How to reduce bias in your job postings: Three things you’re doing wrong and how to fix them

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Want to make your team more diverse, and/or make your hiring process more effective and efficient?

You're in good company. A lot of factors go into this, and solutions usually need to be customized for your particular context (starting with diagnosing why you’re lacking diversity and what’s not working about your process). 

But when I look at job postings, I see some common mistakes across industries. So in the next two blog posts, I’ll be sharing three of those mistakes and instructions for how to fix them.

The First Mistake:

Your lists of “responsibilities” and “qualifications” are too long -- and they’re not actually listing the right things.

Why is this a mistake? 

Because it’s causing you to lose qualified applicants and get a less diverse applicant pool. Here's how that's happening:

A lot of the “responsibilities” sections in job postings read like to-do or task lists. How does it make you feel to think about the tasks on your to-do list for this week? (Sorry. Probably not awesome! Maybe tired and overwhelmed? Me too.)

Try this instead: How does it make you feel to think about the big picture impact you have when you accomplish these tasks? (Better? Me too! The impact is usually why we do the work!)

Here’s an example from my life: Physically typing out this blog post (the task I’m doing right now) is not always fun for me. But the conversations this blog post will spark that will allow me to help you build more diverse teams more equitably (the impact) give me so much energy! 

So this is your first problem: You’re losing candidates by making them read through that laundry list of responsibilities: it’s overwhelming and boring, so it makes the job sound overwhelming and boring. 

That long list of responsibilities is also making your applicant pool less diverse. That’s because people with different backgrounds and identities often approach projects differently to achieve the same impact. When we list “responsibilities” as tasks, we fail to make room for that diversity in our applicant pool.

Back to my example: What matters is that I get to help you build diverse teams more equitably. Writing a blog is just one way to achieve that. There are lots of other super valid ways that I'm not using. (Managing someone who could write blog posts for me, hosting a podcast, making TikToks...)

So what should we do instead? Don't write a task list. Write an impact list.

Here’s how:

Try writing your “responsibilities” as “how you’ll contribute to our mission” – i.e., the impact you need the person to make in your organization. Not only will this draw in more candidates, it’ll help you build a more diverse candidate pool: different people might achieve the same impact through different techniques (or tasks) that you haven’t imagined yet, and this helps you make room for that. 

You’ll likely find that doing this makes your list shorter: that “organizational impact” list can often be consolidated into a few high-level bullet points instead of that old laundry list of responsibilities. 

I had a client who, once this clicked for her, explained, “Oh! I’m writing the why instead of the how!” That’s exactly it. If you’re struggling with this, an exercise I guide clients through is to think about how you would justify the budget for this role if you were talking to the CEO or Board Chair of your organization. It’s not a good use of that person’s time to learn about the details. They need the big picture, and they need it succinctly. What impact is this role going to have on this organization’s ability to achieve its mission? That’s the impact that goes on this list.

The same logic above extends to our list of qualifications. Your long list of qualifications usually makes your candidate pool unnecessarily homogeneous. That's because it causes you to overly weed out folks who might have different backgrounds and identities than the norm on your team, and overly weed in folks whose backgrounds and identities are more familiar to you. 

How does this happen? Mostly because of our biases. 

We start by writing responsibilities lists based on the tasks we've seen others do in the past to achieve a desired impact. Then, we write a qualifications list based on the qualifications of people we've seen do those tasks well. But we're limiting ourselves with this availability bias*: It’s highly likely that many of the folks we're weeding out actually do have the skills necessary to have the impact we need, and that many of the folks we’re weeding in actually don’t. We just aren't giving ourselves a chance to be open to different ways of doing things. (And we're overly preferencing what we're familiar with, mistaking correlation for causation.)

Your long list of qualifications is also causing you to waste your and your candidates’ time evaluating for unnecessary skills and qualifications. 

You’re probably hiring for a role that you needed someone to be doing, like, yesterday. So don’t waste your time evaluating for extraneous qualifications! I’ve never read a job posting that didn’t have at least a few of these. 

My favorite is "attention to detail." How often is broad attention to detail actually important to a person’s ability to achieve the impact needed in their role? Probably not as often as you think. Might a copywriter need to catch typos and grammatical mistakes? Absolutely. So that's the qualification. Might a Chief of Staff need to notice subtle shifts in interpersonal dynamics on a team? Totally. But that's not broad "attention to detail." That's probably more like, "Strong interpersonal skills." And I bet that's already covered in another qualification on the list. 

What should you do to make your qualifications list shorter and more accurate? 

Make sure the qualifications you’re listing and evaluating for are actually critical to a candidate’s ability to make the impact your organization needs from them. 

Think of your qualifications list as a list of abilities you’re hoping a candidate will have that you believe will most help them make a successful impact. That means you need to make sure every single qualification your list out maps back to one of the areas of organizational impact you listed for the role. (Usually you’ll have a few qualifications for each area of impact, and some qualifications might map to multiple areas of impact.) 

Want to take an even deeper dive? Our self-paced course, Minimizing Bias and Maximizing Effectiveness in Hiring, covers this and the rest of the hiring process in a step-by-step guide. It also includes a job posting template (part of a full template library) that’ll help you avoid the mistakes I'm outlining in this blog series.

*If you want to get nerdy about it, mere exposure effect, confirmation bias, and in-group bias play big roles here, too.

**My second and third favorites are "years of experience" and educational degrees.Read why here.