As part of our pledge and continuing journey around equality, diversity and inclusion, we at People in Action believed unconscious bias needed to be at the forefront of our mindset and from the very beginning.

What better way to start then looking at our internal recruitment process and how we could take control and minimize any internal unconscious bias.

It is a big job, but our wider recruiting managers were on board and it was a great project to work through.

We started with the application form, assessing why we collected certain information and what it was used for. We also removed details that we no longer required at this stage.

We also thought about what information the recruiting manager really needed see to make their decisions, and what the Human Resources team were required to know.

We decided that the application should be over two forms; one being information that was required which will only been seen by Human Resources and the other including information on how the applicant meets the essential criteria (without the manager knowing a name, age, gender or ethnicity).

Although we are at the beginning of our journey, and have no statistics to prove a “change” has happened, the feedback from our manager is positive and that this provides them with focus on the applicant meeting the criteria with no other unconscious factors in mind.