How AI Can Help Improve Workplace Diversity

Diversity in the workplace has become one of the essential qualities of modern companies, allowing them to thrive in the modern business world. AI recruiting promises to deliver more diversity and equality in a faster and more effective way.

Once a mistrusted technology, AI is now leveraged to make recruiters’ work easier and provide the best possible results. The way it does this is by increasing diversity and removing bias in the hiring process.

The Benefits of Increased Diversity

Diversity and inclusion remain among the most important factors when it comes to innovation and financial success. Harvard Business Review reports that companies with higher diversity are 45% more likely to increase market share and 79% more likely to enter new markets.

Hiring candidates with diverse skills and backgrounds will help bring new perspectives to the company. This, in turn, leads to more different points of view, increased innovation, and creative problem-solving.

Companies are becoming aware of this, too. A Boston Consulting Group survey shows that 75% of responders believe diversity is becoming a priority for their organizations.

How AI Can Help With Diversity

So far, one of the biggest hurdles in the move towards diversity has been the effect of our own unconscious biases. In hiring, these are the opinions recruiters form based on the first impression of a candidate.

Fortunately, more and more companies are becoming aware of this and are looking into ways to reduce unconscious bias. AI recruiting has proven to be one of the most promising tools in this battle.

Proponents of this approach claim that AI has no preconceived notions, and therefore can’t show bias. While there are certain issues with this claim (we will cover those later), it’s true that AI can be a great help in our search for more diverse recruiting.

Attracting People With Disabilities

When talking about diversity in the workplace, a lot of effort is put into increasing the diversity of genders, races, and cultures, but excluding candidates with disabilities would leave a large part of the talent pool untapped.

A number of companies in Sydney have started combining AI with data from disability employment agencies. By using AI to design job postings and screen candidates, they are able to increase the talent pool and make sure they attract top candidates.

Long-Term Changes

AI might be reshaping the way recruiting works in the modern business world, but at the same time, it’s reshaping the way both employers and employees think.

This is resulting in a shifting mindset, moving from a biased (whether consciously or unconsciously) to a more diverse type of company culture. This, in turn, ends up laying the foundation for even more diversity and equality in the future.

Potential Downsides of AI

As we mentioned above, even though we consider AI to be immune to bias, this is not entirely true.

The quality and effectiveness of an AI depend on the amount and quality of information it’s provided and the work put into tailoring the AI to your business needs. Because of this, if the initial data AI uses to build its models is biased, the decisions that AI makes are also likely to contain bias.

As an example, a recent attempt by a large IT company to create a more gender-neutral hiring process ended up backfiring due to faulty data. The AI modeled the screening process based on the previous 10-years worth of resumes the company has received. It turned out that, since most of the previous resumes came from men, more men were passing the screening process with the new AI.

The good news is that tech companies are working on eliminating issues like these. By some estimates, by the year 2025 AI will have advanced enough to become an essential part of the recruiting process.

Everything we mentioned above comes together in an effort to fight unconscious biases, both in the hiring process and in the everyday life of a company. The ultimate goal is to create a level playing field for everyone and close diversity and wage gaps.

To achieve this, companies are relying on AI and machine learning and powerful and unbiased recruiting tools. In time, we should see a full integration of AI in the hiring process, and all the financial and social benefits that come with it.