How To Hire The Best Candidate Without Bias

“People are our greatest asset!"

How many times have you heard that at a company meeting or on-boarding session? While the corporate lexicon may be a bit over-used, it’s still true! The people who show up to your office every day, or now their kitchen tables (ha!), are what makes the difference between good and great outcomes in an organization. 

The inputs of creating a talented team are a daunting question to face. Experts have been deliberating "what makes a great team?" for decades.

General Stanley McChrystal, former Commander of the Joint Special Operations Task Force, re-framed decades of conventional wisdom in his book “Team of Teams”- challenging traditional conventions of how teams should be assembled in a new world with evolving challenges. Deloitte branded their own “Business Chemistry” to use behavioral science to improve working relationships. These experts are certainly not the first to articulate the need for teams to assemble and execute with speed and flexibility. The question is, how do you scale and implement these practices in your organization?  

Teams are composed of individuals. Hiring Managers have their work cut out for them. How do you efficiently and effectively find the “best” candidate for the role your organization is needs, while also providing constant updates to leadership teams, and most importantly, remaining objective and providing transparency to candidates? Judging by the length of that run-on sentence, this seems like a lot to juggle for any HR Department! This is why many customers have come to Decision Lens to make INTELLIGENT HIRING DECISIONS, RAPIDLY, WITHOUT BIAS.  

When Decision Science Is Married With Candidate Selection The Results Are Extremely Powerful.  

Decision Lens assists organizations with understanding the relative prioritization of their operations. Projects/Studies/Programs (Alternatives) are rated against pre-developed criteria to understand how and to what extent each Alternative aligns to that organization’s strategic goals. Using this understanding, an organization can develop hiring criteria to evaluate candidates and manage their selection process from end to end. Let's take a look at some areas of focus.

Area 1: Developing Frameworks And Evaluating Candidates  

Have you ever been in an interview debrief and your colleague describes a candidate as the “best we’ve seen” and all you can think is “WHY?!”. Sometimes we have this gut sense of what makes something or someone “good” for an organization, but can’t really define or quantify it.

This not only makes candidate selection long and arduous but also leaves the door open for vulnerabilities. Why did we pick this person? Was it because of an intangible? Are we sure they’re the best for the role? Are we doing our due diligence and obligation to remove bias from our hiring practices? By designing a Framework for selection, you can ensure that your decisions are transparent, defensible, and absent of bias. 

Area 2: Storing Applicant Data 

Don’t be that person with piles of sensitive candidate information on their desks, searching for each application in a panic whenever there’s a question. Decision Lens makes it easy to gather and store applicant data in a safe and compliant manner. You can grant access to individuals involved in the hiring process, and control what information they can and can't see. You can also store attachments in many different file types, making it easy for evaluators to access relevant information like resumes, essay responses, or other documents. By utilizing participant roles, access to different levels of applicant information can be limited depending on who has a need-to-know at various stages of the hiring cycle.  

Step 3: Analyzing Feedback And Final Results 

Evaluators have the ability to capture comments on candidates and their performance against specific aspects of the framework. This feedback is often very valuable to gather and analyze for leadership as well as the applicants themselves.  

One of Decision Lens’s favorite books on hiring and assembling our Customer Success teams is “Five Dysfunctions of a Team” by Patrick Lencioni. He writes, “It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage. Both because it is so powerful and so rare”. Your organization wants to remain the best, by hiring the brightest. Decision Lens can enable you to scale and implement best practices in Candidate Selection using decision science.  

Want to hear more? Check out our video as we continued this discussion live!

Do you have a similar issue that needs addressing? We’d love to help you change the way you’re viewing your problem by incorporating Decision Lens methodologies! Please reach out to a member of the Decision Lens team today - we’d love to chat with you!