Best Practices to Make Your Hiring Process More Equitable

Hiring in America is changing and for the better. Businesses are finally admitting that the old way of hiring often shuts the door on the very people they need most. 

This realization has sparked a movement toward equitable hiring practices. Equity in the workplace ensures that every person has a fair shot at a job. 

Removing barriers that often affect people based on their race, age, or background helps achieve this goal. This matters more because there are more than 70 million workers who are skilled through alternative routes (STARs). 

But knowing equity matters and actually building it into your process are two very different things. Don’t worry, though. Making your hiring more equitable is not that tough. You just need to make a few changes in the hiring process. 

Dive in, for we'll walk you through some best practices to help build an equitable hiring process that tackles bias at its source.

#1 Limit Unnecessary Experience Requirements in Job Descriptions

The job description is where a lot of inequity quietly begins. Almost all job ads list long years of experience or fancy degrees that are not actually needed for the work. This is often called credential inflation.  

On the surface, they sound reasonable. But they often do more harm than good when it comes to equity. The U.S. Census Bureau reveals that about 62% of people in America do not have a four-year degree. You narrow your pool of candidates if you ask for degrees. 

The fix is simple. Strip out unnecessary degree or experience requirements and focus on what actually predicts success in the role. 

Instead of demanding a certain number of years, describe the outcomes you need. Use phrases like “equivalent experience or demonstrated skills” to welcome candidates whose paths look different. This ensures an equitable hiring process from the very first touchpoint.

Involve your team in a quick job analysis workshop. Have current employees list the real skills they use daily. 

Tools like the U.S. Department of Labor’s O*NET database can help you map competencies without reinventing the wheel. Many companies now use AI-assisted job description writers (with human oversight, of course) to flag overly restrictive language.

IBM is an excellent example. It has lowered degree requirements for IT jobs. IBM only requires a degree for 29% of its IT roles now. 

#2 Remove Identifying Information During Early Screening

Once applications roll in, the next sneaky bias point is the resume review. Names, photos, schools, and addresses are details that trigger unconscious or conscious biases before anyone even reads the accomplishments.

Blind hiring strips away personal identifiers like names and graduation years to effectively even the odds for every candidate. Just the skills, experience summaries (stripped of company names if they are recognizable), and accomplishments remain.

To implement this, you can use applicant tracking systems (ATS) with built-in anonymization features. For smaller teams, it’s as simple as a quick manual redaction in a shared spreadsheet. 

Think about it in the context of specialized fields like healthcare. Say, you’re hiring for the role of Family Nurse Practitioner (FNP). In that case, you might look for candidates who have a Master of Science in Nursing (MSN) with an FNP specialty. 

But the job outlook for FNPs is growing so much that it’s expected to reach approximately 45% by 2032. For that reason, many professionals are transitioning to the field through MSN to FNP programs online. 

Walsh University notes that the online program empowers professionals with the hands-on experience to manage the long-term health needs of individuals and their families.

Without redacting personal identifiers, you’re likely to reject candidates who entered the field via online programs. But this likelihood is zero when you hide their details. That way, you focus entirely on the fact that they have mastered the rigorous coursework and clinical hours required for the role.

#3 Focus on Outcomes Over Pedigree

Pedigree bias, such as favoring fancy degrees, big-name employers, or traditional career paths, is one of the most stubborn barriers to equity. It quietly excludes talented people from community colleges, trade programs, the military, or non-linear journeys.

Pedigree often reflects access to opportunity more than raw ability. Not everyone grows up with guidance counselors pushing Ivy League applications or family networks funneling them into prestigious internships. 

This disproportionately affects first-generation students, people from rural or low-income backgrounds, and many communities of color.

Shifting your focus to outcomes breaks the cycle where the same groups of people get the same opportunities. 

To create an equitable hiring process, replace prestige requirements with skills-based assessments, work samples, or short trial projects. LinkedIn's Economic Graph reveals that skills-based hiring expands talent pools 6.1x. 

For example, instead of asking for a master’s in data science, give candidates a small dataset and ask them to present three insights and one recommendation. A 30-minute case study or portfolio review does the trick for non-technical positions. 

Google has already dropped degree requirements for many roles, citing skills as the better predictor of success.

#4 Expand Sourcing Beyond Traditional Networks

Even the fairest screening process won’t help if your candidate pool looks the same every time. 

Traditional sourcing, like posting on LinkedIn, relying on employee referrals, or attending the same industry conferences, tends to pull from the same circles. Referrals, while efficient, often reinforce homogeneity because people naturally recommend folks who look and sound like them.

In the U.S., where professional networks can still reflect historical patterns of exclusion, this quietly limits diversity. 

The best practice is to deliberately expand where and how you source talent. Cast a wider net that includes communities and organizations that have been underrepresented in your pipeline. This isn’t about quotas, but about ensuring talented people even know your opportunities exist.

To build an equitable hiring process, you must deliberately expand where you source talent. Use job boards that serve specific groups. This includes boards for veterans, women, and people with disabilities. It also includes organizations for specific racial and ethnic groups. 

You can also partner with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic-Serving Institutions, and women’s colleges for campus recruiting and internship programs. 

Post on diversity-focused job boards like DiversityJobs, LatPro, or Veteran-specific platforms, as well. Consider joining Facebook groups or Slack communities dedicated to specific demographics within your niche.

This sourcing strategy might increase your lead time, but it will deliver significantly higher-quality results at scale. You discover talented people who never would have found you otherwise. And your organization gains fresh perspectives that help you serve a broader customer base.

#5 Shift to Culture Add From Culture Fit 

Culture fit might be the most well-meaning phrase in hiring that does the most damage to equity. 

On its face, hiring for culture fit sounds reasonable. You want people who will mesh well with your team, share your values, and thrive in your environment. Who wouldn't? 

But that leads to groupthink, stifled innovation, and homogeneity. It disproportionately disadvantages candidates who are different from your existing team, in background, communication style, personality, or lived experience.

When candidates are screened out for not being a culture fit without any clear definition of what that means, you're not protecting your culture. You're stagnating it.

Replace the culture fit lens with a culture add lens. Instead of asking if someone fits the existing mold, you ask what unique perspective, experience, or strength the person brings that will strengthen the culture further. It’s about valuing differences that enhance psychological safety, creativity, and problem-solving.

Before you replace culture with culture add, get clear on what your culture actually is and specifically, which aspects of it are genuinely non-negotiable. Values like integrity, curiosity, collaboration, and accountability are legitimate cultural anchors.

Once you've defined your core values, build interview questions and evaluation criteria that assess them explicitly. 

If collaboration is a core value, ask every candidate a structured question about how they have worked through disagreement on a team. Does curiosity matter? Ask them about something they have recently learned that changed how they think. Score responses against a consistent rubric.

Train interviewers to listen for evidence of shared values (integrity, collaboration, customer focus) while celebrating what makes the candidate different.

Building a Future-Ready, Inclusive Hiring Engine

Each of these five practices addresses a different point in the hiring funnel where bias tends to enter. 

Together, they create something more powerful than any single fix. That is, a system that consistently gives talented people a fair shot, regardless of where they came from or who they know.

The goal is nothing but ensuring that opportunity is earned, not inherited. So, track your data. Look at where candidates from different backgrounds are dropping out of your process. Audit your job descriptions regularly. Gather feedback from candidates who didn't get the job and revisit your interview training.   

Make this series of small, intentional shifts, and you’ll build a more resilient organization. 

Zainab Shakil is a writer with over six years of experience in fields like tech, health, and finance. She is great at creating content that helps businesses reach more people. Currently, she works as a freelancer, helping SaaS, e-commerce, and lifestyle businesses grow their online presence.