking cognitive is iq, that’s very discriminating as well. Yes, but no, cognitive is much more than IQ.
22:47
Bas van de Haterd
You know, IQ is about four different traits and you have about 16. So if you actually measure the entire brain to a job, that’s actually very predictable. But we also know that’s more predictable for early careers. For later careers, it’s usually more about job knowledge, which then does amplify early career bias that we’ve been having. So that’s, you know, that’s why it’s such an insanely difficult thing to tackle. But start asking questions, which is difficult because of ChatGPT right now, but start making sure that people answer the questions about how well are they. Try to get performance data and look at our actual brain. And especially I think the best way to start tackling bias and I know this is playing the long game, but start with early careers, stop, get rid of resumes and especially cover letters. Early careers.
23:49
Matt Alder
I think we’re at a fantastic point in time where we can reinvent the recruitment process and make it fairer and make it just work for everyone. Just sort of final question for you. Just give us a quick vision. Say it’s like, I don’t know, five years time, you know, what would that perfect recruitment process look like?
24:07
Bas van de Haterd
Again, it depends a lot on what you are recruiting and who you are recruiting. I would probably say that early careers, you do a mainly a cognitive and a personality test, match it to the job and only that. And yes, it’s nice if you have a college degree, but especially in America and also the uk where college degrees are very expensive, you probably don’t have it. We see college as a rite of passage more than a place to get your education right for late stage careers. Next to the question, how much work are we still going to be doing? I would probably expect more structured interviews. Maybe we’ll even go to the fact that we just need to talk to more candidates. Now how are we going to scale that?
25:08
Matt Alder
We live interesting times. Thank you very much for talking to me.
25:12
Bas van de Haterd
Thank you for having me again, Matt.
25:15
Matt Alder
You can also search through all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com where you can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track on everything that’s coming up on the show. Don’t forget, if you haven’t already, you can benchmark your talent acquisition capability quickly and easily by completing the free Fit for the Future assessment. Just head over to Mattalder.me/podcast. It only takes a few minutes and you’ll receive valuable insights straight away. You can also search through all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com where you can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track on everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me. This is my show.
