Blind Hiring Statistics: Why the Process Works

Statistics prove that diverse workforces perform better and help businesses become more profitable.  Learn more about the value of blind hiring in 2019.

Blind Hiring Statistics – The Numbers Don’t Lie

With companies being pushed to be more diverse, blind hiring has come under the spotlight. If you’re unfamiliar with what blind hiring is, we’d like to clarify that it’s not covering your eyes and pointing! Instead, it’s about excluding certain information from hiring decisions, so as not to compromise impartiality. This information can include someone’s age, ethnicity, and gender, but also their education. The idea behind blind hiring is that it enables companies to hire people based soley on merit. You can learn more about this in our article ‘What is Blind Hiring?’

Seems a lot of effort, right? Especially when apparently, there’s “no evidence” to suggest that diversity actually improves businesses. This could not be further from the truth.

CEOs might think that diversity is a problem for HR or corporate ‘tokenism’. But the fact of the matter is that diversity actually makes good business sense. To quash debates about how important diversity actually is, recent statistics show it has a cast-iron business case. In other words, teams that are more diverse actually perform better and make more money.

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Blind Hiring Processes are Potentially Profitable

McKinsey & Company have spent the last few years studying corporate diversity. Delivering through Diversity, a publication released in January 2018, contains data which forms a compelling argument for diversity:

• Companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 21% more likely to financially outperform those in the bottom quartile. For ethnically diverse companies the likelihood increases to 33%.
  

• Companies in the bottom quartile for gender and ethnic/cultural diversity were 29% less likely to attain above-average profits than more diverse companies.
  

• Companies in the top-quartile for gender diversity amongst executives had a 21% likelihood of generating higher profits.

There you have it, the importance of workplace diversity in black and white (no pun intended). However, before companies start patting themselves on the back, there are some key areas of improvement. Putting it simply, like most effective changes, diversity needs to start at the top:

• In the United States, only 9% of top-level executive roles for Russell 3000 companies were held by women.
  

• In the UK, despite 22% of university students identifying as Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME), they make up only 8% of executive positions.
  

We don’t want to dwell on the negatives, but we must clarify that there’s still a long way to go before diversity is no longer an issue.  

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Do Employees Care About Diversity?

There’s so much more to a successful business than making money. Hiring and employment is a two-way conversation. Companies can’t rest on their laurels thinking everyone will accept a job offer. Businesses must make a concerted effort to resolve issues raised by their team – and diversity is one of them.

A 2018 survey carried out by Randstad found that diversity is important to 78% of United States employees. However, in spite of the supporting evidence, 58% of female workers and 52% of workers say gender equality is not a priority for their employer. How can this be the case, when there is such a strong argument for diversity? At Applied, we think this can be condensed down into two factors:

• Some organisations don’t want to admit they have a problem with diversity. They’re cagey when asked about workplace demographics or salary transparency. Rather than fix the problem, they’d rather pretend it doesn’t exist.
  
• Other companies simply haven’t grasped the concept of unconscious bias. All recruiters officially consider themselves equal opportunists, and they haven’t been prompted to dig deeper and examine unconscious bias. Since they haven’t driven their business into the ground just yet, they’ve decided to say ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’

We recently published an article, ‘5 Reasons You’re Struggling with Diversity Hiring Initiatives.’ This could be of great value to you if your efforts to diversify your workforce simply aren’t getting off the ground.

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Applied is the essential platform for debiased hiring. Purpose-built to make hiring empirical and ethical, our platform uses anonymized applications and skill-based assessments to identify talent that would otherwise have been overlooked.

Push back against conventional hiring wisdom with a smarter solution: book in a demo of the Applied hiring platform.