Reducing bias in your interview process

Finding the best candidate for your team is a daunting task – between attracting, scheduling, interviewing, and assessing talent, it can be incredibly stressful to make sure you find someone who is a great fit. Could your process be making it even more difficult? Could you be unknowingly introducing bias that unnecessarily filters out qualified candidates?

We spoke to our members about their experiences both as interviewers and candidates, and what they saw as the best approaches to reducing bias and developing an effective interview process.

How much is too much?

Interviews require a lot of time and commitment on the part of the candidate, not only for the interview itself, but in preparation. Availability of time off work and time outside of work are not necessarily a given for all candidates. On the flip side, hiring a new member of your team is a big step, and it’s important to make sure you get it right.

Multiple interviews are often necessary for a role and can be beneficial for the candidate as well, as they can get a better idea of the team they are potentially joining. But when is enough enough?

One of our members shared her experience in which she was required to do a recruiter interview, a hiring manager interview, an 8 hour take home assessment, and seven more hour-long interviews, only to not get the role. This is not only frustrating for the candidate, but it’s a massive time sink for the team members reviewing assessments and conducting the various interviews. When designing an interview panel for a role, be sure that each interview has a clear purpose and an objective signal that you are hoping to capture. Enumerating this can help reduce duplicate assessments and ensure that your process is as efficient as possible.

In terms of scheduling, offering candidates flexibility is key. Providing ranges of dates and available times can help ease the stress of scheduling for candidates with commitments outside of work. Some may prefer to get all interviews done in one day so that they can just take a single day off from their current role. Others may have more flexibility (or less PTO!) and prefer interviews to be spread out on different days.

Take-home interviews

A take home interview can be beneficial for both parties. It allows the candidate to demonstrate how they actually work without the added pressure of an interviewer present, while also allowing the interviewer to effectively assess how the candidate will perform on a more realistic problem than a simple whiteboard interview.

They can, however, introduce a good deal of bias into your interview process if not done right. Imagine, for example, a single parent working a full time job who is interviewing for the same role as an individual without dependents who has deliberately taken time between jobs for interviewing. If given the same take-home assessment and the same amount of time to complete it, they will likely have very different outputs regardless of their experience and actual aptitude for the job. Someone’s current work schedule and obligations outside of work generally should not impact how they will perform in a new role, so it shouldn’t necessarily be reflected in their interview.

Our members had mixed opinions on take-home interviews. Some had felt that they had previously found themselves in situations where they were doing “free labor” for the organization. Others found take-homes to be their preferred method to be assessed for technical skills, as it allowed them to think and work on their own time and more accurately reflected their true readiness for the role.

One middle ground that some of our members had enjoyed in the past, both as interviewers and candidates, was a strictly timeboxed take-home that the candidate could freely schedule. For example, one member detailed her team’s process in which a candidate was to provide their email address and a three hour window within the next week. At the time they selected, an automated system would email them the take-home assessment, and they had three hours to complete and return it via email. This allows candidates ample flexibility to adjust their schedules, without giving candidates too much of an advantage relative to their available free time outside of work. However, we all work at different speeds, especially folks with neurodiversity, so a strictly timeboxed scenario could feel difficult for some. It’s important to consider whether or not a take-home assessment is truly necessary for your role, and if it is, try and develop a process that minimizes variation in performance based on factors outside of candidates’ control, and try your best to understand and accommodate differences in availability.

Reducing subjectivity

One key to reducing bias in your process and ensuring that each interview has a clear goal is to establish a rubric for each step of the process. While this may seem tedious, it actually can save you mental load down the road. This doesn’t necessarily mean a checkbox for each correct answer, but rather ensuring that you as the interviewer can clearly dictate what strategies and skills you are looking for from a candidate. 

One of our members, a manager in security operations, shared her thought process when effectively assessing candidates’ problem solving rather than memorized knowledge. 

• You either know the information or you know how to get it. I’m not asking “Google-able” questions or trivia. For the behavioral questions, I look for the thought process to get there - how do you respond when there are roadblocks? How do you deal with them? In situations where you weren’t successful, how do you pivot? 

Think through the kind of teammate you want to have - for example are they a self-starter? Think about what that looks like for you. What kind of examples do you want to hear about?

Regardless of your ideal candidate, establishing a rubric in advance can force the interviewer to objectively measure candidates using the same scale every time, which can help to reduce opportunities for bias based on race, age, gender, or other protected attributes.

A side effect of establishing an effective rubric is that you can easily delegate or scale the interview process and ensure that everyone is on the same page about what success looks like for a given candidate. This also makes it easier to provide objective feedback to the candidate.

Tying it all together

Creating an effective and respectful interview process requires careful consideration of both the candidate’s experience and the needs of the hiring team. Ensuring that each interview stage has a clear purpose, offering flexibility in scheduling, and reducing bias through structured rubrics can go a long way in improving the process for all parties involved. By optimizing the interview experience, organizations not only attract top talent but also foster a more inclusive and equitable hiring environment.