8 mins

Navigating Bias For Better Hiring

How many skilled candidates could you be missing out on due to unconscious bias in your hiring practices?

While we’d all like to think we offer fair, unbiased and balanced opportunities to all applicants, in reality there are all manner of subtle assumptions and stereotypes that influence how we perceive people – usually without us even noticing it.

It sounds concerning, but often it can just be the natural inclination to either seek out people similar to ourselves, or who we might perceive as more “professional”, rather than considering the full scope of skills and experiences. Unfortunately this is what people often mean when they talk about “gut instinct”.

When you’re hiring, this creates all sorts of risks: from missing out on exceptional talent to creating a homogenous workplace environment that’s free from alternative views and ideas.

As a specialist recruiter, providing services in areas that – in truth – still suffer from inequality (STEM businesses are still often male-dominated, for example), it’s something we’re extremely conscious of and take steps to avoid in our candidate searches. We train our teams to be aware of any ingrained stereotypes and unintentional bias, so that we can provide our clients with balanced and fair profiles, based on skills and capability.

Much of this training is run through our ASCEND programme, which is an internal initiative designed to attract, retain and promote women within Amoria Group and across the wider recruitment and staffing industry. Through ASCEND we support women by hosting events, podcasts, learning opportunities and other training.

Gender is just one of the biases that need navigating the workplace, but the principles that go into dealing with this can also apply against many other criteria. Some of the key points we follow in this training, that can also help you with your own hiring practices and workplace culture, include:

Identifying common biases

A stereotype is an oversimplified, generalised belief about a group of people, and can show up in hundreds of different ways. Examples might include:

“Teenagers are always moody”.

“Gen Z are lazy”.

“People from big cities are unfriendly”.

They can seem broad and unimportant, but in a workplace environment these small stereotypes contribute to larger impact on peoples’ jobs. Bias affects behaviour and what seems like a small belief can turn into “I don’t want to deal with Gen Z behaviour so I won’t hire anyone under 30”.

Some serious ways these stereotypes can develop include:

Gender bias – such a man preferring to hire other men for his team.

Affinity bias – looking to hire someone with the same interests or personality.

Maternal bias – believing mothers may be less committed at work

Beauty bias – thinking more attractive people, or better presented people are more competent. Conversely this can be tricky for women as some suggest looking too attractive may be distracting.

Age bias – avoiding hiring older people to work with technology or in a fast-paced environment. Or thinking younger people will need hand-holding or not be committed to the work.

You may think you’re aware of this and don’t make biased opinions, but these beliefs are more prevalent that you’d expect. And it’s not just during the hiring process that these problems can arise.

Common workplace biases for women

It should not come as a surprise that many of these beliefs and biases centre around women in the workplace, with issues such as:

Being interrupted or talked over

Having ideas stolen in plain sight

Unequal pay

Unequal promotions

Being mistaken for someone more junior

Being mistake for the cleaner (eg. Taking out the cups at the end of a meeting)

Being mistaken for the note taker in a meeting

Being mistaken for the events planner (eg. It’s Josh’s birthday, can you start a collection)

It’s almost guaranteed that everyone will be able to think of at least one example of the above happening in their workplace.

Country	Latest Gender Pay Gap	Type of Gap	Year	Source
USA	Women earn 82% of men’s earnings (≈ 18% gap)	Unadjusted	Q2 2025	[gov.uk]
Germany	23% gap	Unadjusted (tech sector, Europe-wide dataset)	2025	[ec.europa.eu]
Netherlands	21% gap	Unadjusted (tech sector, Europe-wide dataset)	2025	[ec.europa.eu]
UK	28% gap (one of the highest in Europe)	Unadjusted (tech sector)	2025	[ec.europa.eu]
Singapore	14.3% gap (women earn 14.3% less than men)	Unadjusted	2023	[channelnewsasia.com]

How to navigate bias (as an individual)

If you do come across bias in the workplace, it helps to know how to respond in a way that is clear and confident.

For example, if someone takes credit for an idea in a meeting, a simple and effective response might be, “Thanks for building on my idea — I’d like to clarify the original concept I shared and expand on it further. I didn’t get a chance to finish earlier.”

This works because it reclaims ownership without escalating conflict. It signals confidence, redirects attention to the original contribution, and reinforces presence in the room.

Other practical phrases include:

“I noticed I was interrupted — let me finish my thoughts on this.”

“Let’s revisit my idea from earlier.”

“I have handled similar challenges before – here’s how I plan to approach this.”

And if you notice it from others, you can support by offering responses such as:

“I’d love to hear more from Rachel on this.”

“Can you help me understand why that decision has been made?”

“Let’s build a long-term plan so that everyone’s ideas are shared.”

These kinds of responses help challenge bias while maintaining professionalism and creating space for dialogue.

Another common form of bias is the unequal distribution of low-visibility administrative tasks, which often disproportionately fall on women, such as note-taking, organising celebrations, booking rooms, or coordinating logistics.

If a woman is asked to take notes in a meeting when it is not her role, a constructive intervention could be “Emma is leading the discussion in the second part of the meeting - can someone else offer to be the note taker to ensure that Emma can fully concentrate on her role in this meeting?”

Or “I’ve noticed administrative tasks often land on the same people. Maybe we could set up a rotation so that everyone gets equal opportunity to participate in discussions.”

This shifts the conversation away from the individual and toward a fairer system, which is where sustainable change happens.

How to navigate bias (as an organisation)

Change starts with the workplace culture itself, not just the hiring processes. Building awareness of bias throughout an organisation is the first step towards eliminating it entirely.

Raise awareness

Regular DEI learning sessions, etiher from internal trainers or external experts can help your teams understand inclusive language, microaggressions and unconscious beliefs.

Build culture

Setting expectations for a “speak up” culture will also benefit – create processes or safe reporting channels for people to share experiences of bias they’ve been exposed to in the workplace. Remember that many people feel uncomfortable or nervous about coming forward, so it’s important to create positive and anonymous channels for them to do so. A dedicated representative in the office – someone discreet and friendly – can be helpful for this, or a confidential email inbox can also help.

Anonymous culture surveys will also help you directly ask questions and give people space to share their thoughts – there are plenty of anonymous platforms with suggested questions available online for this. Just make sure it’s properly anonymous, so that people know actions will be taken without consequences for those who raise the issues.

Inclusive leadership

Provide opportunities for people with other experiences to join your leadership team and contribute to the direction of the company. It’s important not to just make this a “token” position, but to actively provide real and fair opportunities for people to join. This can include picking up your existing teams and providing long-term leadership training to build their capabilities to suit the positions, or seeking external hires to join your leadership, bring experience and knowledge from outside the business as well.

You can also offer specific leadership, negotiation and career-clarity training for women in your business, to build confidence and actively give them skills that they may have not had the opportunity to develop in the past.

As part of your leadership process, it’s important to also do a company-wide pay audit and understand your own pay gaps, taking efforts to resolve that.

Bias-proof processes

Finally, build in bias-proof processes to your hiring. Structured hiring processes with clear stages and standard questions or requirements mean everyone is given the same chance.

Removing images, gendered language or other bias influences from CVs before they go to hiring managers can help ensure candidates are only judged based on relevant criteria to the job.

Multiple interviewers – particularly bringing in someone who may have a different background or viewpoint to yourself – also helps balance bias during the interview process.

When you work with a specialist recruitment and staffing firm like Amoria Bond, you also benefit from all of our expertise – not just in finding skilled experts for complex roles from our global network, but from the training we already run with our consultants in navigating bias and presenting the best candidates regardless of age, gender, religion, ethnicity, sexual preference, background, disability or other areas that may be susceptible to hiring bias.

Our teams do what we can to ensure every candidate has a fair chance when we put them forward for a role. We can also work with your hiring teams to help reduce and navigate bias in your own processes.

We can help you build a 12-month action plan that will help you prevent organisation-wide bias. A sample structure of this can include:

Q1: Awareness + development of women’s network (such as our own ASCEND programme)

Q2: Bias-proof processes + pay audit

Q3: Leadership/negotiation training + visibility programmes

Q4: Measure progress + celebrate wins + set new goals

Navigating bias is not an easy thing to implement into your workplace or workflows, and change will not happen overnight. There are a lot of solutions suggested in this article and much more that can be done as well. But this just demonstrates how much is being missed in so many businesses – even those who think they are doing well, likely are missing some of the above topics we’ve discussed.

It's ok to not have all the solutions in place – very few do. But navigating bias is an ongoing challenge and the more you do, the more improvement you will see in your business, not only from the culture but in the performance, direction and scope of your business opportunities. Diverse hiring, diverse leadership and equal opportunities give you a more diverse viewpoint on what your business can be capable of, and that can be the best thing you do for expediated growth.

Navigating bias, becoming more aware of the systems, assumptions and behaviours that shape the workplace culture, and empowering people to speak up and take opportunities themselves, changes the culture. And with that, bias becomes easier to spot, harder to ignore and less likely to define who gets to progress.

Work with Amoria Bond today to benefit from our own skills in navigating bias or learn how we can work with you to develop your own hiring processes and ensure that you have access to the wider, more diverse candidate pool.