Eliminate Bias: How Skills-Based Candidate Testing Transforms Hiring Outcomes

Hiring bias—whether unconscious or conscious—has significant and well-documented impacts on both employers and job candidates.

The employer cost is more than simply hiring an unqualified person. Here are just a few of the areas that will significantly impact the employer:

• Financial: Hiring bias often results in suboptimal hires, leading to decreased productivity, higher training costs and higher turnover. This increases costs associated with rehiring and retraining.

• Reputational Harm: Once an organization gets a reputation for bias they often lose the opportunity to hire top talent.

• Legal and Compliance Risks: If the bias is systemic or overt, the employer may find itself being subjected to regulatory enforcement actions or civil suits.

• The candidate has the anguish of not being hired for a position that they were the most qualified person. How this translates may be different for each candidate but here are some common outcomes:

• Career Impact: Often when a candidate loses out on an opportunity it can set back their entire career trajectory. They often find themselves years or decades behind individuals who were not subject to bias.

• Psychological impact: Experiencing bias can lead to feelings of inadequacy, decreased self-esteem, and increased stress. It may also discourage future job applications, further limiting career prospects .

• Economic Consequences: Lower Earnings and Unemployment: Candidates overlooked due to bias may end up in lower-paying jobs or remain unemployed longer, leading to significant income loss.

Discover how to avoid these issues and eliminate hiring bias with AI Powered screening, shortlisting, testing and assessment tools. Learn proven strategies that transform your recruitment process while maintaining the human touch.

Building Bias-Proof Hiring Process

Effective bias elimination requires a systematic approach across every hiring stage. Structured interviews using predetermined questions and scoring rubrics eliminate the randomness that breeds bias.

Every candidate answers identical questions and is evaluated against consistent criteria. We have compiled some of the most prevalent areas where bias comes into play in the hiring process and the recommended steps you can take to avoid them,

1. Write Inclusive, Bias-Free Job Descriptions

This entails much more than simply using gender-neutral and inclusive language, or terms that may alienate certain groups.

This is about focusing on the skills and experience that a qualified person should have to perform the job properly.

The complexity for doing this is often that the human resources professional may not know the skills and experience that is required for the position.

They need to rely upon the expertise of the hiring manager who is not adept at writing bias-free job descriptions.

While a collaboration between the two is possible, that often is difficult to schedule and slows down the entire hiring process.

SOLUTION: MTestHub has an AI-powered platform that will create the perfect job post in mere seconds.

This will not only save the time it takes for the team to build the job description, but it will ensure that every qualified candidate can see how they can be an integral part of your organization.

2. Implement Blind Resume Screening

The proper way to screen for candidates is based on the skills and experience they possess.

When humans are personally reviewing resumes, they often show bias based on the personal characteristics such as the candidate's name, photo, age, gender, ethnicity, or educational institutions.

When you implement automated screening that focuses on skills and experience, it avoids the unconscious bias associated with the manual process.

SOLUTION: MTestHub has an AI-powered screening platform that will allow you to screen hundreds of applicants in mere seconds.

Our proprietary tool will automatically screen candidates based on their resume, questionnaire responses, job description, and required skillset.

Our AI analyzes each resume and ranks candidates based on their matching percentage.

NOTE: A growing number of candidates are now using artificial intelligence to generate resumes that perfectly match the job requirements.

This attempt to spoof the HR professional or their Applicant Tracking System (ATS) can greenlight candidates who are not qualified for the position. MTestHub and catch those individuals who have used AI to match their resume to the job description.

BONUS: Sometimes the unconscious bias can take place in subtle ways. Many top candidates are excluded from consideration simply because they were slow to submit their resume.

Employers often do this because they are overwhelmed with applicants. MTestHub solves this problem because our AI-powered platform can screen thousands of resumes in mere seconds.

3. Standardize How Shortlisting Is Performed

The decision on which candidates are moved forward in the hiring process can leave open the door for both unconscious and conscious bias.

Personal preference can quickly leave the most qualified candidate receiving a rejection letter.

SOLUTION: MTestHub has an AI-powered shortlisting platform that will automatically push forward those candidates that have the essential skills or responded correctly to the “knock-out” questions that were included in the job listing.

4. Standardize Skills-Based Assessment Before The Interview

One of the most important ways to ensure that there is no bias in the hiring process is to implement an objective validated skills-based assessment that takes place before the candidate is interviewed.

Standardized assessments minimize subjective interpretation and provide quantifiable data for decision-making

Having the skills-based test before the interview means that every candidate has the opportunity to make it to the final round in the hiring process if they are qualified.

This also saves the interviewer valuable time because they are not interviewing people who would later prove incapable of performing the duties of the role.

The obstacle that many companies face in generating an assessment is time and knowledge. If you are hiring for a highly technical position, most HR professionals do not have sufficient knowledge of the functional duties of the job to create an assessment.

While the hiring manager may have the requisite knowledge, they are reluctant to do so because of the time it takes to create the assessment and to keep it current. Regular review and updated assessments to ensure cultural fairness and job relevance .

SOLUTION: MTestHub has the first and only AI-powered Testing and Assessment platform that in one-click can generate in seconds tests and assessments for any industry, position, or job requirement.

Never again wonder if the person you have scheduled for an interview is actually qualified to perform the role.

NOTE: Most candidate testing platforms have a limited number of fixed questionnaires.

If your job description does not fit their questionnaire exactly, you are left to try to build a questionnaire from scratch, by yourself.

5. Use Anti-Cheat Technology To Ensure The Integrity of the Assessment

Fundamental fairness in the hiring process means that you have to ensure that every person who is taking a skills-based test or assessment is playing by the same rules.

Often candidates in an attempt to appear perfect will take advantage of technology or people at their disposal.

While most won’t overtly cheat by having another person take the test, they might be inclined to do more subtle activities that achieve the same results.

SOLUTION: MTestHub has state of the art technology that protects the integrity of testing.

We have ten different features that allow the employer to decide the level of protection that is required for the specific job.

Some of the basic features include: recording the candidate’s screen, enabling full screen mode, capturing images from camera, block copy and paste, enabling device location, etc.

If warranted, the MTestHub Platform can level up security by using AI Body Language Analysis, AI Communication Analysis, and Live Proctoring of the Test.

6. Use Structured Interviews

Structured interviews are proven to be more predictive of job performance and less susceptible to bias than unstructured interviews.

To avoid the potential of bias, it is important to ask all candidates the same set of job-related questions in the same order, and use anchored rating scales to evaluate responses.

These interviews should be done by the same person(s). If different interviewers are used the outcome may be different based on individual perception.

It is CRITICAL that notes are taken from the interview and summarized and analyzed in an unbiased manner.

It is also important that EVERY individual who passes the skills-based assessment is put through for an interview.

SOLUTION: Create a list of agreed upon questions and the respective order they will be asked is a first-step. It is also important to prepare a list of follow-up questions that should be asked depending on the candidate’s answer.

MTestHub can help ensure that every individual who passes the assessment is invited to an interview with our autoscheduling feature that will send an interview request along with the availability of the person conducting the interview.

MTestHub also uses AI to provide feedback and analysis of the interview by analyzing the transcript of the interview.

7. Monitor and Analyze Hiring Data

If you are not measuring the hiring process you are simply guessing whether your process is effective in both hiring the best candidates in an unbiased manner.

Tracking metrics is critical and should measure every element that is important such as resume match score, assessment results, time to hire, where candidates learned of job opening, etc.

Depending on your job title what you feel is important to know will be different. Having a system that can provide that information may help detect bias or allow you to discover bottlenecks in the hiring process.

You need to have predefined dashboards and analytics tools that allow you to visualize trends and set measurable diversity goals

SOLUTION: MTestHub has a data rich platform. Individuals can create unique dashboards that provide them the information they need to manage and optimize their process.

We offer the capability of creating charts based using datasets to allow users to better visualize the information. MTestHub also has the ability of the user to use SQL queries to pull any available data and analyze it.

8. Leverage AI and Technology to Reduce Bias

MTestHub’s AI-powered platform can help standardize evaluations and remove human subjectivity, but must be carefully managed to avoid perpetuating existing biases.

MTestHub solves the bias problem through intelligent automation. Our AI-powered automated screening engine evaluates candidates against job-specific criteria, identifying qualified talent regardless of background, education, or previous experience.

The platform's AI-powered assessment algorithms focus exclusively on performance indicators: coding ability for developers, analytical thinking for strategists, and communication effectiveness for client-facing roles. Candidates succeed or fail based on demonstrated competency, not resume polish.

The result? A hiring funnel that doesn’t just reduce bias; it elevates high performers who might otherwise be overlooked. And that’s how you build stronger, more diverse, and more effective teams.

The MTestHub Advantage: Beyond Automation

While competitors focus purely on efficiency, MTestHub optimizes for both speed and quality.

Our platform doesn't just screen faster, it screens better, identifying candidates traditional methods miss while eliminating those who interview well but perform poorly.

The system learns from your hiring outcomes, refining assessment criteria based on actual performance data rather than gut feelings.

Integration capabilities ensure MTestHub enhances existing workflows rather than disrupting them.

The platform connects with popular ATS systems, maintains hiring manager preferences, and provides analytics integration for comprehensive performance tracking.

The cost of biased or inconsistent hiring isn’t just a missed opportunity - it’s a direct hit to team performance, retention, and business growth. In a market where hiring speed and quality make all the difference, relying on guesswork or gut-feel is no longer sustainable.

Isn’t time that you HIRE BETTER - FASTER

Book a demo now to see how MTestHub can help you optimize every step of your hiring process.