Candidate Selection: A Definitive Guide
Learn of candidate selection to improve your candidate selection process and build a high-performing workforce.
Traditional employment interviews are a cornerstone of hiring processes. They're widely seen as a human-centric, personal way to evaluate candidates. But beneath the surface, interviews can be rife with unconscious bias—and one of the most persistent and overlooked is accent bias.
Audio Reading: How accents impact hiring decisions
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This phenomenon refers to the unfair disadvantage faced by candidates who speak with regional, ethnic, or otherwise non-standard accents. A growing body of research now shows that accent bias doesn't just exist—it can significantly distort hiring outcomes.
A major meta-analysis recently examined the impact of accent bias on interview ratings. The findings were sobering: candidates with non-standard accents were consistently rated lower, even when their skills and experience matched or exceeded those of their peers.
Understanding the Issue
Research shows that candidates with non-standard accents often receive lower interivew ratings. Bias is even more pronouned for women or candidates with racial or ethnic accents.
Implications of Bias
Interivews can be highly subjective and susceptible to various biases. Accent bias undermines fairness and objectivity in the hiring process.
Mitigating Accent Bias
Reserve interviews for the final stage as a confirmation step. Use standardised assessments earlier to minise bias and ensure a fairer selection process.
Promoting Fairer Hiring
Assessments are more consistent and scalable compared to interviews. Reducing reliance on subjective interviews helps to address bias and promotes diversity.
The size of this disadvantage—approaching a standardised effect size of 0.5—means accent alone can halve a candidate's chances of success. Worse still, the bias compounds in intersectional ways. Women with non-standard or racially coded accents were rated even lower, especially when interviewed by women.
This "triple jeopardy" effect exposes just how arbitrary and unfair the interview process can become when irrelevant traits like voice and gender intersect.
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Accent bias isn’t just a social issue—it’s a business problem. Interviews that penalise qualified candidates for how they sound, rather than what they can do, reduce the diversity, capability, and fairness of your talent pool. Organisations must take action to mitigate these risks. The most effective solution? Rethink the role of interviews. Instead of using interviews as an early-stage screening tool, they should be used as a final check—an opportunity to verify fit after more reliable assessments have already done the heavy lifting.
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Summary and Recommendations
Early-stage assessments, such as structured cognitive tests, situational judgment tests, and work simulations, offer more consistent and objective insights.
These tools are not only scalable and cost-effective but are far less vulnerable to unconscious bias.
Unlike interviews, their outcomes can be scientifically validated and audited for fairness across different demographics, including accent and gender.
It means preserving human judgment for the moments where it matters most—at the final stage, when you're choosing between the very best candidates. By doing so, organisations can improve both the fairness and predictive power of their hiring processes.
For hiring managers and talent professionals concerned about inclusivity, efficiency, and long-term performance, the takeaway is clear: accent bias is real, it's measurable, and it's avoidable. The tools exist. The evidence is in. It's time to rethink how we interview.
