We all have biases that impact the talent pipeline and our hiring decisions.
Take affinity bias, for example. It means we’re more likely to favor candidates from the same race or gender or who share similar backgrounds, interests, or attitudes as us.
It’s a well-known fact that diversity in the workplace is an asset for both organizations and employees. Diverse teams are the most innovative, more resilient in adversity, and produce better results. But when left unchecked, bias can harm company diversity and impact future team success.
While there’s no way we can completely rid ourselves of bias, there are things we can do to limit its effect when making hiring decisions. Next to unconscious bias training, collaborative hiring practices can help.
The goal of collaborative or team-based hiring is to add more voices to the screening, interviewing, and decision-making phases. Not only the recruiter and hiring manager but senior leadership, other managers, and team members who will work with the chosen candidate directly.
With input from various people with different perspectives and interests, you can gather well-rounded information about candidates and their potential fit at your company.
Keeping the decision-making process unbiased and fair will level the playing field for candidates and help you make better hiring decisions. Better hiring decisions lead to better hires, and hiring the right people is good for business. So it’s crucial to master this part of the hiring process.
The challenge for hiring teams is to avoid groupthink or “mutual admiration society,” which can distort the final hiring decision. That’s where Recruitee’s Fair evaluations feature comes in.
Why Fair evaluations?
Interviewing and evaluating candidates as a team in a multi-stage approach can help reduce the impact of a single team member’s bias. But bias can still creep in.
For example, confident, vocal, or senior team members may influence other, less experienced members. Or, let’s say all team members except one person share similar opinions about a candidate. The person who thinks differently may choose to go with the flow instead of challenging the rest of the team.
Having everyone’s honest observation is essential so teams don’t lose the value that collaborative hiring can bring.
With Fair evaluations, one strong opinion won’t swing the hiring decision. Team members can all share their free opinions and see which candidate comes out on top.
How Fair evaluations work
Because hiring team members can influence each other’s impressions of a candidate, the feature lets you hide evaluations temporarily. Evaluations from your team will remain hidden until you add your own feedback.
You can enable Fair evaluations at any stage where multiple team members evaluate candidates collaboratively, such as during the CV review, interview, and assignment stages.
The feature gives everyone a fair chance to evaluate candidates, even if they’re only involved in one hiring stage.
Let’s use the below pipeline as an example.
Two team members, Robin and Quinn, evaluate a candidate during the interview stage. Since this stage has Fair evaluations enabled, they won’t see any evaluations from previous stages.
Robin submits their evaluation first. Quinn now has to evaluate the candidate themself to reveal Robin’s feedback, older evaluations, and the candidate’s score.
The candidate moves to the assignment stage, where the feature is also enabled. This time, Quinn evaluates the candidate with Taylor, another team member.
Quinn will see their own evaluation from the previous stage. But to see Taylor’s notes and rating, Quinn must also submit feedback for the assignment stage.
Suppose the candidate moves to another stage with Fair evaluations enabled. In that case, the feature will again hide all evaluations and scores, so everyone can continue giving feedback without their team members’ influence.
Follow the steps in this help article to enable Fair evaluations for specific pipeline stages.
What’s next?
We know that the topic of unbiased hiring covers so much more than team evaluations. We’ll keep working on delivering solutions to help our customers make objective hiring decisions and hire better together. Keep an eye on our roadmap and product updates.
Have ideas for new features? Share your suggestions with us here. We love customer feedback, and your input helps us build a better product!
