DON’T REVIEW A CANDIDATE’S RESUME BEFORE AN INTERVIEW
3 reasons not to review a candidate’s CV before an interview:
1. Efficiency - Pre-screening (CV screen and phone interview) should have covered all bio requirements for the position.
2. Accuracy - Skills beat previous experience in predicting job performance, so you’ll want to spend your interview time assessing if the candidate’s skill set match the job’s core skills.
3. Fairness - Resumes contain information that creates biases. For example, candidates who worked at well-known organizations or studied at well-known universities can be assessed more favorably without any connection to their capabilities. As interviewers, it might make us drop our guards down when interviewing them vs. other candidates who will be assessed more harshly.
This doesn't mean that previous experience and education shouldn't be considered in the hiring process. It’s just means that once candidate were screened and advanced to the interview stage, we should level the playing field for all.
#informedecisions #interviews #interviewbestpractices #hiring #recruitment #DEI #bias
Please don’t "tell me about yourself"
3 reasons why asking “tell me about yourself?” is bad interviewing practice:
1. Broad and unfocused: As an interviewer, you’re racing against the clock to collect the information that will enable you to decide if the candidate fits the position. “Tell me about yourself” can take the interview anywhere, including places that aren’t necessarily related to the job’s relevant skills.
2. Candidate experience: ”Tell me about yourself” is a stressful question for many candidates. “What does the interviewer want to hear? about my experience? hobbies? relevant skills? etc.?” A vague, open-ended question like this needlessly adds stress to the interview process.
3. Interviewer bias: This is a great place for bias to creep in. Candidates that have done their homework about the interviewer can impress them with irrelevant facts like "we went to the same school" that automatically generate biases like "similar to me" bias.
#informedecisions #recruiting #hiring #interviews #candidateexperience
DON’T BE A DEPENDENT INTERVIEWER
Interviewing with others?
Do you?
• Exchange texts/comments with your fellow interviewers during the interview?
• Kick ‘em underneath the table?
• Exchange looks or roll your eyes?
• Immediately after the interview ends, start discussing the candidate?
If you answered yes to one or more of the above, you are a dependent interviewer.
Dependent interviewers knowingly or unknowingly influence each others’ view of the candidate. This undermines the entire goal of having multiple interviewers—to gain multiple and diverse perspectives of the candidate.
Dependent evaluations create groupthink, contagion of bias, and they hurt your interview process’s accuracy and fairness. It also undermines efficiency and time to hire since you will probably need more interviews to make up your mind.
So what can you do in order to become an independent interviewer:
STOP doing all of the above.
Upon completing an interview - each interviewer should first provide their evaluations (scores and summary) separately and only then discuss.
DO NOT change your scores after the discussion - research has shown that a simple average of independent evaluations out predicts each one of the separate evaluations.
#informedecisions #bias #interviews #recruiting #hiring #assessment
1. Humility has been found to be associated with better leadership results. Yet, the chance of being promoted to a leadership role is higher if you're not humble — we choose leaders based on confidence rather than competence.
2. We hire and promote leaders based on experience when tomorrow's problems are not similar to yesterday’s.
3. We talk about the importance of integrity, honesty, and transparency in leadership, but the news is filled with stories about the corruption and egoism of leaders.
#informedecisions #skillsbasedhiring
I interviewed XXX yesterday.
I was highly impressed with _____ strong charisma. ____ charmed the hell out of me.
From the examples___ shared throughout the interview I could understand how goal-driven ____ was in ___career.
I felt at times ___ had been over-competitive, but I feel ___ ability to set boundaries for upper management, negotiate effectively and be assertive will make ___ succeed in this role.
If you filled in the gaps with “he”/”his” then you probably have “Gender Bias.”
Gender bias describes our tendency to assign specific behaviors and characteristics to a particular genders without supporting evidence. In this case, the description leaned towards “masculine” traits.
In an interview setting, a man might be rewarded for demonstrating these behaviors while women might be punished for demonstrating the exact same behaviors.
#informedecisions #interviews #recruiting #DEI #bias
WHICH CARD/S WOULD YOU FLIP OVER? THE RESULTS
Which card or cards do you have to flip over to test the assumption that if a card shows an even number on one face, then its opposite face is red?
The correct answer is “6+yellow”
If you got it wrong, don’t feel bad about yourself, it happens to most people as this is “Confirmation Bias” in play.
We flip 6 since if it’s red on the other side that will confirm the assumption.
We tend to flip red but actually, there’s no reason to since no one said that behind every red should be an even number.
Most of us do not consider flipping over the yellow card, although if we found an even number on its other side that would disprove our hypotheses.
In the interview context, Confirmation bias makes us assign more weight to information that confirms our initial premises and neglect information that disproof it.
For example, think about candidates that come from specific universities or previous companies (Google for example). A lot of time we have pre-conceived notions of them: “If they worked/studied at XX then they are probably…”. In a lot of cases, this will make us go easy on them on certain aspects of the interview that for other candidates we would deep dive into much further.
So what can you do?
Before interviewing a candidate ask yourself: “What are my assumptions about this candidate”?
Write those down on a piece of paper so they would be in front of you throughout the interview.
Make sure you also collect information/document notes about things that don't align with your initial assumptions. For example - if you believe a candidate has strong attention to detail since they majored in a specific domain in university, but on the interview itself, they respond very high level to some questions and neglect to refer to different aspects of your question. Don’t just ride this off with “they were probably stressed” - make sure to document this and take it into account in your final evaluation.
#informedecisions #bias
WHICH CARD/S WOULD YOU FLIP OVER?
Which card or cards do you have to flip over to test the assumption that if a card shows an even number on one face, then its opposite face is red?
1- 6+red
2- 7+red
3- 7+6+red
4- 6+yellow
5- 7+yellow
6- All cards
#informedecisions #bias
SHOULD AN INTERVIEW BE CONDUCTED AS A CONVERSATION
Lately, we’ve been hearing quite a lot that interviews should be held as conversations. This is what we have to say about it: interviews and conversations are inherently different.
A conversation is a talk that "flows", does not necessarily have a structure, and in which both sides are equally in charge. However, an interview is a limited time frame where the interviewer is in charge of asking directed, relevant, and fair questions aimed to assess job related skills, values and motivations. The responsibility lies with the interviewer to make the most of the interview and to manage time in an effective and efficient manner.
This doesn’t mean an interview has to be technical and rigid. There are different techniques to make an interview more conversational, but still keep it fairly structured and to the point. More on this on upcoming posts.
#informedecisions #interviews #skillsbasedhiring #hiring #candidateexperience
1. Humility has been found to be associated with better leadership results. Yet, the chance of being promoted to a leadership role is higher if you're not humble — we choose leaders based on confidence rather than competence.
2. We hire and promote leaders based on experience when tomorrow's problems are not similar to yesterday’s.
3. We talk about the importance of integrity, honesty, and transparency in leadership, but the news is filled with stories about the corruption and egoism of leaders.
#informedecisions #skillsbasedhiring
WHEN YOU NEED EXPERIENCE TO GET THE JOB BUT YOU NEED A JOB FOR EXPERIENCE
#informedecisions #hiring #recruiting