Avoiding Bias and Improving Hiring Outcomes During the Interview Process

Interviews consume a tremendous amount of valuable time and resources from organizations and job seekers. In some cases, the number of interactions in a hiring cycle can be anywhere from three to even ten interviews!

Despite the amount of time that can be expended by applicants and hiring teams, not nearly enough effort is put into adequate preparation to ensure that time is well spent and the right questions are being asked by the prospective employer.

When organizations put more emphasis on defining what the hiring process should look like with effective interview training, the time that is put into each cycle becomes more efficient for recruiters, hiring managers, and interviewers. Even more importantly, the candidate experience gets better and hiring outcomes improve. Let’s explore how to get to this ideal state.

The Divide in Interview Training Today

In many cases, businesses are failing to conduct or mandate any interview training whatsoever. Requisitions are approved, jobs are posted, and then it’s open season for hiring managers and interviewers to narrow down the candidates of their choosing — at their discretion. All too often, it’s anybody’s guess what types of questions are being asked to arrive at a hiring decision.

Other organizations, however, recognize the need to put process and structure in place to adequately prepare their hiring teams. These companies:

• Conduct in-person training sessions and workshops (e.g., how to conduct interviews)

• Distribute guides and manuals (e.g., how to avoid biased or inappropriate questions)

• Facilitate knowledge sharing via mentorships and peer learning engagements

Even with these well-intentioned exercises, the training is often ineffective and broad versus personalized to the specific job or interviewer. And the guides shared are not well understood — if they’re even being read in the first place. Because of this, person to person engagements often lead to inconsistent training quality across the board.

Implementing Interview Guidance to Reduce Bias

Although guidance from HR teams may be well intentioned, applying these recommendations and making them meaningful can be difficult for hiring decision-makers to do. This is often because guidance is not directly applicable to or personalized for every role or scenario.

This calls for more feedback loops put in place by HR teams that make it easy for curated guidance to be provided — which can only happen when appropriate context is taken into account.

For example, a hiring manager may ask a particular question each time he meets with a candidate — while unknowingly opening the company up to potential risk. Depending on the severity, this could even mean potential legal action. If the company had a mechanism in place to identify when this was occurring:

• The hiring manager could be made aware that this question should be avoided — and why

• Feedback could be given to steer the manager on the right path for future engagements

• Future interview performance could be improved, and the potential for bias reduced

With Phenom Interview Intelligence, HR teams can implement these types of feedback loops — leveraging the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to move past the traditional methods of preparation and interview training and produce better outcomes. There are various ways that Interview Intelligence supports with training before, during, and after interviews. Let’s explore each.

Getting Ready for a Solid Interview

At this stage of the process, a hiring manager or interviewer needs to be fully aware of the job they are interviewing candidates for. Important aspects they need to know include the core competencies they should be profiling for and the job requirements, so that they may appropriately evaluate the candidate’s eligibility.

Interview training for hiring managers is extremely important to ensure that candidates are being appropriately evaluated, and the right ones move forward in the process. Interview Intelligence can draw upon this context to comprise tailor-made interview guides. With this method, AI generates personalized questions that are entirely based on the job requirements and core competencies needed to perform the job. It also uses context to serve up the questions and topics that would be best to avoid.

Furthermore, interviewers can prepare for their next conversation by reviewing takeaways from past interviews that were automatically recorded and transcribed. AI facilitates a proper interviewer reflection process by serving up recommendations based on the outcomes of previous engagements. This contextually relevant guidance and interview training for hiring managers affords them with an understanding of where there may have been missed opportunities to ask the right questions — and how that learning can be applied in the next interaction.

Facilitating Top Notch Interactions in Real-Time

Because Interview Intelligence automatically records and transcribes interviews, it can provide interviewers with immediate feedback in real time — analyzing and addressing bias.

For example, if an interviewer mistakenly introduces bias into the conversation by asking a potentially risky question like “Are you planning to have children soon?", the AI can detect it in real-time and share a different approach — for example, offering a recommendation to ask the question a different way or to omit it completely.

Because this feedback is made immediately, the interviewer can course correct while keeping the process fair and appropriate for the candidate they are evaluating.

Interview Intelligence can also consider the amount of time that has been spent in each conversation and prompt the interviewer with additional questions to ask that are aligned to the role and its requirements, ensuring the right ones get surfaced before the end of the exchange.

Optimizing Each Interview Interaction

With Interview Intelligence, the entire team gets the opportunity to reflect on how the interview went. AI makes this process easy by highlighting key moments from each conversation and providing contextually relevant feedback. This can include acknowledgement of potential risks that were introduced, and what can be done to appropriately address them in the future.

The team can evaluate whether the right questions were asked and what types of responses were received. If there are gaps that are important to address before deciding to move forward with a candidate, the team can bring those actionable takeaways to the next interview to make it even more impactful.

Overall, these data-driven insights from Interview Intelligence make it easy to spot trends, highlight potential risks, and keep the process moving forward as efficiently as possible for all parties involved.

See Interview Intelligence in Action

Every organization has different requirements when it comes to hiring: Different jobs to be done, talent that needs to be evaluated, and processes for attracting, engaging, and converting prospective hires. There is, however, a pressing need that applies for all organizations, no matter how they’re choosing to hire: the need to prepare for the most impactful, efficient, and fair interactions with job seekers. Not only have candidates come to expect this, but it also keeps brands protected from encountering potential legal troubles.

Interview Intelligence simplifies this process by providing a holistic solution that cuts across the interview process from start to finish. It continually optimizes the way that hiring teams engage with applicants to create phenomenal experiences that result in better hiring decisions.

Request a personalized demo today to see how your organization can benefit from putting Interview Intelligence into practice.

This blog is part of a series dedicated to improving the way organizations approach the overall interview process to create better candidate experiences, improve hiring team collaboration, and reduce total time and cost to hire. Click here to catch up on previous blogs:

• 4 Ways to Improve the Interview Experience

• Best Practices for Structuring and Preparing for an Interview

• 5 Ways to Boost Hiring Team Communication and Efficiency

In our next and final blog of the series, we will be touching on the best ways to streamline interview experiences for candidates. Be on the lookout for more to come in the weeks ahead!