Designing and advertising a role well means being clear and transparent on flexible working, salary and benefits, avoiding bias in the language you use, avoiding a requirement of aligning with existing organisational culture, and placing adverts where they’ll find a diverse audience rather than just where you always put them.
Processing applications well means doing things like asking candidates if they require any reasonable adjustments, setting a clear timeline and letting candidates know what it is, reducing bias in sifting of applications, and making sure more candidates from diverse backgrounds get through the process.
But, I’m going to focus on how you can interview well to reduce bias and improve diversity.
Core to that is the use of structured interviews.
Structured interviews use the same pre-defined questions with each candidate, with set criteria for how an interview panel can assess them.
An important thing to address at the outset is that structured interviews, while a little bit more work upfront for interview panels, actually make the process of interviewing easier.
Before you commence interviews, you should develop the questions, get feedback on them from others to ensure they are fair and effective, and also set and agree your scoring criteria.
That’s the upfront work, but because the questions are pre-determined, it’s easier for interviewers to listen to and engage with the answers, and the assessment criteria make it significantly easier to compare candidates, as they are all responding to the same prompts.
You’re looking to use the structured questions to explore candidates’ experience, as well as their skills and how they would be applied to the role. It discourages the interviewers from looking for those candidates who would be the ‘best fit’, or form following their ‘gut feel’.
This doesn’t mean you need to stick rigidly to the questions you’ve decided on, but any deviation should be led by the candidate. You can enable this by informing them they can ask follow-ups, or for clarification, and by doing so yourself if the candidate has misunderstood the question or not responded in a way which you expected from your criteria.
An additional element you can add is skill-based assessment, where you set one or more job-relevant tasks to get a sense for how a candidate would operate in the real working environment. It could be a role-play of a scenario with a customer, or a data analysis exercise. Mixing in a range of tasks alongside structured questions can help avoid bias by giving candidates a chance to show their capabilities in different ways.
Panel members should confer before the interview to make sure they are clear on the structure of the interview and how it is going to be conducted, but they shouldn’t confer on their scoring. In fact, scoring should happen as you go along, that way you’re not having the score for one question influenced by the answers given to subsequent ones, and you’re not then comparing notes at the end. This avoids the tendency to align your scores with each other.
As well as helping you find the right candidate for a role, your scores from structured interviews also give you an incredibly insightful source of data for adjusting your processes over time.
By collecting and analysing your scoring you can begin to identify trends – are certain groups more likely to score lower on a question? Are others meeting skills assessments more consistently? Are you disadvantaging certain groups through your approach?
The better informed you are, and the more reflective you are, the better progress you can make towards embedding diversity in your organisation.
It’s not always easy to do, so working with outside specialists is often an important part of getting it right.
I’ve had the pleasure of sitting on some really effective panels when working with clients across a whole range of sectors. They might be hiring for completely different roles, with completely different skillsets, but the fundamentals of the process remain the same and structured interviews always have a role to play.
