Anonymous recruitment aims to stamp out bias, but can it prevent discrimination?

It is extraordinary what some employers will say about the people they hire when they think their conversation is private. Just about every bias and prejudice can get a run.

“Don’t send me any women because they cry too much,” the executive director of Slade Group, Anita Ziemer was told by a middle-aged man who was hiring graduates for the local arm of an international business. “There was nothing you could do to convince him otherwise,” says Ziemer in frustration.

It’s exactly this sort of bias that Ziemer hopes new pilot program Recruit Smarter will stamp out. The Victorian government-initiated project is introducing the concept of anonymous hiring, which removes identifying details from resumes so jobseekers get a chance to slip past the biases – conscious and unconscious – of those who are hiring. The program will be trialled by 29 large public and private sector organisations including Westpac, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, Australia Post, Dow Chemical, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Victoria Police.

Robin Scott, the Victorian minister for multicultural affairs, says his wife struggled to get a job interview until she took her Chinese name (Shaojie) off her resume and replaced it with an anglicised alternative, Jade Scott.

“Almost instantaneously there was a change in the response, and this is essentially the same CV, same material going out,” he said at the launch of Recruit Smarter in May.

Scott is not the only politician with a keen understanding of the bias that saturates the job market. Back when he was a professor of economics at Australian National University, Andrew Leigh (now the federal shadow assistant treasurer) co-authored a study that found Chinese applicants must submit 68% more applications to get an interview than those with Anglo-Saxon names. People with Middle Eastern names must submit 64% more, Indigenous 35% more and Italian 12% more.

Biases in recruitment are many and varied. Ziemer says that in Melbourne, where she is based, the “old school tie” still has an impact, particularly in financial services and wealth management.

She points to a recent advertisement from a professional services firm, congratulating its new crop of partners.

“This is a classic,” says Ziemer. “What they have done there is taken the best commerce graduates from the best universities, and they are mostly Anglo and completely out of kilter with the community. They are Anglo, private school-educated kids.”

Andy Cross, the managing director of recruitment firm Ambition, is also keen to try anonymous recruiting. He says bias against women has improved in recent years, but he still hears from employers who stipulate they don’t want people from India or Ireland (the last because, according to the bias, they “talk too much”). “When you challenge them, they [the clients] get embarrassed,” says Cross.

Cross says anonymous recruiting could be a good strategy to encourage clients to “put their money where their mouth is”.

The head of inclusion and diversity for Westpac, Ainslie van Onselen, says the bank plans to start anonymous recruiting by the end of this year. The details that will be removed will include names and anything that gives clues to gender, cultural heritage and age. “Even something like an interest, like yoga or dancing, could suggest it is a woman. We will also remove school … and any geographic bias,” she says.

What will remain is information about their skills, qualifications for the position and the reasons the applicant feels right for the job. The resumes will then be sent out to external recruiters, who will make the “first cut” for a short list. There will also be a control group in place so the bank can get an idea of what kind of difference is made by the new approach. The way roles are advertised and described will also be reviewed.

Jon Williams, the global leader of people and organisation at PricewaterhouseCoopers, is sceptical about the effectiveness of anonymous recruitment on its own because, at some stage, jobseekers will still have to make it past a face-to-face interview.

“It is an awesome way of removing unconscious bias in the initial selection. But all you can do is remove it in the first instance and there are very few jobs where you are going to appoint someone purely on the basis of a written submission without actually meeting them,” he says.

“So all you are doing is papering over the bias in the first instance, so you may get a 10% benefit, but you are still relying on people to make decisions based on interactions with other human beings.”

Removing identifying details from resumes must be supported with other approaches, he says. “We need to start addressing the bias itself and its roots so that people actually make the right decision in the first instance”.

The chief executive of Diversity Council Australia, Lisa Annese, says other anti-discrimination measures could include involving as diverse a group as possible in the hiring process.

“The other thing is to run some training or make people aware of the way biases play out and that could also be helpful,” she says.

This article was amended on 16 August 2016 to avoid unintended offence.