How Virtual Reality Learning can Reduce Hiring Bias

Brandi Yates is senior director, workforce solutions, at Ultimate Medical Academy (UMA) where she oversees the new hire training and employee learning and development programs. She has more than 20 years of experience in learning and development in education. In addition to her integral role within UMA’s Career Services team, Yates works closely with employer partners, subject matter experts and key executives at UMA on the strategy and development of workforce solutions, in support of talent acquisition, engagement and growth. Yates has represented the organization at several conferences and summits, speaking on a range of workforce solution topics, including “Creating a Powerful Resume: How to Stand out from the Crowd,” “Adult Learning A-Z: Applying Adult Learning Principles to Improve Your Employee Onboarding Experience,” and “Catch the Preboarding Wave.”

Known for designing training in soft skills and technical courses, she spent several years at Corinthian Colleges in progressively advanced roles as a trainer in human resources, customer service and academics, as well as a webinar specialist. Yates maintains membership with the Society for Human Resource Management, the National Association of Colleges and Employers, and Association for Talent Development where she holds a Performance Support and an Evaluating Learning Impact certificates. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, and a Master of Science from Everest University in Florida.

With 11.55 million job openings in the United States right now, organizations across industries are struggling to find qualified workers to meet their needs. At the same time, there are many job candidates applying for open positions – so why are employers still having challenges filling these roles?

Non-traditional students and those without traditional qualifications – including those who do not take a traditional path to higher education, underserved populations, caregivers, veterans, immigrants, those with physical disabilities – are having trouble even getting an interview due to invisible hiring biases that first become evident in the resume review process. Hiring biases can include common prejudices, but also include things like introversion, extroversion, resume gaps, overqualification and more.

Ultimate Medical Academy (UMA) has always used innovative education methods to support healthcare workforce growth, and we felt the issue of hiring bias was timely and important for employers in every industry. Since the phrase “hiring bias” may be polarizing we knew we had to tackle this important subject meticulously and sensitively. While most people will understand what different types of biases look like, they will not associate their own behaviors with bias.

During UMA’s Spark Summit for our healthcare employer partners this past April 2022, we began with a goal of creating a tool to recognize and remove bias from the first phase of the recruitment process: reviewing candidates resumes. We set out to train hiring managers to identify preferences (rather than biases) by using virtual reality (VR) and putting this hotbutton topic in a game focused on resume review. Using VR, UMA created a safe space for players to act out the scenarios naturally, putting the employer in the candidate’s shoes and generating a high level of engagement. This unique simulation helped players better understand complex concepts such as affinity and confirmation bias and forced players to reassess assumptions made by intuition and first impressions.

Why Virtual Reality?

VR is experiential learning. Participants are engaged and animated while they are strategizing and playing and, even if they don’t immediately apply it, they have a higher retention of the material because they put the skill into action. In traditional learning experiences, if the information isn’t applied within a few hours of learning, learners lose most or all of it.

eLearning industry leaders report that the impact of gamebased learning is staggering. Arecent eLearning industry study, “Gamification and Statistics,” reported that 80 percent of workers are more engaged with VR versus a traditional learning format. 

Further, learners taught using VR showed an 89 percent increase in productivity and a 60 percent increase in engagement and motivation. 

Convinced that VR would be an effective tool for teaching ways to reduce hiring biases, UMA career services, DE&I and education teams all had roles consulting on the new VR learning program we introduced at our Spark Summit. Our UMA program uses the Oculus VR platform to immerse participants in a game-based experience in which they choose a player based on a set of criteria (i.e., go through a “hiring process”) and then have to play the game as that player and experience the impacts of bias. During the game, players shoot at targets while an artificial intelligence chatbot interjects a “bias” which hinders scoring. Every time a target is hit, the player shatters a notion that reflects one of the biases. 

Once scores are tallied, a debrief session is essential. In the end, our employer partners missed a lot of great candidates and gravitated toward the same potential interviewee. That’s where the real learning happens. In the debrief, they quickly realized that if everyone selected the same candidate, they would have a myopic view if they were all seeking people who are similar to each other; likewise, they discovered that they could potentially miss candidates with diverse backgrounds who would add perspective and talent to their organizations.

How do hiring managers overlook large pools of talent?

In decades-long studies, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that hiring biases exist in every industry and at every level within companies. Through the development of the VR game, we identified six areas where employers were running into challenges. Hiring managers seemed to have specific ideas about personality types they want for their open jobs. For example:

• Extrovert – “for our receptionist, we want a bubbly, passionate person”

• Introvert– “better for a work-from-home job like medical billing and coding, where I need someone who doesn’t require much social interaction”

• Overqualified or a depth of experience – “don’t want to take a chance because they will leave us in five minutes”

• Gaps in employment – “this person is unreliable and won’t stay long” or “they probably don’t have current skills”

• Changing industry – “flaky and unreliable; why do they want to change careers now?”

• The current generation/recent graduates -- “doesn’t want to talk to people or doesn’t want to work”

Particularly when someone is changing from one field to another, employers might make assumptions based on these generalities, or many more. [Employers] could exclude from consideration viable candidates whose resumes do not exactly match the criteria, but who could perform successfully within the company. Those from other industries can bring new and innovative ideas because of their different perspectives – and that job hopper candidate could deserve a second look, as you may find out that at those fallow times, they’ve honed interesting, valuable skills that may make them an even better candidate.

Obviously, we can’t turn all training into VR gaming, but the possibilities are endless. Now that new technologies are being developed and VR headsets are becoming more accessible, turning learning into action may ultimately facilitate the expansion of America’s pool of aspiring workers.