In recent years there has been increasing interest in how to make hiring processes more
equitable and inclusive. Much of the conversation has hovered around what organizations ask for in their job descriptions (the number of “required” qualifications, the necessity of formal education versus lived experience), how to minimize bias in interview questions, and how to check our assumptions based on presenting characteristics (what is “professional” anyway?). Folks in the nonprofit space have also questioned the ethics of asking candidates to invest significant time in applied interviews (write a 500-word proposal for how you would increase earned revenue) without compensation only to not get the job and depart without their dearly beloved intellectual property. But I have been thinking about ways we can question some of the most taken-for-granted aspects of the interview process.
Let’s start with the cover letter. What’s up with cover letters? Why are these still a thing? We ask candidates to go through the whole process of writing an actual letter with an address and a “Sincerely” at the end. Why? It’s getting emailed. Why do we care if it’s in a letter format? And then we get all prickly when the letter a candidate provides is too short or too long or has typos or doesn’t tell us why the candidate wants the job or what they’ve accomplished. First, let’s just say that asking for text-based candidate information already puts certain under-represented groups at a disadvantage – folks whose first language isn’t English or folks who struggle with articulating their ideas in text (for any number of reasons), to name just two. Further, if this information is that important for screening candidates, then why not ask specific questions that we want information about and ask candidates to provide that information in whatever format they choose? Maybe some candidates will feel more comfortable providing audio or video-based responses. Others may simply want to write the question and then provide a response. Does writing in a letter format suggest anything useful about what kind of a team member a candidate might be?
Next, let’s turn to the actual interview experience. An interview already includes clear power dynamics – the interviewer has the power to provide or deny something the interviewee wants… a job. But we add to this power dynamic by hiding all of our questions from the interviewee like the interview is a quiz. Naturally, this amps up the nerves for many candidates. Presumably those nerves are even more pronounced for folks who know they have to enter into an interview space and deal with whatever preconceived notions (conscious or unconscious) the hiring team may have about the candidate based on their skin color, height, physical ability, comfort with dominant English dialects, hair style, clothing, weight, gender expression, religious expression… the list goes on. If we gave the candidate our questions beforehand, would it really dramatically change what we understand about a candidate and their fit for the role and organization? Instead, we could, say, send five questions we expect to discuss during the course of the interview while still leaving space for follow-up questions based on the primary questions.
Lastly, I’d like to question the multi-round interview process. There are good reasons to have multiple rounds of interviews – perhaps a phone screening, an interview with a hiring manager, and an interview with peers. Having a few rounds of interviews does save time for folks who may not be the right “fit” for the role (a topic for another blog post someday) and incorporates perspectives of multiple internal stakeholders so that the decision doesn’t only live with a single person and their biases (which we all have, by the way). At least with multiple people involved, we hopefully have a diverse smattering of biases that help to balance each other out. (Another blog post for another day – internal power dynamics and their influence on the hiring process.) But there are plenty of organizations out there that go well beyond a two- or three-round interview process. Such involved processes tend to be a waste of the candidates’ time (that you aren’t compensating them for) and staff time without yielding consequential information about the candidate. Think real hard about whether you can clearly justify such a process.
This is far from the end-all-be-all of ways to make the hiring process more inclusive and, dare I say, kind to everyone involved. But hopefully it’s a place to start reimagining what it means to bring new people into our organizations.