Impartial interview techniques

- Whenever someone thinks about the job search process, interviewing is really what they're thinking about. When preparing to find a new job, the interview is often where a candidate will dedicate all of their energy and focus. Seen as the thing a candidate has to get through in order to get the job, the interview is a big deal, so much so that I wrote an entire book about interview preparation. But are candidates correct? Is the interview all it's cracked up to be? For mainstream candidates, the answer is yes. For everyone else, the answer is it depends, and that is what the diversity recruitment strategy aims to fix. In a randomized double-blind study published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the US, a research team sent science faculty at top universities applications for a lab manager position. The resumes were identical with the only difference being that either a male, or female name was added, and yes, you guessed it, the faculty members rated the male candidates as more competent than the female candidates, and even offered higher starting salaries to the men. What happened in the interview process to get that result? Probably the same thing that happens in a lot of interviews, nothing special, or different until now. And now that you know this is happening, now that you have acknowledged this is occurring within your own company, it is your job as the person managing the interview process to change things up, acknowledge the biased behavior, and not only point it out when it happens, but address it. One way to combat bias is to standardize interview questions and provide hiring managers and other interviewers with a catalog of questions to choose from. Assessing these questions in advance to ensure they don't contain biased questions will help produce situations that don't favor one particular set of professionals above another. Additionally, you can review the interview questions used to hire employees who were successful within the organization to assess whether those questions were an accurate predictor of job success. If you have an employee who is performing really well, go back and review who interviewed that candidate, which questions were asked, and did the questions asked during the process accurately predict success. Alternatively, if you have an employee who isn't faring as well, conduct the same review process. Did your interview questions predict this employee would not perform well? Even when asking candidates to assess their own skills, hidden bias is lurking. Take the example of a candidate I once asked to rate herself on a scale from one to 10 with regard to her proficiency in using a particular computer software. She gave herself a mediocre rating, and I spent the rest of the interview trying to figure out why I had made the decision to interview someone who clearly wasn't a good fit if she wasn't proficient in the software that we needed her to use. So I go back to her resume, and reread her experience with the software, and see that she taught others how to use it, had been using it for years, and was the go-to expert within her department. So what happened there? We had a woman who was not comfortable rating herself highly, even though she was extremely good at what she does. On the other hand, research has shown that a man without half of the experience she had would've had no problem rating himself as a 10 when asked about his proficiency and skill in using the software. Had I provided her with an online assessment, or given her a project to complete as part of the in-person interview, I would've been better equipped to hire for skill, rather than relying on the candidate's feelings about her own abilities. Regardless of the type of job, whether it's an engineering position, or a customer service role, there is always a creative way to include an objective assessment for a candidate. Focusing everyone on the candidate's ability to do the job is an independent and impartial way to review a prospective employee, and is a great recruiting practice to implement overall.