For many organisations, the hiring process feels objective on the surface. There is a job description, a shortlist, a few interviews, and a decision. But bias can enter at any one of those stages – often without anyone in the room realising it.
Building truly fair hiring practices means looking closely at each step in the process and asking whether it is actually assessing the right things. With the Workplace Fairness Act (WFA) passed in Parliament in January 2025 and set to take effect by end-2027, talent acquisition teams in Singapore now have both a legal and strategic reason to get this right.
This article walks through the practical steps recruiters and hiring managers can take to reduce bias, build structured processes, and stay ahead of what the WFA requires.
What the Workplace Fairness Act Means for Recruiters
The Workplace Fairness Act changes the compliance landscape for hiring in a meaningful way. It puts legal weight behind standards that were previously advisory, and it covers recruitment specifically – making it illegal to make hiring decisions based on protected characteristics such as race, age, gender, religion, marital status, family responsibilities, and disability.
Under the WFA, it is illegal to make adverse employment decisions based on protected characteristics when hiring or conducting performance reviews, training, promotions, and dismissals. For recruitment teams, this means that informal decision-making – the kind that relies on gut feel or undefined criteria – carries real legal risk.
From Advisory to Enforceable
The Tripartite Guidelines on Fair Employment Practices (TGFEP) have long set the standard for merit-based hiring in Singapore. The WFA works alongside these guidelines, giving TAFEP stronger enforcement tools. Employers that fail to respond to TAFEP requests in a satisfactory manner can be subject to penalties, such as a suspension of the ability to apply for S Pass and Employment Pass visas.
This is not just a compliance issue for HR leaders to file away. It is a signal that recruitment processes need to be documented, structured, and defensible – not just well-intentioned.
Where Bias Actually Enters the Hiring Process
Most recruiters do not set out to discriminate. Bias in hiring is usually the result of unstructured processes, undefined criteria, or decision-making that happens too quickly. Understanding where it enters helps teams fix it at the source.
Job Advertisements
The language used in a job advertisement already shapes who applies. Phrases like “young and energetic” or requirements that are not genuinely related to the role – such as asking for a degree when experience would do the job equally well – filter out candidates before they have even had a chance to be assessed.
When stating the selection criteria in job advertisements, employers should ensure that they are related to the qualifications, skills, knowledge, and experience of the candidates. By the way, this also applies to the way requirements are framed – overly narrow criteria that do not reflect actual job demands tend to reduce the diversity of applicants without improving quality.
Application Forms
A surprising number of application forms still collect information that has no bearing on whether someone can do the job. Date of birth, marital status, nationality, and even photographs can all introduce bias into the shortlisting stage – before a hiring manager has read a single word about a candidate’s actual qualifications.
Employers should remove fields on age, gender, race, religion, marital status and family responsibilities, or disability from job application forms. If certain information is genuinely needed – for example, for identity verification – it should be collected at the offer stage, not during initial screening.
The Shortlisting Stage
Shortlisting is where informal judgements often do the most damage. When there are no defined criteria, reviewers default to pattern-matching against whoever previously succeeded in the role. This is how homogeneous teams stay homogeneous.
Fair hiring means assessing candidates on merit, based on job-related requirements, and applying those criteria consistently to all candidates. Structured shortlisting checklists – where every candidate is assessed against the same pre-defined criteria – remove much of the subjectivity from this stage. It also makes the process auditable, which matters more than ever under the WFA.
Building Fair Hiring Practices into Your Recruitment Framework
Good intentions are not enough. Fair hiring practices need to be designed into the process itself, so that they hold up even when teams are busy, under pressure, or making decisions quickly.
Start with a Job Analysis
Before writing a job description, the hiring team should agree on what the role actually requires. This means identifying the specific skills, experience, and behaviours needed – not a wish list based on who held the role before.
A job analysis defines objective requirements, which should then be reflected in the job description, job advertisements and every stage of selection. This single step makes every downstream decision easier to justify, because the criteria were set before any candidate was in the picture.
Use Structured Interviews
Unstructured interviews – where each interviewer asks whatever feels relevant in the moment – are one of the biggest sources of bias in recruitment. Different candidates get different questions, different levels of probing, and different levels of warmth from the interviewer. The results are not comparable.
Structured interviews use the same set of pre-agreed, competency-based questions for every candidate. Interviewers score responses against defined benchmarks before discussing them with colleagues. This does not make interviews robotic – it makes them fair, and it makes the eventual decision much easier to explain.
Keep Records of Every Decision
One of the most practical things a recruitment team can do is document why decisions were made. This includes who was shortlisted and why, which candidates progressed to interview, and what the final selection rationale was.
Employers should maintain proper interview and assessment records for at least one year. Beyond compliance, this documentation helps teams spot patterns over time – for example, if certain candidate profiles are consistently being screened out without a clear merit-based reason.
Unconscious Bias and Why Training Matters
Even experienced recruiters carry biases they are not aware of. This is not a character flaw – it is a feature of how human cognition works. The brain takes shortcuts, and those shortcuts are often shaped by social conditioning, past experiences, and the environments we have grown up in.
What Unconscious Bias Does in Practice
In recruitment, unconscious bias often shows up as affinity bias – favouring candidates who remind interviewers of themselves, or who fit a familiar image of “the right kind of person” for the role. It also shows up in the way CVs are read, in which candidates get follow-up questions, and in how confidence and communication style are interpreted.
Just thought it worth flagging – these biases are especially consequential at the shortlisting and interview stages, where small judgements compound into significant patterns across a team or department.
Training as a Practical Intervention
Awareness of bias is a starting point, but it is not enough on its own. Effective training gives hiring managers and recruiters practical tools – structured scorecards, consistent question sets, panel diversity – that reduce the opportunity for bias to influence decisions.
This is exactly where DEI training for recruitment teams makes a direct, measurable difference. When hiring managers understand how bias operates at each stage of the process – and have concrete techniques to counter it – the quality and fairness of hiring decisions improves. This is not just theory: organisations that invest in bias-aware recruitment consistently see broader candidate pools and more defensible selection outcomes.
The Risk of AI Hiring Tools Without Human Oversight
Many recruitment teams now use AI-assisted tools to screen CVs and rank candidates. These tools can save time, but they carry their own risks if they are not monitored carefully.
AI tools learn from historical data. If past hiring decisions reflected certain biases – in favour of particular universities, career trajectories, or demographic profiles – the model will replicate those patterns at scale. The result is faster hiring, but not fairer hiring.
Include Consulting has written specifically about this issue, and it is worth reading their guide to AI hiring bias if your team relies on any AI-assisted screening. The practical advice there covers how to audit AI tools for bias, what to look for in vendor assessments, and how to keep human judgment central to the final decision.
How the Fair Consideration Framework Fits In
Alongside the WFA, the Fair Consideration Framework (FCF) requires employers in Singapore to advertise roles on MyCareersFuture before hiring for Employment Pass positions, and to fairly consider all candidates who meet the selection criteria.
The Fair Consideration Framework sets out requirements for all employers in Singapore to consider the workforce in Singapore fairly for job opportunities. Employers should not discriminate on characteristics that are not related to the job, such as age, gender, nationality or race.
For talent acquisition teams, the FCF reinforces the same core principle that runs through the WFA: hiring decisions should be based on what someone can do, not on who they are.
What TAFEP Checks For
When TAFEP reviews a hiring complaint, they look at the practical evidence: the shortlist, the selection criteria used, and how consistently those criteria were applied. Employers that receive information requests from TAFEP may be requested to provide a detailed list of candidates who applied, a comprehensive summary of how far each candidate progressed, a shortlist and selection criteria for the position, and an explanation of the approval process used to select the successful candidate.
Teams that have documented processes and consistent criteria will find this process straightforward. Teams that have been making informal, undocumented decisions will find it much harder.
Connecting Fair Hiring to Broader Workplace Fairness
Fair hiring practices do not exist in isolation. The same principles that make recruitment fair – clear criteria, consistent processes, documented decisions, trained decision-makers – also underpin fair performance management, fair promotion decisions, and fair grievance handling.
For organisations preparing for the Workplace Fairness Act, it helps to think about all of these systems together. The Workplace Fairness Act readiness guide from Include Consulting covers the full scope of what compliance looks like across the employee lifecycle – from hiring through to complaint resolution.
Conclusion: Fair Hiring Practices Are a Business Advantage
The Workplace Fairness Act creates a clear compliance framework for recruitment, but the case for fair hiring practices goes well beyond avoiding penalties. Organisations that build structured, bias-aware hiring processes consistently access a wider talent pool, make better decisions, and build teams that are more capable and more representative.
The shift required is not as large as it might seem. Defining criteria before reviewing CVs, standardising interview questions, keeping records, and training the people involved in hiring – these are practical steps that most teams can implement without a full process overhaul.
If your team is working through how to build or improve your fair hiring practices ahead of the Workplace Fairness Act, Include Consulting can help. Our DEI training programmes are designed to give talent acquisition teams the knowledge and tools they need to hire fairly and confidently. Get in touch to start the conversation.
