FIVE WAYS TO MAKE YOUR JOB INTERVIEWS MORE INCLUSIVE AND DIVERSE
Job interviews are a crucial part of the hiring process, but they can also perpetuate discrimination and bias if not handled properly.
Here are five ways to make your job interviews more inclusive and diverse:
1. Review the position’s description and requirements: Make sure that the language you use in your job description and requirements is gender-neutral and doesn't exclude any particular group of people.
2. Train your interviewers: Provide training to your interviewers on unconscious bias and cultural competency. This will help them avoid making assumptions about candidates based on their appearance, race, or background.
3. Create a structured interview process: Use a consistent set of questions for all candidates and avoid relying on the interviewer's gut feeling. This will help reduce bias and increase the diversity of your hiring.
4. Be mindful of your body language: Be aware of your nonverbal communication during the interview, including maintaining eye contact, smiling, and nodding when appropriate.
5. Encourage diversity in your recruitment process: Consider recruiting from a variety of sources and actively reach out to diverse communities. This will increase the diversity of your candidate pool and give you a better chance of hiring a diverse and inclusive team.
By implementing these strategies, you can create a more inclusive and diverse hiring process that will help you to find the best candidates for your organization.
Remember, diversity and inclusion are not only values, but also drives better performance and innovation.
WHY INCREASING DIVERSITY IN YOUR HIRING PIPELINE WILL NOT NECESSARILY RESULT IN MORE DIVERSE HIRES
Increasing diversity in your hiring pipeline is an important step in creating a more diverse and inclusive workforce, but it is not a guarantee that your hiring will become more diverse.
Here are several reasons why:
1. Unconscious bias: Even with a diverse candidate pool, unconscious bias can still play a role in the hiring process. Interviewers may unconsciously favor candidates who are similar to themselves or who fit a certain stereotype.
2. Lack of diversity in the decision-making process: If the decision-makers in the hiring process are more homogenous (in ethnicity, gender, perspectives), chances for hiring diverse candidates decrease, as they may apply stereotypes and not appreciate diverse candidates.
3. Lack of inclusion: Even if a diverse candidate is hired, they may not stay with the company if they do not feel welcomed and included. A company culture that is not inclusive or welcoming to diverse individuals can push out diverse hires and discourage diverse candidates from applying or accepting a job offer.
It's important to understand the goal is not to "check a box," but to create an equitable and inclusive hiring process and work environment where everyone can perform at their best.
Therefore, it is important to remember that increasing diversity in your hiring pipeline is only one step in creating a more diverse and inclusive workforce. It is crucial that you are tackling unconscious bias, promoting a culture of inclusion, and retaining diverse employees.
UNECCESARY INTERVIEW QUESTION #3: WHY SHOULD WE HIRE YOU?
Here are 3 reasons not to ask “Why should we hire you?” in a job interview:
1. When you ask for slogans, don’t be surprised when slogans are what you get. You are basically giving candidates an opportunity to give you the speech they’ve rehearsed as to why they are the perfect match for the job. However, their speech is generally more about selling and pitching capabilities and less about their true, skills-based fit for the position.
2. Poor candidate experience - this question puts candidate under pressure to prove or sell themselves while, in fact, the interview should be a two-way process that allows both sides to assess each other.
3. Limited and biased information - this question only allows the interviewee to focus on their own qualifications, but does not allow them to discuss their fit for the company or how their skills and experiences align with the needs of the role.
What should you ask instead:
1. What is your key value proposition as a candidate for this job? what do you believe is your competitive advantage that will make you successful in this position?
2. What are the main areas of fit/alignment between you as a professional and a person and the company/position? What are the possible misalignments?
Score the following statements on a scale of 1-5 based on how profound each of them is (1-not at all, 5- very profound): Today, science tells us that the essence of nature is grace Life is the driver of potential. We live, we dream, we are reborn These statements were actually generated by an AI “New Age Bullshit Generator). The tendency to see these types of statements as profound is called “Bullshit Receptivity.” In their new book “Noise”, Daniel Kahaneman and colleagues present research showing some people are more bullshit receptive than others, and can be easily impressed by supposedly impressive statements which are in fact shallow or meaningless. If you fell for this, don’t feel bad, it actually might mean you are in a good mood! People in a good mood tend to be more receptive to bullshit and are less likely to notice fraud or misleading information. The bottom line here is not to come grumpy to an interview, but to be aware that there are candidates that know their storytelling and are great at talking in slogans. Our role as interviewers is to break down high level statements such as “my mission is to inspire and deliver” to concrete real-life examples.
THE TALE OF THE PREDECTIVE INTERVIEW
Danny was a 21 year old psychologist that was drafted to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) after his studies.
In 1951, after a short attempt as a combat soldier he was assigned to the IDF’s Psychology Unit. He quickly discovered that his commander, the chief of the psychology unit, was a chemist. That’s how he found himself, after two years of psychology studies, as the only psychology expert in the army.
Amongst the tasks he was assigned was to improve the initial interview with candidates for army service so it would better predict success in the service. By that time, the interviewers (diagnosticians) would ask whatever they want and their impression was open ended and with a “clinical” nature.
Danny took the questions and changed them to focus on candidates’ actual behaviors instead of self perceptions. For each question he attached a 1-5 scoring scale. Overall he created 4 structured scores + 1 additional score for the interviewer’s overall impression.
The interviewers hated it and told him “you are turning us into robots”
The aggregate of the 5 scores has a high predictive power - it predicts success in the army service, promotion up to lieutenant colonel level, and is being utilized up until this day.
The integration of the structured score with the more intuitive score provides enhanced prediction, especially in comparison to the intuitive score.
Our Danny is of course Daniel Kahaneman, the economist and Nobel Prize laureate for his work on judgment and decision making.
Be Danny, Go structured!
#informedecisions #assessment #bias #hiring #interviews #interviewbestpractices #skillsbasedhiring
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
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
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