In the spring of this year, the City of Helsinki started an anonymous recruitment pilot, which removed the names, gender and age from the application documents seen by HR before deciding to send invitations to job interviews.
The system was tested in 12 different sectors, for a total of 41 workplaces. Most were in the fields of education, but the pilot also included other types of tasks, including jobs in social and health care and in Helsinki’s urban transport.
The current project is scheduled to continue until the end of this year, but officials say the results have been so good that the pilot will continue in 2021.
“One manager, thinking about his own attitudes towards the recruiting pilot, said he wondered why he would want to recruit anyone anymore ‘normally’,” Aino Lääkkölä-Pyykönen, the project ‘s human resources expert who led the project.
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Technical barriers
In principle, anonymous recruitment could be widely used in the city, he says Tarja Näkki, Director of Strategic Resource Management, City of Helsinki.
The problem is current technology.
According to a diversity study by the National Institute of Occupational Health, a major barrier to anonymous recruitment is HR systems. The information system used by the City of Helsinki does not yet support anonymous applications.
“Extending it to most of our service is not in itself an obstacle. There are plans to increase anonymous recruitment next year and train supervisors, ”Näkki explains.
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Several Finnish local governments have tried anonymous recruitment, and Kuntarekry, a national public job search service maintained by the Association of Finnish Municipalities and FCG Talent Oy, recently launched an anonymous recruitment department.
Miša LeiberThe CEO of CG Talent says that the municipalities of Janakkala, Turku, Kokkola, Rovaniemi and Espoo, as well as the Espoo training consortium Omnia, have used the new service channel to try out unknown recruitments this autumn. In addition, the City of Vaasa and the North Karelia Association of Social and Health Services (Siunsote) have tried anonymous recruitments,
A new way of thinking
Before, recruiters knew that he had been interviewed about his current job as a youth media educator in the city of Helsinki. Emilia Mäkinen just a list of degrees and a four-digit numerical series.
Anna-Mari Rouru, The supervisor hired for Mäkinen ‘s work says that anonymous recruitment methods led to a new way in paid work.
“I got a list of applicants who were only identified with a personal ID. I then decided which ones were selected for the interviews. When the interviewees arrived, they revealed their names and personal identification numbers, ”Rouru says.
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As an instructor, he had to think even more carefully about what is required in the application and what qualities and professional qualifications the applicants need. In the absence of a personal resume, all the necessary skills had to be clear from the application form.
Rouru said at first he wondered how anonymous recruitment is even possible.
When the pilot started, Rouru was surprised at how smoothly it worked.
“Perhaps the invitations to the interview were sent on a slightly larger scale. If we didn’t know anything about the applicant, whether it was a man or a woman, young or old, we had to focus on what education and experience they were suitable for this job, ”Anna-she explains.
Rouru says the process will help balance the operating conditions.
“If job requirements are not precisely defined, an applicant can be attracted through an interview and get a job, even if they do not have experience in the field. Now these types of people were left out. Everyone was an expert, ”Rouru points out.
Emilia Mäkinen, who was hired through an anonymous recruitment process, considered it a good experience.
“I felt like I had really tried to avoid discrimination based on gender or age,” Mäkinen says.
Age and gender are the two factors most commonly sought in applications in anonymous recruitment processes in Finland. According to a recent study by the National Institute of Occupational Health, eleven percent of personnel professionals reported seeing discrimination in recruitment within their own organization. The discrimination observed was mostly based on ethnic or national background and gender.
Source: The Nordic Page