10 Minute Read
How to hire without bias or quotas
Payroll software company, Avanti, saw an opportunity to deviate from traditional recruiting and hiring practices, confront implicit biases and nurture a diverse talent pool.
The only problem with recruiting is, it tends to be both an art and science. The gray area in between is where companies and recruiters are challenged to wade into biases and tackle the inherent issues, sometimes before knowing what they don’t know … Clear as mud? The Avanti People and Culture team jumped right into the pit, ready and willing to get their hands dirty and learn along the way.
Hiring quotas are becoming an option for companies eager to tackle DEI in a measurable action-first process, but hiring by quota doesn’t necessarily fit every founder, team, or community’s vision. So how do you hire without biases and still measure success?
Through their recruitment strategy, the team set out to create a series of hiring practices that:
Cast the widest net of potential candidates possible
Purposely did not implement a hiring quota
Aimed to make every job posting salary transparent to reduce nepotism or negotiations favoring inherent biases
Took a hard look at hiring questions and processes that carry bias and rewrote the interview scripts
Acknowledged that knowing they needed to make changes and beginning this process is not half the batter - each year Avanti aim to learn and improve their recruiting with bias processes
Standardization and process are often seen as the antidote to innovation, but Avanti sees this a little differently. Supported by leaders with a vision that embodies learning, equity, and accountability, the Avanti People & Culture team developed a unique approach where standardization can be used for good.
Agile, innovative, forward-thinking.
Though Avanti exists in the software space now, the company hasn’t always looked as it does today. Over 40 years ago, Avanti began as a payroll business, but in 2016, a dramatic shift occurred. This shift was marked by a new direction, transforming Avanti into a noteworthy Canadian Human Resources Information Systems HRIS provider.
And it’s exactly that transition that illustrates Avanti’s approach to business – including their People & Culture functions.
The company is a clear product of the values that drive everything they do:
• With Open Arms
• Do What You Say
• Think Big. Start Small.
• Make Your Mark.
These values create a culture of accountability, transparency, and work that simply can’t go unnoticed. When faced with new challenges, every team member comes back to these values to drive their work forward and, just as importantly, leave the world better than they found it.
That brings us to their DEI strategy.
Leading the Charge
Avanti’s DEI strategy started with the entire leadership, championed by the company’s CEOs, even as Avanti’s core values were crafted.
According to Fundera, 41% of managers state they are “too busy” to implement any kind of diversity and inclusion initiatives.
It’s not about making time or to-do lists – it’s a mentality. When an organization emphasizes exploration, creativity, and accountability, these traits seamlessly lend themselves to a more diversity-driven hiring process that lays the foundation for a culture where perspectives and experiences are heard and embraced.
Hiring without bias doesn’t have to be hard or costly or even all that creative. Instead what it takes is persistence, open-mindedness, and a vision of better diversity practices in the workplace. Avanti saw an opportunity to deviate from traditional hiring practices where implicit biases often sneak in.
The software company’s People & Culture team operates by the philosophy that recruitment is a blend of science and art. Research, methodology, and process are contrasted with softer skills and an ability to read people. If you don’t have a process, it’s hard to know where you might be going wrong or reinforcing the same biases.
From the onset, Avanti builds a diverse candidate pool and integrates transparency throughout the hiring process.
Avanti wastes no time in implementing equitable hiring practices; their DEI work begins the moment a job posting is drafted.
“We know that biases and inequities exist because we deal with it in almost everything that we do, and specifically as it pertains to recruitment, biases, and inequities can be found starting with even just the job posting. For example, the specific words that you use within a job posting can greatly influence who applies for that role.”
With this in mind, Avanti pays close attention to words and how role requirements are communicated in every job posting to ensure that they aren’t missing out on candidates that may self-select themselves out of applying.
Need some help? Avanti used the software platform Textio to help them see where their biases may be creeping into jargon and hiring copy. Textio uses AI to help analyze job descriptions, flag jargon as well as words that might come across as masculine or feminine biased.
For Avanti, a DEI strategy isn’t just about creating a job posting that attracts a diverse group of people. Building diverse talent at the top of the hiring funnel also means being proactive by way of community outreach.
Avanti’s People & Culture team makes a deliberate effort to connect with diverse groups of people beyond the typical universities and institutions, such as the Catholic Immigration Society, CIWA, and Gradient Spaces. Avanti sees these partnerships as a way to share expertise and cultivate quality relationships.
It becomes more difficult to find candidates when you need them when you haven’t invested time and effort into creating a diverse talent network. But when you do, it inevitably provides a runway towards a diverse, inclusive team. In true Avanti fashion, the People & Culture team flipped the traditional hiring quota concept to objectives that influence the top of the hiring funnel.
It’s all too tempting to zero in on hiring quotas and other KPIs that characterize ‘good’ performance. These metrics, however, leave out very meaningful aspects of equitable hiring practices that aren’t easy to quantify.DEI is a critical part of any organization’s bigger picture and pays dividends far beyond what hiring quotas can illustrate.
• According to Gartner, 76% of employees and job seekers say a diverse workforce is important when evaluating companies and job offers.
• Similarly, McKinsey found that companies with more than 30% women executives were more likely to outperform companies where this percentage ranged from 10% to 30%.
In Avanti’s eyes, a commitment to your role in the community is an important aspect of true DEI work. This plays out when members of the People & Culture team make intentional efforts to get in front of diverse talent pools, even if those candidates get the role they want elsewhere.
That’s what it means to serve the community at large – and that matters, too.
How many job postings have you applied to that didn’t have a salary range?
In order to be truly equitable, Avanti believes that money talk needs to happen early and often throughout the recruitment process.
“Better transparency up front leads to better alignment in the end.”
Negotiations go against the perception of likeability. To combat this, Avanti made the conscious decision to remove hiring managers from the negotiation process as much as possible. Avanti’s hiring managers are involved in the initial salary range setting process before the job is posted, but hiring managers don’t know exactly how negotiations go, removing unconscious bias once the candidate joins the team.
This leads us to Avanti’s three-step compensation philosophy.
• Advertise salary ranges publicly on job postings
• Pre-interview communication reiterates the base compensation range and more details
• Further discussion of salary expectations takes place in the first round of interviews
This process allows both sides of the equation to be transparent and aligned; otherwise, candidates can find themselves in a low-leverage situation come negotiation time.
Hiring without any bias is a lofty goal – and while it’s important to aspire to no bias, doing so would be running before we can walk. Instead, it’s about hiring with transparency to mitigate as much bias as possible.
→ Avanti uses a candidate evaluation form that gives interviewers the ability to accurately assess each candidate based on the same criteria.
→ A candidate typically speaks with three interviewers separately, who then debrief to check biases, make sure the right questions are asked, and align on which candidates are right for the role.
→ The initial Culture and Values Chat is done off-camera to eliminate stress for the candidate and bias for the employer.
Avanti’s also begun to implement skills assessments into the hiring cycle. This allows the People & Culture team to quantify skills instead of using subjective judgment, which is especially valuable for those with English as a second language.
Avanti’s DEI recruitment practices leave things better than they found them.
Because the Avanti process is rooted in consistency and transparency, it also gives the team another chance to give back to the community on the candidate level, even when the candidate isn’t the right fit. When candidates are turned down for a role, Avanti provides more than a rejection notice. Avanti’s standardized process is translated into solid rationales and actionable takeaways that the unselected candidates can use to improve for their next interview, wherever that might be.
This is another example of DEI work that can’t be quantified by hiring quotas, but it betters the community all the same.
Avanti’s talent lifecycle has been carefully designed to ensure there's diversity at every level within their organization.
Doing good work doesn’t mean doing something ‘revolutionary’ and it certainly doesn’t mean a big investment of money or even time. Embedding inclusive practices directly into aspects of the talent lifecycle has had a positive effect on Avanti’s reputation and when you log onto a team video call, it’s clear that diversity is not only present but is valued.
Avanti continues to focus on building diverse talent at the top of the funnel, while also paying close attention to aligning the hiring experience to the employee experience. As is typical for tech companies, iteration is essential. The People & Culture team continues to look for tools such as Textio to help refine aspects of the process like job postings and ways to measure equity such as negotiation outcomes.
Chic Geek’s Diversity Motherboard is here to help you put Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging to practice in your organization! Chic Geek exists to build gender diversity in technology, a sector that’s shaping the world we live in. Our mission is to engage, retain and support intermediate women so they can thrive in their technology careers. Welcome to Chic Geek, your space to thrive!
With over four decades of experience as a Canadian HCM provider, Avanti understands the challenges you and your team face. It’s our mission to be the supportive partner you need at every stage of your growth.
We’re proud to be partners with 300+ Canadian businesses.
We’re trusted for our highly configurable Canadian payroll and benefits solution, paired with native time, attendance, and scheduling integrations. We’re loved because of our people. From our exceptional Client Care and Success teams to our innovative product team – we care about building software that simplifies your work and drives your success.
When you partner with Avanti great things can happen. You get the Canadian payroll expertise and transformative products you need, along with the dedicated client care you deserve.
This resource is proudly brought to you through funding from Alberta Enterprise Corporation (AEC), which promotes the development of Alberta’s venture capital industry by investing in venture capital funds that financial technology companies. Learn more at alberta-enterprise.ca
Alberta Innovates is a provincial research and innovation agency that expands the horizon of possibilities to solve today’s challenges and create a healthier and more prosperous future for Alberta and the world. Learn more at albertainnovates.ca
