Unconscious bias has long impacted the quality of hiring throughout the UK workforce because of how frequently it can cloud the judgment of otherwise skilled recruiters. Now, artificial intelligence tools are emerging to provide some much-needed objectivity in the human resources landscape.

It’s not an overstatement to say that instances of bias can potentially be fatal to businesses in the United Kingdom, particularly at a time when the cost of an ineffective hire could severely damage the cash flow of small businesses.

Bias among recruiters can lead to poor decision-making, reduced diversity, and potential legal issues.

Tellingly, 96% of recruiters have agreed that unconscious bias is a problem in recruitment and HR processes. But what can be done about it?

The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) has led to a rapid rise in use cases throughout HR departments throughout the UK, and its effectiveness in identifying skilled candidates without the distraction of the unconscious biases of human recruiters is helping more businesses to benefit from more accuracy in onboarding the right employees at an operational level.

How Bias Affects the Workforce

Instances of unconscious bias can not only negatively impact the recruitment strategies of businesses, leading to ineffective hires and increasing the risk of costly employee turnover, but they can also cause havoc internally, too.

Disparities can also impact the development of workers, who may be continually overlooked for leadership roles internally. This can lead to widespread disengagement and disillusionment at a perceived lack of meritocracy within a company, as well as a severe lack of diversity in senior positions.

This lack of diversity can stifle innovation within a business and prevent fresh perspectives for new ideas. These issues can negatively impact businesses at all levels, and data shows that employees who perceive bias are approximately 2.6 times more likely to withhold ideas in a trend that severs company-wide access to fresh market solutions and competitive advantages.

Objectivity in Candidate Assessments

The brilliance of AI, when the technology is correctly deployed, is the objectivity it can bring to the recruitment process, as well as employee management for HR professionals.

In a telling study conducted by King’s College London, 12,000 applications to 4,000 roles were analyzed to find that applicants with English names received 26.8% positive responses for leadership roles, while non-English names saw 11.3% positive feedback.

Artificial intelligence can immediately address this disparity between responses by autonomously anonymizing profiles; here, candidate identifiers such as name, gender, and education can be redacted, creating a level playing field for assessments.

The technology can even automatically match candidates with vacancies based on their skills and interests, taking further elements of subjectivity away from recruiter decisions.

Additionally, AI resume summarization can equip decision-makers with a holistic view of applicants, regardless of their individual CVs and their varying formats. Again, this helps to create a more equal environment to boost objective hiring decisions.

Workplace Equality With AI

Employee management systems can also be enhanced with the help of artificial intelligence insights. The great thing about adopting software to assist with monitoring the performance of employees is that it can assess each staff member using equal KPIs, ensuring that nobody is overlooked if they’re outperforming their benchmarks.

Using integrated software solutions, employees can be recognized for their efforts and rewarded with personalized perks and benefits on the job, such as additional days of holiday or other more bespoke accolades.

The ease of access to these data insights can be enhanced with artificial intelligence, and deploying AI to assist with HR performance overviews can allow professionals to better understand employee performance metrics in a more frictionless manner.

Here, AI tools like PeopleHR Evo can provide HR professionals with actionable advice based on handling issues with underperformance, sourcing company policy documents on key matters, and comparing staff performance to specified benchmarks.

In effect, this allows line managers and decision-makers to rapidly access company policy documents to make decisions rather than rely on their own interpretation of rules and regulations, which may open the door to more bias.

The Battle Against Bias is Symbiotic

While AI can take a leading role in overcoming bias in UK HR processes, it must never be left to its own devices when it comes to making key business decisions.

Like human decision-makers, bias can enter AI systems at any point, and the technology will only ever be as objective as its training data. This means that human employees should always oversee the work of AI tools and intervene when questionable practices begin to enter the fray.

If these technologies are deployed for different purposes across departments or are used by various managers, the results may vary at a remarkable rate, opening the door for discriminatory outcomes.

The artificial intelligence revolution will fundamentally transform how HR professionals tackle unconscious bias in the workplace.

But it’s imperative that AI doesn’t allow its own shortcomings to undermine the clarity of hiring and managing employees. Adopting a symbiotic relationship is the solution to overcoming the solutions and challenges of artificial intelligence in human resources.