HR, Recruiting

How to Bust Bias in the Jungle of Employee Interviews – Part 3

Summary:In Part 2 we had a deeper dive into how we can minimize these biases using Structured Behavioral Interviews for employees.

HR, Recruiting

How to Bust Bias in the Jungle of Employee Interviews – Part 3

Summary:In Part 2 we had a deeper dive into how we can minimize these biases using Structured Behavioral Interviews for employees.

In part 1 of this series, we discussed cognitive bias and how it impacts the interview process. Part 2 was a deeper dive into how we can minimize these biases using Structured Behavioral Interviews. In this final section, we’ll discuss how technology is currently being used to counteract bias.

Technology Options for Addressing Cognitive Bias

Depending on your budget, you may be considering how to add in more innovative recruiting technology to your process to fight bias and give your teams better confidence in their hiring decisions. You may already be exploring the vast, virtual jungle of high-tech selection and interview tools, including ones that do analysis on tone of voice, micro facial expressions, and word choices. Many AI tools sprouting up have roots in platforms such as IBM’s Watson, Microsoft’s Machine Learning Studio, AWS’s SageMaker, or the open-source project jointly developed by Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook: Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX).

What to Watch Out For

The idea with Artificial Intelligence is that smart algorithms using more and more data can better predict the potential of people than humans. However, as has been widely reported, AI has been shown to learn the same biases humans already have. AI quickly learns what we like because we train it to predict what we like. In hiring, where bias is already evident, we guide machine-learning models down the same path as human interviewers by providing data that is predictive of future success without inadvertently encoding bias. When sifting through these new recruiting technologies, consider not only their predictive capabilities, but also their impact on candidate experience and likelihood of adoption by your hiring teams.

Even if you opt to stay low-tech for now, the good news is that you will still improve hiring results by bringing more awareness and rigor to the process using the tried and true structured behavioral interview, which we discussed in part 2. Despite the growing abundance of new tools, decades of research show that SBIs are valid for predicting performance and that candidates trust them.

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Jodie Kirby

Jodie has been recruiting full time since 2008. She understands the talent acquisition life cycle and shares her professional expertise regularly as a contributing author and speaker. She started in the franchise industry: pipelining new franchise prospects, streamlining vetting, and improving lead generation. Then she launched a staffing agency franchise and eventually focused on recruiting designers and developers to deliver marketing projects through her own consultancy. When a key client was acquired, she began recruiting hardware and software engineers. She has a track record of success sourcing and placing technical and leadership talent, building high-performing teams, and optimizing both candidate and hiring team engagement. She leverages her extensive experience directing, revitalizing, and strengthening complex recruiting operations to deliver recruiting business partner consulting and placement services through Ruit Leaf Recruitment.