If you turn up in a suit and tie for an IT job at a bank, you’ll fit right in. Wear the same to a tech startup, and you’ll likely fail the first interview. But what does wardrobe have to do with your qualifications anyway? How much of an interview is irrelevant chit-chat, affected by the cultural biases of the interviewer?

ByteMark, a U.K. web hosting company, decided to fix this with anonymous recruitment. That is, right up until the final interview, the company would know nothing about candidates other than their suitability for the job.

“We try to avoid the ‘X factor’ of cultural fit, which we’ve seen as an excuse for all kinds of implicit and explicit bias,” writes ByteMark in a blog post. The experiment was such a success that ByteMark has adopted anonymous recruiting as its standard method.

Applicants fill in an online form and then selected applicants are given a first interview via instant message. Next is a several hour hour skills test and finally a regular in-person interview. Until the short list for this final stage is reached, ByteMark asks for no information other than anonymous alias, a cover letter, a list of their five best skills and the five skills they’d like to develop, and an optional disability declaration.

This approach brought immediate benefits. Not only was the result better–“we didn’t have a single ‘doomed’ third-stage interview,” writes the company in a follow-up post–but the process was much cleaner. Because the initial IM interviews could be conducted by a wider range of staff, more candidates could be considered. And because these interviews were shorter and more focused, they could be quickly looked over by senior staff members, and advice offered.

Hiring biases are real and they are ugly. We don’t even trust ourselves to avoid them.

But the real advantages came from the removal of biases. The ByteMark blog addresses it thusly: “Have you ever thought your chances of being hired were affected by something other than your ability to do the job? Hiring biases are real and they are ugly. We don’t even trust ourselves to avoid them.”

Anonymous recruitment automatically filters out biases based on race or gender, as well as less obvious things like shyness. Regular person-to-person interviews punish those with poorer social skills, when those skills might not be relevant to the job. Equally, those who can sell themselves well could charm their way into a job they might be ill-suited to.