The Great Reshuffle: A Time To Reimagine Your Hiring Processes

Creating more equitable outcomes for all

We are in the midst of the Great Reshuffle, a moment in time where employers and employees alike are changing how we work, why we work, and what we value. For companies, this means it’s more important than ever to rethink cultures, company values and working models, including hiring processes to build more diverse talent pools and create more equitable outcomes.  

At LinkedIn, we’ve been committed to helping companies do this for some time, whether it is through representative search in Recruiter that delivers results reflecting the gender representation of the available talent pool or through our Talent Insights product that helps employers rethink their sourcing strategies and broaden talent pools. We’ve also created an open-source project that allows us to measure and mitigate bias in our products.

But these tools alone will not change our hiring systems. Together we must commit to taking steps to change the traditional ways of hiring to create more equitable outcomes for all. Here are a few ways how:

We know that qualified candidates may be overlooked during the hiring process due to unconscious bias as recruiters can unintentionally use names and photos to evaluate candidates’ qualifications for a role. In fact, a recent study by economists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago found that on average applications from candidates with a “Black name” got fewer callbacks than similar applications with a “white name.”

To help reduce bias in the sourcing process, we recently introduced the ability for companies to elect to have candidate pictures and names hidden when sourcing candidates through our recruiter tool. With this new feature, an avatar will replace the candidate’s photo and four randomly generated letters will replace the candidate’s name so that recruiters can now evaluate candidates solely on their qualifications and skills, not perceived social identity or appearance.

Along with tools to reduce bias in the sourcing process, it’s equally important to integrate unconscious bias training into a company’s culture so that talent acquisition teams and hiring managers can understand, recognize and confront unconscious bias during the hiring process. This could be through extensive company training, learning courses or one-to-one conversations. And people are taking this very seriously: the single most popular LinkedIn Learning course over the last year was Unconscious Bias.

In the era of the Great Reshuffle — where employees want to work for companies whose cultures align with their values— showcasing your company’s authentic commitment to equity has never been more important.

Today, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace is no longer a preference – it’s a requirement. Younger job seekers, in particular, are seeking out employers who are taking an authentic approach to diversity efforts, with over half saying they look for diversity to be showcased during the interview or hiring process, and a quarter saying they look for mentions of diversity on the company website or a careers site, a recent icims report found.

One of the ways that companies can showcase their DEI commitments is on their LinkedIn page where they can post employee testimonials, customizable spotlights that highlight important DEI information, such as inclusive benefits or policies, or callouts of recent recognition, such as being named a top employer for diverse talent. In fact, over three-fourths (78%) of job seekers on LinkedIn expect to find DEI information on a company’s LinkedIn Page, our data found.

3. Think Skills First
The Great Reshuffle is also helping companies to rethink their overall approach to hiring, and over the past year, we’ve begun to see a shift to a skills-based approach.

For far too long, hiring was based on a candidate’s last job, degree, or who they knew. But today, we’re seeing that more and more companies are looking for relevant skills, especially as the supply of jobs outweighs the demand, and this thinking is very quickly helping companies to broaden their searches and expand the pools of available talent.

For hiring managers and recruiters, skills-based hiring can be as simple as writing job posts to focus on skills and responsibilities, as opposed to only degrees and traditional requirements, and asking skills-based questions during the interview process. In fact, our recent data found that U.S. job posts that mentioned “responsibilities” without mentioning “requirements” received 14% more applications per view than job posts that mentioned “requirements” but not “responsibilities.”

While we recognize these solutions alone will not create the systemic change we need, these steps can make a meaningful difference in helping companies source and build more diverse talent pools and create more equitable outcomes for the global workforce.