Find the Elephant: When hiring, mitigate all bias, then decide

The parable of the blind men and an elephant tells of six blind men who each touch a different part of an elephant and share what animal they think it is. The man who touches the tusk thinks it's a rhinoceros. The man who touches the trunk thinks it's a snake, and so on. When hiring, each interviewer is a "blind man" from this parable who is biased and who, by themselves, can't determine if the candidate is actually qualified and the right fit. Only with a hiring process that mitigates bias along the way can you successfully "find the elephant" of the right candidate.

While every company has a different hiring process, generally the steps are a résumé screen, phone screen, and some series of interviews. Some companies include deliverables for some roles. Most companies allow bias to creep in at each step and find themselves hiring unqualified people or people who are bad workplace culture fits. Though you can train people to know their biases, you can't design a company's hiring practice around every recruiter, interviewer, and hiring manager being able to overcome all unconscious biases in every candidate interaction.

What companies should do is have a hiring process defined so that at each step, measures are taken to prevent or lessen bias from creeping in to the interactions, observations, and assessment. An ideal hiring process would consist of five stages that are structured in the following way:

1. Résumé screen with personal information removed: People's names, addresses, and even phone numbers all lead to unconscious bias in the mind of the interviewer because they indicate gender, socio-economic status, ethnicity, and more. Remove those factors, and you remove the bias.

2. Standard phone screen: Nothing special to lessen bias here; make sure to use a set of questions that address what's important to make a good decision at this point of the process, such as motivation and interest in the opening, salary requirements, etc.

3. Deliverable with "blind review": The best way to know if someone can do a job, is to have them do the job. Structure a deliverable that will take no more than 1 hour over 3 business days and that will assess a main responsibility of the role and also traits like critical thinking, accuracy, etc. The time commitment is important to be mindful so as not to weed out individuals who don't have a background or lifestyle permitting them to devote much time outside of work to these activities. Then, when you do get the deliverable back, have the recruiter or HR team member remove any personally identifying information before sending it over to the reviewers. Orchestras have their candidates perform behind a curtain for this reason, and we should take a page out of their sheet music.

4. Interviews with ~4 interviewers, "grading rubrics," and diversity in panel where possible: Google found, as described in How Google Works (p. 119), that four interviewers is the magic number of interviewers. Adding an interviewer improves accuracy substantially until interviewer five—after four and on, the added person produces marginal returns in interviewing accuracy. By having the interview panel use a "grading rubric" with areas of focus and corresponding questions, you ensure that the interviewers talk through the right points in ways that prevent bias from creeping in and also that you collect a full picture to "find the elephant" when everyone reconvenes. Lastly, where possible, the interview panel should represent a diversity of backgrounds—people's unique perspectives will allow them to uncover red flags or strong points that others will miss.

5. Post-interview Synch: The moment to pull it all together and "find the elephant" has arrived. Each interviewer should share their observations in a turn-based style so that everyone is heard. A moderator, most likely the hiring manager, should then share their own while bringing in the rubric-based observations from each interviewer. At this point, the moderator can hone in on the overlapping observations and the observations that pose discrepancies or risks. In talking through these, the group should arrive at a sense of if the candidate is qualified or not.

Hiring is the most important thing because the people of a company are the most important part of the company. While we are all "blind men" from the parable, we can implement a process that allows us to come together and make effective decisions for our company and for the interested applicant.