Fair Recruitment Training Programme

In the job-recruiting system, people are not merely hired on the bases of skill and competences but the bias of the recruiter plays a big role in whether someone gets hired or not. It is generally accepted in science that people always have an subconscious bias. However, people will not admit or acknowledge that they in fact discriminate; if you ask someone to their face whether they discriminate they will always answer no.

How might we tackle this problem of biased recruiters? We want to work on it on the level of the Human Resources-departments of companies and recruiting companies like the VDAB. Besides that, we want to tackle the problem from the roots and address universities that educate students that will work in HR later on.
 
How do we want to do this?
We would like to develop a training programme to make the recruiters more aware of their bias and change the way they recruit people. We would use Virtual Reality (VR) to have the recruiter interview a multitude of fictional jobseekers. The recruiter writes down the strong-points and whether he/she would hire the fictional jobseeker or not. This data is then analysed to see to what degree the recruiter only looks at competences or to what degree the recruiter has a bias in one of the areas mentioned in the previous slide.

If there is a bias, the recruiter is made aware of this, and he/she will follow a training programme to get rid of the bias. After the training programme the recruiter does another couple of interviews with the VR-headset, and based on what they write about the fictional jobseekers we can determine whether the training has worked and whether the bias is less than before.
 
We can do this every couple of years to check whether there keeps being as little bias as possible.
 
Companies would be able to contact us to use the VR-equipment and the trainings. We would bring it to the companies and give a small explanation to the HR managers. The recruiters shouldn’t know what the exact goal is of the VR-interviews, so they don’t pay special attention to bias. In this way, companies and recruiter companies get a realistic view on how biased their employees are.

Using: VR & AR, AI & Analytics

Download our pitch deck here.

If you want to know more about this project, reach out to Marika via marika.de.mits@vub.be.