So, you’re looking to hire amazing people to help your online course business scale. That’s a great place to be. But it’s not an easy endeavor. If you’ve never hired before, here’s the most important thing to keep in mind:

One of the most important things involved in the selection process of hiring is… fairness.

Making sure that you are being fair with who you are hiring and not hiring your best friends or your family members over actually qualified candidates is vital. There is a lot of toxicity among companies today with people hiring their friends and people who went to school, rather than looking at candidates who actually have the right experience. 

Fairness during the selection process will help you to create a more diverse workforce and achieve the innovation that you are hoping to achieve.

Did you know that only 41% of businesses are willing to hire workers with crime records?

But, what if you overlook somebody who’s fantastic in an interview and has a great resume because they had a misdemeanor when they were 18? You need to make progress toward having a fairer hiring process, and here are some of the practices that you could use to do that:

Ensure that the language that you use is inclusive.

You could discourage plenty of excellent and well-qualified candidates from applying to your organization due to the language that you’re using in your job advert. Words like ‘competitive’ and ‘strong’ are always considered to be male, while support and assistance are perceived to be female. Run your job descriptions through tools such as Textio to strip biased words from your advert and make it more inclusive.

Implement skills assessments for every job.

When you have a skills assessment as part of your hiring process, you can ensure that hiring is about merit and not just the words on a resume. You could also ensure that you are blind hiring, where you take names off of all of the resumes before you pass them to the hiring manager so that they are hiring based on what they see, not the names of the person that they are hiring.

Look at job-related selection criteria.

Before you start sourcing applications or reaching out to qualified candidates, you should ensure that the whole team has agreed on selection criteria that will fit with the team culture. All criteria have to be related to the job and be compliant with the EEOC and other state and local labor laws. Cultural fit can lead teams to focus too much on bringing candidates that look like everybody else in the company, where you want somebody who has the skills to participate in the team effectively.

Make sure that your hiring team is diverse.

People need representation, and your hiring panel should be made up of a range of people from the organization of different backgrounds, different colors, and different genders. Hiring decisions by a group consensus can also help to overcome some unconscious bias. And if you have somebody who’s racially diverse sitting in front of a panel of all people of the same race, it’s not going to be particularly fair. 

Running a business can be difficult. But knowledge can help ease the burden.

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