What's your process for addressing unconscious bias in interviews?

Raise awareness: Educate employees about unconscious bias, its impact on decision-making, and the importance of addressing it. Offer workshops, training sessions, or presentations to provide a comprehensive understanding of bias and its effects.

It's essential to recognize that we all possess unconscious bias. In order to foster a more equitable atmosphere while interviewing, I suggest individuals learn about this concept and how it applies to them. Whenever the potential of bias arises in an interview setting, it's important to take pause and reflect on whether your thoughts are being swayed by prejudice or not.

To mitigate unconscious bias during candidate interviews, I adopt several strategies. First, implementing structured interview formats with standardized questions helps ensure that all candidates are evaluated consistently based on their qualifications and responses. Additionally, training interviewers to recognize and address their own biases can lead to more objective evaluations. Implementing diverse interview panels can also help counteract individual biases by incorporating multiple perspectives into the decision-making process. Ultimately, raising awareness about unconscious bias and fostering a culture of inclusivity can result in fairer and more effective candidate evaluations during the interview process.

In navigating interviews, acknowledging our unconscious biases is vital. I use structured questions, ensuring consistency for every candidate. Diverse panels add varied perspectives, enriching evaluations. I prefer resumes without names, removing initial preconceptions. Objectivity is my compass, guiding evaluations. While intuition has its place, it dances with evidence in my decisions. Continual learning and inclusivity are my pillars, aiming to fairly recognize each unique voice in our vast human tapestry.

The following has been essential in my experience: 1. Recognizing the recruiting team members' preexisting biases, being real with them, and providing resources and training on effective management of those biases during interview - requires many in-depth conversations with each team member, but create for creating awareness. 2. Creating a structured interviewing process with predetermined sets of questions and evaluation criteria. 3. Building a blind resume review process into the hiring processes and systems. 4. Having a diverse interview panel or stages of interviews and providing a collaborative feedback/evaluation process. 5. Providing bias awareness training to all recruiters, hiring managers and company leadership groups.

There are three primary components to standardizing your process: 1. Create a scorecard with clearly defined criteria for success and key outcomes. 2. Develop standardized interview questions. Use the standardized interview questions with each candidate to ensure each candidate is measured against a baseline. 3. Train your hiring managers on best interview techniques as well as on areas where unconscious bias tends to exist.

This definitely makes the entire process more objective and tangible, facts lay on the table when you have a structured form and appropriate feedback. While biases may play upon the feedback as well when the questions from the questionnaire are close ended its easier to stay unbiased.

Standardizing an interview process sounds simple - but it is probably one of the more challenging facets of the already subjective process to get right. When humans are interacting verbally, they do not measure their word-count, they do not stop each other mid-sentence because someone has taken too long to respond, they have emotional connections to some people more than others...hence the subjectivity of the process. Knowing this means that without structure, you'll likely end up with tremendous subjectivity. And also, don't be deluded into thinking that 'structure' will stamp out bias. It's almost impossible - so then reviewing with an awareness of unconscious bias becomes another step to build into the process.

Review hiring and promotion processes: Examine the recruitment, selection, and promotion procedures to identify any potential sources of bias. Implement strategies like blind resume reviews or diverse interview panels to minimize bias and ensure fair evaluation of candidates or employees.

First things that come to mind are education and awareness. Workshops or Trainings implementing regular sessions for hiring managers and interviewers around unconscious bias and mitigation strategies. Structured Interviewing: Making sure all candidates go through the same process. Diverse Interview Panels: Making sure panels represent different genders & ethnicities. Addressing Affinity Bias: Encourage interviewers to be aware of affinity bias, where they may unconsciously favor candidates who are similar to themselves. One way to address this is to have them consciously note what they have in common with a candidate and ensure it doesn't affect their decision.

I see a lot in the civil service they have a diverse panel of people. Prior to applying for the role, they have a fair open and honest policy. All names, address, location are removed to stop this from happening and its based on the merit of the individual. This should be adapted in the private sector, as people are too quick to judge!

In my experience, having a diverse panel is key when it comes to unconscious bias. Being intentional from the moment the role is opened to build a diverse interview panel is the single most important factor in making the best hiring decision. In the past, I have often partnered with the hiring manager to think outside of their team as needed to ensure a diverse interview panel (where all members have ideally gone through unconscious bias training) - it is too late if you start this process once the hiring manager has selected the candidates they want to interview.

In my last role as a people manager we made sure that when I interviewed a candidate that a male peer also interviewed the same person. Additionally we ensured that we asked the same set of questions to all candidates. This helped us to balance out any individual biases.

This is critical. More women, more LGBTQ+, more ethnic diversity on the interviewing panel will undoubtedly reduce bias. But data shows that unless you have more than 1 diverse panelist, or unless the diverse panelist is in a 'power' position, the impact is not significant.

Incorporating diversity within the panel of interviewers emerges as a strategic approach to mitigate prevalent challenges within the talent acquisition process. This structure, when complemented by a robust guideline, should stand as a primary objective for an effective process. By encompassing a holistic perspective, this approach not only enhances the candidate experience, but also optimizes evaluator outcomes, thereby significantly influencing the ultimate decision-making process for new hires.

I think it's incredibly important to get the full interview panel (from every stage) in the room together for 30 minutes to discuss a candidate's feedback prior to making an offer. In a psychologically safe team/company, this allows people to openly question and respectfully challenge each others' feedback in a group setting. It's like having a jury for your hiring process!

As a Human Resources integrator, a pivotal responsibility rests in effectively overseeing interview outcomes, substantiating these with the technical team to corroborate the final verdict. This entails harmonizing the chosen candidate to seamlessly transition into receiving a fitting offer, underpinned by insights gleaned from the feedback garnered throughout the talent acquisition journey.

Encourage self-reflection: Encourage employees to reflect on their own biases and consider how they might influence their judgments and interactions. This introspection can help individuals identify and challenge their biases to make more objective decisions.

Train managers and leaders: Provide specific training for managers and leaders on identifying and mitigating bias. Equip them with the knowledge and tools to create inclusive environments, address bias-related issues, and promote equal opportunities for all employees.

Implement objective performance measures: Develop clear, objective criteria for evaluating performance and provide regular feedback based on these metrics. This helps minimize the influence of subjective bias in performance evaluations.

In my experience with interviewing/ training people on how to interview, I always points out that the recruitment process, will never be error free Recruiters,Hiring managers, and even candidates can be compared to a “weather forecast” validity of your weather report is dependent on when did you measure it and overtime, this may change dependent to various conditions that may arise after the measurement. A. Establishing feedback and review on your recruiting process will help. Steps like a surprise shadowing of an interview can provide insights B. Continuously train recruiters and hiring managers on recruiting bias and proper interview techniques C. HR/Leaders should always be in the lookout for best practices in recruitment processes

Check the diversity of the team. The diversity of the team can be range from gender, age, university, race, and even go futher to hobby, sexual orientation, religion, or social status. ASK questions that can double check your bias, like "Do many persons in team join the same club and get the job because of it?"

For me, fighting the ego and putting aside personal problems can support us to be more objective so that we are not trapped in subjectivity, so that our judgments are also objective and based on rationality.

Being biased is always like second nature. To avoid letting this interfere with the interviewing process, hiring process, and making a final decision on the person who will fill the position at hand. Several steps have to be taken into consideration. Such as having all applicants take a survey to determine personality and traits. Then review applications and or resumes to identify the personalities and traits. Separate them as identified. To then have a hiring manager with the same personality and traits interview them to not make any biased decisions. To only select the most qualified candidates.