Unconscious Bias at Work

Suppose you are the Hiring Director for a local computer software design firm. Your company has experienced significant growth over the last two quarters and as a result, your company will be hiring for 30 new positions in the next several months. The Vice President of Human Resources feels this is a perfect opportunity to incorporate unconscious bias training at your company as managers from several departments will be interviewing and hiring candidates for the new positions. Your company, unfortunately, suffers from a lack of diversity especially among the engineering, coding, and designing positions. She has asked you to conduct this training for the department managers in advance of any interviews being conducted.

As the hiring director, which of the following are effective in removing bias from the recruiting, interviewing, and hiring process? Check all that apply.

-Create inclusive job descriptions, using gender neutral terms and job descriptors

-Ask current employees to refer their friends to the open positions

-Ask managers to conduct unstructured interviews, in which managers are encouraged to ask different questions to each candidate in order to get a better impression of the candidate

-Ask managers to conduct structured interviews, in which each candidate is asked the same questions in each interview.