Insights

How to Reduce and Eliminate Hiring Biases in Your Insurance Business

As much as we like to think otherwise, hiring biases are still commonplace in today’s recruitment processes. 

If you’re looking to attract the best insurance talent, addressing hiring biases – around gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and age – will help level the playing field and attract the best insurance leaders to your insurance business. But so too will recognizing and reducing common unconscious hiring biases.

 

hiring biases

The first step is recognizing where hiring biases exist and helping all colleagues do likewise. Then taking steps to remove them.

Taking steps to eliminate hiring biases is not a one-off action. It’s an ongoing task and regularly reviewing and taking steps to ensure your recruitment decision-making is informed and fair.

On average, a human makes one decision every 2.5 seconds.

Many of these are made unconsciously and based on factors such as where we grew up, parental influence, our education, the social groups we mix with, the media we consume and the level of diversity we’re exposed to.

And there is nowhere more apparent where our unconscious biases are displayed than throughout the recruitment process

In a perfect world, hiring decisions would be based purely on a candidate’s ability to do the job and free of any subjectivity and hiring biases – but this is seldom the case.

But what are common hiring biases?

  • Confirmation bias – the tendency to seek out information that confirms our existing beliefs and ignore evidence that contradicts or opposes them
  • Affect heuristics – decision-making based on our emotional responses or gut feelings rather than through a rational analysis
  • Expectation anchor – when we allow initial information or expectations to heavily influence our subsequent judgments or decisions
  • Halo effect – forming an overall positive impression of someone based on a single positive trait or characteristic
  • Horn effect – forming an overall negative impression of someone based on a single negative trait or characteristic
  • Overconfidence bias – overestimating our own abilities, knowledge, or judgment
  • Similarity attraction bias – preferring people who are similar to us in terms of background, interests, or appearance
  • Illusory correlation – perceiving a relationship between two unrelated events or characteristics due to cognitive biases
  • Affinity bias – favoring those who are similar to us in terms of race, gender, or other shared characteristics
  • Beauty bias – treating attractive individuals more favorably than those we view as less attractive
  • Conformity bias – adjusting our behavior or beliefs to match those of a group, even if it goes against our own judgment
  • Intuition – making decisions based on our gut feelings or instincts, often without conscious reasoning
  • Contrast effect / judgment bias – evaluating something based on its relative differences compared to recent experiences or other stimuli

 

For insurance businesses seeking to attract the most diverse and talented insurance executives, it’s paramount that to give these biases ongoing thought and consideration during all stages of the recruitment process as they can subtly influence our decision making.

Allowing hiring biases to go unchecked will not only affect talent attraction and recruitment efforts but can also negatively impact diversity, promotion and talent retention, as well as company culture

But what are some the steps insurance businesses can take to eliminate hiring biases?

Acknowledge and address the root cause

To reduce and eliminate hiring biases, leaders and teams at levels of an insurance business must recognize and understand the common prejudices that exist. People hire people after all.

Being aware of hiring biases is the first step to addressing the problem. Educating teams to recognize them and identify their own will help eliminate them.

Have open conversations within the business and allow all voices to be part of the solution.

Use technology to minimize and mitigate

A myriad of tech tools exists to help mitigate hiring biases.

From reviewing the wording of job adverts and job descriptions to anonymizing candidate personal details and screening, will all help ensure insurance businesses are accessing the broadest talent pool.

Rephrase and rewrite job descriptions

Hiring biases can be eliminated by the language used in job descriptions.

The choice of words used can determine the size of the applicant pool. Gender-coded adjectives – such as driven, competitive or determined – can lead to a higher proportion of male applicants.

Reviewing job descriptions and replacing with gender neutral language will widen the talent pool and increase the diversity of applicants.

Adjectives including collaborative, dependable, loyal, interpersonal, enthusiastic, committed and connected will reduce stereotypes.

Technology tools can help here too.

Focus on qualifications and skills

Anonymizing demographic data on job applications and CVs / resumes will help reduce and remove hiring biases.

Focusing on key skills and qualifications rather than factors such as name or location or make assumptions around ethnicity, gender or age.

Define interview questions in advance

Conversational interviews that lack a pre-determined structure tend to perpetuate hiring biases.

Interviews with a clearly defined structure, standardized set of questions and scorecard will allow an insurance business to focus on and evaluate a candidate’s skills and experience that will have a direct effect on job performance.

The composition of the interview panel will also help reduce hiring biases. A diversity of interviewers will improve the inclusivity of the process and counter against hiring biases such as similarity attraction bias or affinity bias.

Using a scorecard in the interview process will ensure candidates are evaluated according to concrete evidence rather than subjective opinion.

Insurance businesses and hiring managers may want to consider the number of interviews in the process. A single interview will increase the likelihood of hiring biases, as opposed to a process that includes 3-4 with different interviewers.

 

Addressing hiring biases will help insurance businesses attract and retain the very best insurance talent, as well as address historical issues around leadership representation and imbalances around gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity. 

Reducing and eliminating hiring biases is not a one-off exercise. It’s an ongoing process of education, learning, communication, review and improvement.      

 

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