Don’t Let Implicit Bias Derail Your Hiring Process
How to make hiring more fair and inclusive at your organization.
I recently had the opportunity to attend AT&T Aspire and Village Capital’s Talent & Culture Development Forum, which was well-moderated by Florence Navarro. I took a lot away from the conference about building an inclusive culture and increasing diversity and fairness in your hiring process, so I decided to write about it.
Values Are the Bedrock of Culture
When we discuss culture what are we talking about? These were some answers I liked:
- How you communicate with each other
- Your shared understanding of why
- Coherence of direction
Another common message was to be deliberate from the start, which is what we’ve tried to do at Quill. To me, culture flows from your values. Values define you edges/contours — the areas where you’re willing to make tradeoffs, the shape of the organization. A good set of values serves as a sort of rulebook, the guiding principles for your interactions and decisions. Culture is what fills the space created by your values.
Instead of Culture Fit, Look for Values Fit & Culture Add
Defining your values is critical if you’re going to talk about culture, because if you don’t have values, you have a vague concept that can be used as a blanket reason to reject a candidate who’s not like you. If you do have values, then you can instead ask whether the candidate holds the same values. Because skills can be taught and improved, but values are much harder to change. So, look for “values fit” — because if you’ve all agreed to your values, then you have a more objective way to ask whether the candidate will be a “fit.”
More importantly, though, if the candidate has the same values as you, it doesn’t matter if they are like the people in the office in some non-quantifiable way. It doesn’t matter if they feel like someone you’d get drinks with after work. If they share your values, they are probably a “culture add.” And a culture add can be better than just a culture fit since they’ll fill in more of the space created by the values, spaces that may not be filled if everyone is exactly the same.
Diversity in Hiring: My Story
I’ve hired people before, but this is my first time leading recruiting and really building out a team. There’s Plenty. Of. Evidence. out there about why diversity is good for your company, and my lived experience supports this. I know I still have an enormous amount of privilege, but my experience being “different” makes me determined to use that privilege to help other minorities get hired.
I can’t truly know other peoples’ experiences, but as an openly queer woman, I definitely have experience feeling different. I’ve been the only “different” person in a group many times before. Some examples: during my first 6 months at law school, I was the only queer woman in every one of my classes and ended up half closeting myself again. One time I went to a Junior League meeting and ran away because everyone looked like Stepford-wives.
And then there was Facebook, which was full of miniature Sheryl Sandberg wannabes. One of my favorite stories from that time is when I worked internally with some other gender non-conforming/trans people to argue against the official interpretation of the “real names” policy. I liked this group because I felt like I could be myself and chat with them and work toward real change, and we achieved at least a modest success when then-CPO Chris Cox apologized to the community. I wouldn’t have had the courage to speak out against it if I didn’t have friends at the company who I knew felt the same way.
So those are some of my experiences being different. You end up having your guard up all the time, all the stress that comes with that is exhausting and because of it you don’t do your best work. I’ve also been on diverse teams where I felt comfortable, did better work because I was comfortable, contributed more and saw others contribute more too. Bottom line: these teams functioned better.
So How Do We Get More Diverse Teams?
This is something I’ve struggled with, because as much as I want to hire the most diverse team I can, there are conflicting messages people hear about hiring Sure, we say diverse teams are better, but then we also say that CEOs should always be hiring, and that people should use their networks to find the best candidates. So I was very excited to see Stacey Gordon speak on a panel about diversity.
When I asked Stacey how to reconcile these messages, she had a great, easy answer: rely on your process. Sure, your CXO/Board/Advisors/Etc. can recommend people, but they should go through the same process as everyone else, and not receive any special treatment.
It also helps to have internal advocates for diversity. If your company isn’t big enough to have employee research groups, for example, you can create an Inclusion Council (I’m planning to try this at Quill).
Obviously this means you need a strong process, and the panel had some ideas about how to implement a fairer hiring process. I presented to our team about this last week, and we’re working on incorporating the following into our hiring.
Define The Job You Are Hiring For
It sounds obvious, but then one of your leaders finds someone who they just think is great. Before you know it, you are interviewing just one person for a job that doesn’t even exist. Stop. Slow down. Good candidates will always be out there. And when that good person joins your company, they’ll be happy to have a clearly defined role.
When defining that job, Village Capital has a checklist you can use in their Talent Playbook. The playbook also has great example competencies, traits and drivers that you can use when writing the job description and interviewing.
Check Yourself For Bias
So you’ve defined your role — congratulations! This is a big step. But now make sure that job description isn’t accidentally scaring away candidates. You might know that using the word “ninja” probably isn’t a good idea. But did you know that words like “commit” and “connect” may attract more female candidates, while words like “adventurous” and “decisive” are more likely to attract male candidates? I didn’t, so I’m excited to try this out going forward.
Fortunately the Internets have made it really to check your job descriptions. There’s a free gender decoder for job ads here, and this tool will give you a result and highlight specific words. I’m also curious about other bias in ads, but wasn’t able to find a tool for other types of bias. If anyone knows of one, I’d love to hear from you.
Why We All Need A Culture Page
One thing both the panelists and attendees emphasized was the need for a page talking about your company’s culture. This is your opportunity to do some positive PR for your company and share your culture and values. Potential candidates will look at the page — someone talked about this being the most clicked part of their website. So use this to explain why your company is great and inclusive. Just make sure you run it through that gender bias screener if you’re trying to get more women to apply.
Make Your Pipeline Diverse
Getting back to the pipeline, qualified, talented, diverse candidates are out there. But you need to make sure you’re doing the work of finding them. This means your network isn’t enough, and sites like Angellist may not be enough either. There are now a number of job and networking sites that focus on specific groups, making it easier to find people outside of your network. One I’ve used before is TechLadies, and the panelists also recommended LaborX, PositiveHire, and Code2040. I haven’t used these so I can’t vouch for them yet, but I definitely intend to in the future.
Another option is to expand your network. One of the panelists (I think it was Stacey) suggested reaching out to diversity advocates on LinkedIn. The panel also suggested going to industry groups and conferences, joining LinkedIn groups and meetup groups, such as the Black Code Collective (which looks like it’s expanded beyond meetup). Or you can invite people to you, by hosting lunches, dinners, or meet n greets targeting specific groups.
Conduct Fair Interviews: The Structured Interview
After creating that awesome inclusive job description and actively making your pipeline more diverse, you still need to interview the candidate. And interviews are one of those places where bias loves to creep in.So, Florence (our moderator) suggests conducting structured interviews (more on this below) following 7 steps. The 7 steps cover 3 areas; what happens before, during, and after the interview.
Before the Interview: Agree on your questions and rating scale. The best structured interview questions ask the candidate to describe past experiences or answer hypotheticals related to their role. They should assess “skills, values, culture add, drivers, and competencies.” There are many examples of structured interview questions online. One question Florence recommended for assessing clear communication is “Describe a time when you had to explain a complex product to a client, or a complex idea to a colleague.”
During the Interview. Take notes, but wait until after the interview to fill out your assessment. When taking notes, ask questions that require the candidate to describe a situation, acton and response. I’ve also seen a similar technique described as the STAR model: Situation, Task, Action, Result. Either way, the idea is to get to specifics.
After the Interview. Fill out your evaluation right after the interview, when the interview is most fresh in your mind. Compare the candidate to the job requirements, not other candidates. And while you should discuss the candidate pool with your team, this should be done after you fill out your individual assessments so that you aren’t biased by your coworkers.
I want to thank AT&T and Village Capital for a great conference. I know I have a lot of work to do, and I’m excited to go get started.
If you end up trying any of these practices, I’d love to hear from you (you can comment or email me at tltcoaches@gmail.com). And if you’re interested in coaching, you can find me at The Leadership Team.
