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Find the talent you’re looking for

Studies have long supported the benefits of a diverse workforce. Companies can experience greater innovation, better decision-making, and higher employee satisfaction. Plus, when Gen Z candidates are specifically looking for employers that prioritize diversity and inclusion, a commitment to diversity can help you attract early talent.

The advantages are clear, but executing this vision can be challenging—particularly when hiring bias repeatedly threatens to sabotage your best intentions.

What is hiring bias?

Hiring bias is when personal preferences or stereotypes—instead of objective qualifications— influence your hiring decisions.

These biases can be intentional (conscious bias) or unintentional (unconscious bias). But, regardless, this prejudice can lead to unfair advantages or disadvantages for candidates based on factors that have nothing to do with their skills and fit for the role—such as race, gender, or age.

While you might think your company is above this inclination, you’d be surprised. Consider the following statistics:

41% of women say they’ve experienced gender-based discrimination during a job interview

36% of hiring managers admit to having age bias against Gen Z applicants

34% of candidates say they’ve been on the receiving end of discriminatory interview questions about their age, race, or gender

Hiring bias can creep into every level of your process—from sourcing candidates to interviewing them. But, the good news is that there are ways you can reduce bias and build a more balanced and inclusive hiring process.

Reducing bias in sourcing and top of funnel

To build a diverse workforce, you need a diverse pipeline. Here’s how you can reduce bias when sourcing and recruiting to attract a varied group of candidates to your company and open positions.

1. Refine your job descriptions

It’s tempting to write off a job description as just the nuts-and-bolts of the process—one that you can use the same rinse-and-repeat template for. However, a job posting is often a candidate’s first impression of your company.

Unfortunately, it’s easy for bias to sneak into these listings and make even high-quality candidates feel excluded. You can write inclusive job descriptions that keep bias at bay by:

Using inclusive language: While it might seem subtle, gendered or ableist language can discourage candidates from applying. Carefully review your job descriptions to swap out those terms for more inclusive language. If members of Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) want to be involved in the recruiting process, enlist their help to review the descriptions and catch any unintentional discrimination.

Revisit your requirements: Do you really need candidates to have a degree in computer science? Or are you primarily looking for Python skills? Foregoing rigid requirements in favor of skills-based hiring can open opportunities for qualified candidates who would’ve otherwise ruled themselves out. It’s also worth reviewing your job requirements to make them more accurate and suitable for candidates with disabilities. For example, does the person in this role really need to communicate over the phone (which excludes deaf or hard-of-hearing applicants)? Or do they simply need to communicate effectively?

Prioritize salary transparency: Gen Z is behind a growing movement toward salary transparency and sees it as a meaningful lever for equity at work. Plus, pay transparency has been proven to close gender and racial pay gaps. Include salary information (or, at the very least, a range) in your job postings to demonstrate your commitment to transparency and leveling the playing field.

Highlight inclusive benefits: Job descriptions are an opportunity to sell a candidate on the role and your company. Emphasizing meaningful benefits can attract a diverse pool of candidates and encourage them to apply. Wondering what to shine the spotlight on? Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), development opportunities, and flexibility all hold a lot of importance for Gen Z job seekers.

2. Widen your candidate pool

Did you know that about a quarter of all Black graduates with bachelor’s degrees in STEM attend an HBCU? 

It’s tough to attract more diverse candidates if you’re constantly relying on the same sources. You could be sourcing qualified talent from four-year universities, community colleges, and trade schools that you're not currently partnering with. 

Your “core schools” strategy can be limiting qualified talent from discovering your opportunities.

Reducing bias in evaluating and screening

A diverse pipeline is a good thing—but it doesn’t mean anything if diverse candidates never make it past the application stage. Here’s how to recognize and reduce hiring bias when screening candidates.

1. Rely on automated or anonymous resume screening

People have beliefs that shape their perceptions and decisions. So, it stands to reason that eliminating human involvement in screening processes can help reduce bias.

That’s why many companies have turned to automated resume screening to reduce inequality when evaluating candidates. With this approach, an algorithm scans applications for relevant keywords, skills, and qualifications to surface the ones that are the best match for an open role.

It might seem like a surefire way to kick bias to the curb, but even artificial intelligence (AI) has shown bias in certain tests. That means relying on these tools isn’t a foolproof system.

Some companies have instead opted to strip identifying candidate information (like name, gender, age, and even educational details) from applications so it doesn’t influence decision-making. Currently, only an estimated 20% of organizations opt for this anonymous process, but it’s a strategy that will likely continue to gain steam.

2. Provide bias awareness training

Even if you rely on anonymized screening tools, real people will play a role in evaluating candidates at some point. Providing bias training can help them recognize when biases influence their decisions and understand how to change their behaviors.

While this training should offer plenty of information, it should also be an opportunity for decision-makers to participate in simulations, see real-time examples of their own biases, and practice better responses.

3. Use skill assessments

Skills-based hiring continues to gain ground, especially since it provides an objective and standardized way to evaluate each candidate (without personal feelings muddying the waters).

A skills-based approach impacts what you include in your job descriptions (like focusing on necessary competencies rather than specific degrees or years of experience), it also plays a role in how you assess candidates.

Skill tests are one solid example. When these assessments are tailored to match the requirements of the role, they provide meaningful insights about which candidates are the best match—regardless of other factors.

Reducing bias in interviewing

Job interviews are an opportunity to understand candidates on a deeper level, but these conversations can also be ripe with biases. Here’s how to keep personal expectations and opinions from shaping your interviews.

1. Standardize your interviews and questions

There’s a lot of nuance in interviewing, which means you want to feel out the candidate and adjust the interview accordingly. However, research shows that unstructured interviews—where interviewers “go with the flow” and ask questions at their discretion—are the most susceptible to biases.

These biases could cause interviewers to ask discriminatory questions and exhibit microaggressions that make candidates feel defensive or unwelcome. That might look like:

Gender-based microaggression: Asking a female candidate why she chose a specific field (when you wouldn’t ask a male candidate the same question)

Age-based microaggression: Asking a younger candidate if they’re ready to take a career or “real job” seriously 

Race-based microaggression: Telling a candidate of color, “I didn’t expect you to have such an impressive background!”

Take the time to reflect on potential bias when, for example, you’re writing your feedback for a candidate, or while they are answering a question. Structured interviews can help mitigate the potential for prejudice and hidden stereotyping. These interviews often include standardized questions and established scoring rubrics that apply to all candidates for that specific role. Plus, research shows  that companies with structured interviews improve the candidate experience as well as the efficiency and quality of hires.

2. Build diverse interview panels

When you involve only a handful of employees or decision-makers in the interview process, it’s easier for bias to undermine your critical thinking. However, assembling a diverse group of people to contribute to the interview process can help you avoid (or, at the very least, gut-check) your personal judgments.

This doesn’t mean that every candidate needs to face a panel of 10 people in every interview. You can involve a diverse mix of employees in other meaningful and less nerve-wracking ways like office tours or quick, low-pressure conversations between the candidate and members of the team they’d be working on—like a social lunch, or a meet and greet.

By exposing the candidate to more people, you’re able to gather more insights and perspectives about that applicant (rather than relying on one or two opinions). And, as a bonus, Gen Z appreciates this exposure: 75% of Gen Z survey respondents said they value the opportunity to meet directly with employees from the team they’ll work with.

Hiring bias doesn’t just harm candidates

It’s important to recognize that we all carry conscious and unconscious biases which will inevitably show up in the hiring process. But have your processes led to overlooking or disqualifying candidates who could make a meaningful and long lasting contribution your organization? 

Hiring bias can be a silent yet powerful force undermining even the best recruitment strategies. By focusing on how to reduce hiring bias, you’ll attract top talent who will strengthen your workforce and better reflect your community.

Are you using Handshake to widen your candidate pool as one way to reduce bias in sourcing? Talk to us.



How to reduce hiring bias from the recruiting process

As one of the very first touch points between your company and potential future interns, job descriptions give you an opportunity to make a great first impression. The information you provide about your organization and culture will influence who applies, who you interview, and ultimately, who you hire.

Here at Handshake, we take an Interns First approach to our university recruiting, starting with how we write our job descriptions. Over 70% of students shared with us that they prefer a company that is diverse, inclusive, and makes them feel like they belong regardless of race, geographic location, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, socioeconomic status, and appearance.

Below, we’ve outlined 4 tips to help you write more inclusive job descriptions and encourage students from all backgrounds to apply.

1. Highlight your commitment to diversity, inclusion and belonging

Your opening statement sets the tone for the rest of the job description: By highlighting your mission and explicitly encouraging students from all backgrounds to apply, you send a strong message that candidates can look forward to an inclusive hiring process.

If you choose to include only the generic EEO statement at the end of your job description, students may take this as a sign that your company hasn’t put much thought into fostering inclusive hiring strategies or diversity throughout the organization.

Here at Handshake, we demonstrate our commitment to diversity, inclusion, and belonging by opening our Intern Job Descriptions with our mission and the following statement:

2. Keep your list of requirements short and sweet

Handshake helps students from all backgrounds navigate the college to career journey, regardless of their school or major. Candidates from non-traditional backgrounds may decide not to apply if they see a long list of qualifications unrelated to skills and traits — qualifications like attending a top tier school, maintaining a certain GPA, or majoring in a particular area of study.

To encourage qualified people from all backgrounds to apply, work with your hiring managers to hone in on listing only the most important requirements. Could an intern perform well at your organization without meeting 100% of the requirements you’ve listed? Continue editing until you’ve pared down the list to only the most essential skills and qualities, and consider adding a sentence encouraging students to apply even if they don’t meet every requirement.

3. Speak about growth & development

When asked what they prioritize most when looking for an employer, 84% of Gen Z respondents cite potential for career growth and progression; students seek internship opportunities that enable them to learn new skills and gain experience in their chosen field to help them jumpstart a meaningful career.

We designed Handshake’s Interns First program around four key pillars that foster interns’ career growth and development. In your job descriptions, highlight the business impact your interns can have, showcase opportunities for learning and experience, and emphasize skill development as a core aspect of their internship.

We close our Intern Job Descriptions with Handshake’s Interns First Program mission:

4. Ask your interns for feedback!

While writing this year’s Software Engineering Internship job description, we reached out to our 2018 Summer Interns, who shared valuable feedback to ensure our job description continues to accurately reflect our Interns First program. Special thanks to our interns for their help!

University recruiting plays a key role in driving your larger diversity and inclusion strategy. Creating an inclusive university hiring process that reaches a wide range of students from all backgrounds begins with ensuring your organization uses inclusive internship job descriptions. By posting and promoting the open role on Handshake, millions of college students from all backgrounds and experiences gain access to your opportunity.

Putting interns first at Handshake: 4 Tips for writing inclusive internship job descriptions

At Handshake, our mission is to democratize opportunity for all students. We also work with employers to build diversity and inclusion strategies because an overwhelming number of students on Handshake prefer employers who are diverse and have an inclusive culture. That’s why today, we’re sharing our learnings and best practices for supporting interns from underrepresented backgrounds.

Ready to set your interns up for success? We asked Brenda Jin, creator of Crush Your Summer Internship, to share her advice on five ways you can support your interns this summer:

1. Show up

Don’t underestimate the power of just being present, especially for ongoing commitments like weekly one-on-one meetings. Showing up creates an essential foundation for trust. It also creates opportunities for interns to ask questions and get inspired by you, which helps them become more confident and self-sufficient.

2. Get to know your intern

Interns aren’t just here this summer to have a checkbox on their profile. They want to accomplish something to help them launch their career. Make sure you get to know them and understand their motivations! In a recent Handshake Student Survey, nearly 70 percent of student respondents said they would only work for an employer that has built an inclusive company culture, which provides a sense of belonging to all employees, from all backgrounds.

What are their goals? What do they want to learn? Even if they don’t have an answer right away, that’s okay, because when you ask, they start thinking about it!

3. Create a plan and write it down

Summer will be over before you know it. Take the time to plan out the intern experience week-by-week. Write down milestones that contribute to the interns’ goals, and share the plan with them so that you can both be accountable.

4. Find additional support

We often hear from students about how navigating an internship as a first-generation and underrepresented minority presents unique challenges in the workplace, like imposter syndrome or assumptions that their major limits their career options.

Folks from underrepresented backgrounds often start work with fewer connections in the industry, which means less access to information that will help them succeed. Encourage your intern to enroll in the company’s Employee Resource Groups and other community activities. Additionally, introduce them to potential mentors in their desired field and specializations, especially folks outside the organization.

5. Find ways to stay engaged

Your company’s relationship with interns shouldn’t end when the internship does. Even if you don’t have open recs now, find ways to re-engage interns as candidates in the future. Collaborate with other recruiters and hiring managers in your organization to make sure interns stay in your pipeline after they leave.

Proactively supporting your interns will make their experience more welcoming and inclusive — and it very well could make a world of difference in whether interns excel at your company, speak highly of you as an employer, and whether they consider accepting a full-time role at your company in the future.

For more resources on how to further support your interns, check out Crush Your Summer Internship, a free online program that helps interns maximize their summer experience, created by Brenda Jin, a software engineer, and intern mentor.

If you want to learn more about Handshake partnerships please contact: employers@joinhandshake.com

For resources or general questions about Handshake please contact us at: https://support.joinhandshake.com

Check out our open roles at Handshake at: www.joinhandshake.com/careers

5 Easy ways to support interns from underrepresented backgrounds

In spite of increasing awareness, a digital divide continues to plague this country—and COVID-19 has only served to exacerbate the existing inequality. There’s a widening gap between those households that have new modems, new laptops, and speedy access to broadband—and those whose residents struggle to get a signal with older devices and low data plans.

It all comes down to money, and unfortunately, what we are seeing is that the people with less of it are shut out. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reports that 21M Americans don’t have broadband at home. This internet inequality leaves significant parts of the population out of access to information, to education, and to potential employers—the very things that serve to drive income growth. FCC member Jessica Rosenworcel told the Washington Post last spring:

The groups who are most heavily impacted by this equity gap are typically underrepresented, including Black, Latine, and women students. The unfortunate reality is that traditional pathways from campus to career tend to preserve racial and class inequality—and in 2020, it’s time for this to change.

It’s worth noting that significant strides have been made in recent years to bring underrepresented groups into a world of economic opportunity. Yet this wave of inclusivity is highly dependent on technology to reduce inequality. And if access to that technology is threatened, the progress is hindered.

How employers and educational institutions can bridge the digital divide

For students who lack access to a computer or a reliable way to get online, some of our higher education partners are actively lending a hand. In a talk with Christine Cruzvergara, Handshake’s VP of Higher Education and Student Success, she shares some of the ways educational institutions are pitching in and some ways that employers can do the same.

1. Make equipment and technology accessible

Cruzvergara points out that many institutions are helping to bridge the digital divide by providing hotspots and/or giving out, lending, or renting equipment to students.

For example, when COVID-19 swept the nation into a near-shutdown, Paul Quinn College—an HBCU in Dallas—sent out Chromebooks and hotspots to students in need. This move is consistent with the institution’s values as reducing income inequality has been a key objective for the college ever since its president, Michael Sorrell, joined in 2007. In fact, the first thing he did after joining was cut tuition by 40%, from $23,800 to $14,275 to reduce student debt at graduation time.

2. Keep doing virtual events

Cruzvergara believes that employers can still effectively reach those candidates who are shut out of participation in so many activities. When it comes to addressing the digital divide, we’re seeing more underrepresented students engage virtually because it’s easier to fit in between work schedules and child care or family responsibilities.

In addition, she advises companies to set expectations in those virtual events—for example, letting students know your preferences, such as whether to ask questions in the Chat, or if they should leave their camera on or off. Questions of etiquette are just as important for these underrepresented groups, and any guidance offered is sure to relieve uncertainty for students.

3. Continue reaching out to individual students

Cruzvergara also encourages personalized messaging.

4. Reach out to career centers at schools

Cruzvergara advises employers to reach out to the career centers at any schools with the representative student population they’re trying to recruit.

As an example, she cites George Mason University.

According to Cruzvergara, college career centers are more aware than ever that they play a key role in leveling the playing field. The good news is that schools are starting to pay attention to the demographics of their population: which students are coming in, which students are engaging, which are not.

5. Build programs to bridge the gap between school and work

In addition, leading employers are crucial figures in continuing to support these students, developing training programs that enable the transition of underserved groups from campus to career. Some apprenticeship and internship programs have broadened their scope in terms of the number of people that they can take. Some have shifted to online and to self-paced versions. Cruzvergara cites JPMorgan Chase as a positive example of a company that has made significant accommodations to help underserved students.

The program is self-paced, and is designed to give these prospective employees exposure—to explore and see if they would even be interested in working for the company.

AT&T also stepped up to help students whose summer internships may have been canceled. With the launch of AT&T's Summer Learning Academy, the telecommunications company created a self-paced, online learning program to give America's next generation of leaders the professional experience they need to launch their careers.

Companies don’t have to create virtual internship programs to bridge the digital divide—they can help reach students without equitable technology access in other ways.

6. Relax the rules & expand your idea of the ideal candidate

Yet another way employers can help is by changing their mindset regarding prospective candidates. To attract a more diverse candidate pool, companies need to broaden their definition of what success looks like.

As we outlined in two recent blog posts, one about Latine students and one about Black students, some of recruiters’ traditional methods for sourcing top candidates—such as GPA cutoffs—have hidden bias. GPA cutoffs exclude disproportionately large numbers of Black and Latine students. Another sourcing strategy that can hurt these candidates is the traditional short recruiting window.

Flexibility and an open mind are key to sourcing and engaging your next generation of leaders.

Closing thoughts

Our discussion with Cruzvergara inspires our ability to think creatively about the ways that employers and higher education institutions can help level the systemic digital divide. It is up to all of us to work together and to shed traditional practices that leave the same people behind—over and over.

We hope we’ve inspired you to expand what you’re doing to reach all students at this time. If you have any ideas, we’re all ears—get in touch with a Handshake team member to talk through best practices for closing the equity gap.