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To your friend: Why do you think of them as white males? Do you think of your friends as the white male, black friend, asian dude, indian girl? 2 routes to im

To your friend: Why do you think of them as white males? Do you think of your friends as the white male, black friend, asian dude, indian girl? 2 routes to improve your hiring process - go more objective or go more subjective. Right now, you're applying the worst practices of both points of view. 1) Be more objective. If you're going to treat candidates as a category of people instead of individuals, you should do it correctly. Establish defined metrics/values that the candidate must have in order to pass the interview. Evaluate based on those metrics, and completely ignore other signals or red flags that aren't part of the evaluation criteria. 2) Be more subjective. These are people. Treat them like individuals instead of categories. Look at them as potential friends, colleagues instead of just a category of people. Either way, you're stuck in a one of the more unfortunate human biases, it's cognitively easier to continue to do what you're doing than it is to do the above.

throwaway48adbd 8y ago
Thank you. I do think setting objective metrics would help. It wouldn't be hard to have a set of questions that we ask every candidate during the whiteboard problems to check for understanding. It might not completely eliminate the subjectivity, but it will at least ensure that we are asking the same slate of questions to all and looking for specific areas of knowledge. I'm also thinking about a more traditional "code a solution to this" challenge where results can be easily checked against a test might be a good idea. It's useful to see how a candidate thinks, but if it opens up the possibility of bias then it may not be worth it.
- spyckie2 8y ago
  These sounds like good steps. Bias can still exist in functional/effective HR pipelines because it is after all a pipeline run by humans, not robots, but they shouldn't outweigh the most important values required for the role.

throwaway48adbd 8y ago

Thank you. I do think setting objective metrics would help. It wouldn't be hard to have a set of questions that we ask every candidate during the whiteboard problems to check for understanding. It might not completely eliminate the subjectivity, but it will at least ensure that we are asking the same slate of questions to all and looking for specific areas of knowledge. I'm also thinking about a more traditional "code a solution to this" challenge where results can be easily checked against a test might be a good idea. It's useful to see how a candidate thinks, but if it opens up the possibility of bias then it may not be worth it.

spyckie2 8y ago
These sounds like good steps. Bias can still exist in functional/effective HR pipelines because it is after all a pipeline run by humans, not robots, but they shouldn't outweigh the most important values required for the role.