Recommendations for Bias reduction & assisting DE&I.

[harpetersen]

One of the states goals of this interview process was the reduction of bias.

This is especially neccesarry to companies with DE&I initiatives (I have served as a DE&I co-chair in a few positions in addition to my normal duties).

In this regards, any instance in which an interviewers has the ability to learn what the minority status of an applicant is puts DE&I initiatives at risk, but also allows risk for discrimination cases in case any interviewer is not fully versed on aspects of DE&I (which in my experience, is most of them).

In this, I make the following recommendations to improve process.

1. Information scrubbing

• The application should be scrubbed from personal information, replaced with placeholders, with the keys for those placeholders kept by those with no influence on the interview process.

2. The Recruiter Phone Interview

This can be replaced my a recruiter email. This prevents making judgement based off of a potential hire's voice (which can be strongly hint at nationality from accents or gender from voice pitch)

3. Technical interviews

Including a live technical interviewer in addition to an already stressful process of interviewing may risk inducing social anxiety, a risk for those with more socially-oriented disabilities. Further, it can stress high-value applicants who are dealing with applying to other positions, and risk them dropping the application process completely. In this regard, I have found that "fix the problems" type technical quizzes instead of "build this product" type technical quizzes are far more effective and require less interacting with an interviewer. This makes it easier for approaches that allow the technical interview to be asynchronous from an interviewer, reducing the social anxiety aspect.

4. The In-Person interview is obviously not a great step from a DE&I and discrimination-presentation perspective. Even if interviewers are well-screened to not be part of bigotry-based organizations, implicit biases can still remain as most people have at least some implicit biases. These could easily be done as take-home personality surveys or a text chat setting (note, I did not say video chat), where users discuss via text back and forth.