How interview management technology helps you mitigate risk and discrimination in hiring

Fast moving and new advances in technology have made it difficult to assess the legal risk of hiring practices. This trend is perhaps most prevalent in the interview process where bias plays a huge role in driving discrimination in hiring decisions. HR teams are confronted with novel questions such as: Is it okay to record interviews? Is it okay to use AI in our hiring practices and, if so, where, when, and how? If I choose to move forward with a new vendor, how do I select one that helps me mitigate risk rather than amplify it?

As much as 85%-97% of hiring managers rely on some degree of intuition when making hiring decisions¹.

Although it is unrealistic to expect technology to eradicate human bias, there is a huge opportunity for responsibly designed technology to reduce bias in employee selection by helping us redesign our systems. Behavioral science shows it's both easier and more effective to change systems than people². Technology that ‘knows’ how bias in hiring works, for example, can be designed to circumvent bias and achieve more accurate, ethical, and inclusive hiring outcomes.

Technology, however, is certainly not a perfect, risk-free solution, especially with the proliferation of AI and a lacking regulatory environment. But keeping with the status quo will undoubtedly continue to do more harm than good. In a world where we have witnessed essentially zero progress in hiring discrimination over the past 25 years³, we must acknowledge that we are failing miserably at improving opportunity and representation for members of underrepresented groups. Responsibly designed technology cannot be ignored as a viable option to improve our existing, biased approach.

Today’s social, economic and legal landscapes demand that the next 25 years be different from the last. More now than ever before, these three distinct but fundamental pressures are driving the need for organizations to mitigate discrimination in employment.

Social Pressure

On the heels of recent, nation-wide social justice movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, organizations are under increasing pressure to demonstrate their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. These movements heightened a collective awareness of the ways in which discrimination and inequality are pervasive in organizations, and employment selection is one area that has been notably put under a microscope. Employees, customers, and candidates are all holding organizations increasingly accountable for fair and inclusive practices to combat discrimination and provide all members of society equal opportunities for employment. We must make significant investments in addressing discrimination in the hiring process to remain viable.

Legal Pressure

Adhering to legal guidelines has always been critical for organizations, but legal scrutiny on fair and anti-discriminatory employee selection has increased in recent years and will likely continue to do so. In the United States, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is the body that governs anti-discrimination employment law. According to their most recent report, discrimination charges are on the rise with 20% more filed in 2022 compared to the previous year⁴. The EEOC is also investing more resources in their workforce to keep up with this increased demand for combating discrimination in employment.

In addition to employment equity legislation that has been around since the 1960’s, we are beginning to witness a wave of emerging new laws governing the use of AI in hiring. The general throughline of these laws is a requirement that companies using AI technology to assist with or replace discretionary hiring decisions traditionally made by humans must conduct regular bias audits to demonstrate the technology is not producing systematic differences in selection decisions between different groups, primarily race and gender. The New York Local Law 144⁵ and the EU AI Act⁶ are both examples of laws that specify this requirement.  

For organizations and HR professionals in particular, the increased legal risk in turn requires a more concentrated effort to facilitate inclusive and standardized hiring practices that mitigate bias and discrimination. Your ability to demonstrate that your selection methods are both job-related and non-discriminatory will go a long way toward complying with EEOC guidelines and best practices. By using structured interviews, for example, you can decrease the risk of a discriminatory ruling by over 30%⁷. These efforts will not only help to mitigate risk in the event of a legal challenge, but are also preventive and work to reduce the opportunity for discrimination to occur in the first place.

Economic Pressure

In today’s labor market, the demand for labor is outpacing supply and is expected to do so for years to come. This means that companies are facing a growing shortage of workers and need to find new ways to access available talent through strategies such as widening their applicant pools and removing barriers to employment. Discriminatory hiring practices disadvantage minorities who disproportionately come from non-traditional backgrounds and represent a huge segment of the American workforce⁸. These individuals are often overlooked with today’s traditional recruitment and hiring methods. Without tapping into this wider talent market by running more inclusive practices, we run the risk of understaffed organizations that can’t optimally function and suffer from costly business outcomes.

To survive this talent shortage, a viable path forward involves redesigning our selection systems to access historically underrepresented groups with non-traditional backgrounds by ensuring our practices are inclusive and non-discriminatory. Skills-based hiring, for example, is one inclusive practice that is beginning to gain traction. Early adopters of skills-based hiring are not only benefiting from more diverse talent pools and are 107% more likely to effectively place talent, they are also making leaps of progress in a variety of other meaningful ways⁹:

1. 98% more likely to retain high performers
2. 98% more likely to have a reputation as a great place to grow and develop
3. 52% more likely to innovate
4. 49% more likely to improve processes to maximize efficiency
5. 79% more likely to have a positive workforce experience
6. 47% more likely to have an inclusive environment

As organizational leaders and HR professionals, the responsibility of transforming our existing practices to combat bias and discrimination lies largely within our hands. A constructive place to start is understanding and the factors that are in our control that are known to mitigate risk and discrimination and implementing them through education, advocacy, and responsibly designed technology.

Structured Interviewing

Structured interviewing is a collection of practices that is beginning to gain traction in the hiring realm. It generally emphasizes two related strategies: hiring candidates based on merit and standardizing the hiring process with practices that limit idiosyncratic bias in decision-making. In addition to helping organizations hire quality talent due to its ability to predict job performance better than any other hiring method, structured interviews also help organizations meet legal requirements related to employee selection because of their effects on reducing bias and discrimination.

KEY FINDINGS ON STRUCTURED INTERVIEWS:

1. Structured interviewing elicits the smallest subgroup differences in hiring decisions, proving to be the most effective hiring practice for reducing discrimination¹⁰.
2. Among a group of organizations that went to trial involving discrimination, those using structured interviews were 3X less likely to be ruled as discriminatory relative to those using unstructured interviews¹¹.
3. Structured interviewing reduces bias and increases accuracy in hiring decisions by 33%¹².

Hire on Merit

Hiring candidates based on merit involves adopting a skills-based approach to hiring. Establishing clear and objective criteria that focuses on the skills candidates actually need to perform effectively has two effects on mitigating discrimination. First, it increases the diversity of your applicant pool by as much as 24% which increases the likelihood that the successful candidate will belong to an underrepresented group¹³. Second, it emphasizes relying only on job-relevant criteria when hiring managers are making selection decisions. Not only is this a recommended best practice from the EEOC to reduce discrimination, but when coupled with other structured interviewing practices it reduces the influence of hiring bias 33%¹⁴.

To implement skills-based hiring, start by reviewing and redesigning your job descriptions to highlight only the skills most necessary for the role. Then, select standardized questions to assess each of those skills, ask the same questions to all candidates, and evaluate candidates’ proficiency on those skills by scoring responses to your questions. Compare candidates based on their skill scores to create a fairer, more objective assessment, and select the highest performing candidate. Collectively, these practices shift hiring managers’ attention away from extraneous factors, such as perceptions of similarity or which college the candidate graduated from, and towards objectively relevant information. The result is fairer, more accurate hiring decisions that meet legal guidelines for inclusive and non-discriminatory hiring.

Standardize Processes

To reap the full benefits of structured interviews, build a diverse hiring team of multiple stakeholders for every requisition to bring a range of different viewpoints to the table when evaluating candidates. Ensure the hiring team is aligned on the necessary criteria required for the role, have at least two interviewers assess each criteria, and average those evaluations to minimize the influence of one person’s biases on the overall decision.

The importance of documenting and grounding your hiring decisions in evidence cannot be stressed enough. Data and facts are your allies here. Use skills-based scorecards with numeric rating systems, and compare each candidate to the criteria you defined at the outset to ensure the evaluations of one candidate are not anchored in those of another. When it comes to final decision-making, use those scorecards to guide your decision. If you carefully define your job criteria upfront, the candidate with the highest overall score is best for the job.

Additional structured interview practices that limit bias and discrimination include:

1. Refrain from discussing each candidate until the scorecards have been completed to prevent opinions and observations from being swayed by others
2. Score candidates on each question in real-time (during the interview) or immediately after if you have a transcript of the conversation to ensure your assessments are not contaminated by irrelevant information such as gut feelings about the candidate
3. In addition to behavioral interview questions, ask situational questions to give candidates from non-traditional backgrounds an opportunity to showcase their skills - these archetypes are also best at predicting on-the-job performance

By hiring on merit and following standardized, bias-prevention practices, you will end up with excellent documentation that justifies the rationales for your hiring decisions. In the event that your interview process is challenged, taking the time to follow these practices that are in your control will go a long way towards minimizing your risk and helping you prevail.

Candidate Information

HR professionals go to great lengths coaching their hiring teams to avoid asking certain questions that can introduce bias and lead to discrimination in hiring. This practice follows guidelines put forth by the EEOC that encourages us to do everything in our control to prevent collecting information about a candidate’s membership in a protected group¹⁵. In addition to avoiding explicitly asking candidates about their personal characteristics, HR professionals can also coach hiring teams to minimize rapport building, especially at early stages of the interview process. One approach is to ask a predefined set of introductory and icebreaker questions that help to build trust and make the candidate feel comfortable without covering topics that might reveal information about a candidate’s age, sexual orientation, or religious affiliation, for example. Interestingly, research shows that limiting rapport building can also improve the accuracy of information you obtain in interviews as it reduces the chances candidates will respond to your questions in socially desirable ways¹⁶. Most importantly though, by avoiding certain questions and structuring rapport building your organization can mitigate risk by ensuring protected characteristics are not used as the basis for hiring decisions.

Although we can control whether and how we coach best practices around collecting candidate information, the challenge with interviews is that they are conversations between humans. This means that the information we collect from candidates is not entirely in our control. Sometimes, a candidate freely offers information about their protected characteristics. In the event that we do end up with identifying information, what matters is that we can control what we do with that information. In these cases, we should take extra precautions to assess candidates on legitimate factors and ensure decisions are well-documented and grounded in evidence.

Monitoring the information we collect in interviews, whether explicitly asked by interviewers or voluntarily offered by candidates, poses a unique challenge for HR professionals because interview conversations are often not documented verbatim. The data we have access to from these conversations are reduced to notes taken and shared by members of the hiring team which are often of questionable quality and can contain biased opinions. The problem with this lack of documentation is that organizations are unable to identify whether interviewers are adhering to the practices HR is coaching them on, limiting any opportunities for improvement or guidance on what to do if unwanted information is revealed.

As the famous Peter Drucker saying goes, “what gets measured gets managed.” In this vein, one emerging solution organizations are beginning to adopt is recording and transcribing interviews. Among a multitude of learning opportunities, this data provides more control to HR to mitigate risk of discriminatory hiring. HR can identify whether protected information is collected and then take extra precautions to ensure hiring decisions are job-related and well-documented. They can also identify whether certain interviewers consistently use problematic lines of question and take action accordingly. Doing this manually does impose an additional burden for HR, but the good news is that newly emerging HR tools are automating this entire practice. If you choose the route of automation, ensure you do your due diligence in selecting a responsibly and ethically designed technology that follows the highest data privacy standards (more on this below).

Ultimately, when it comes to collecting candidate information not only should you  follow EEOC guidelines on what to avoid asking candidates, you should also have a mechanism to determine the extent to which this is happening (if at all) and have practices in place for what to do in the event information is collected. Transcribing interviews and using only job-relevant criteria to document and justify hiring decisions are both tactics in your control that will help you mitigate risk and discrimination in this component of selection.

Choosing Responsibly Designed Technology

Technology will not eliminate risks and discrimination entirely, but responsibly designed technology can be effective in reducing bias and creating a more level playing field for candidates. One emerging technology segment that is making advancements in this area is interview intelligence, and HR leaders are presented with an opportunity to choose solutions that help to mitigate risk and to pass over those that do not. A responsibly-designed interview intelligence platform that mitigates risk should be informed by behavioral science principles and should focus on the following goals:

1. Helping hiring managers focus on objectively relevant skills that predict success on the job.
2. Augmenting the quality and documentation of data to drive evidence-based hiring decisions.
3. Auditing practices for adverse impact on candidates and help revise them to make improvements as necessary.

To achieve these goals effectively, a central feature in many of these tools is recording and transcribing interviews. However, not all recording tools are created equal. In addition to selecting a tool that achieves the three goals stated above, tools that offer recording and transcription should comply with data protection laws, be SOC compliant, and use high-accuracy transcription. If they offer AI features, those features should be used to assist hiring managers in making decisions, not to make selection decisions for them.

USEFUL FRAMEWORK FOR VETTING TECHNOLOGIES:

Hireguide is an interview intelligence platform informed by decades of behavioral science research that helps companies minimize risks and discrimination in hiring. Its features help companies reengineer their interview process by putting guardrails around bias and increasing the accuracy of human decisions. The specific method that underpins Hireguide’s technology is structured interviewing which has been established as the best practice for valid, reliable, and legally defensible selection¹⁷. It also helps companies achieve goals for improving diversity, equity and inclusion¹⁸.

Learn about specific legislation governing technology and employment and how it applies to Hireguide here

Value Proposition

Hireguide exists to reduce systemic inequalities in employment and widen access to economic opportunity by debiasing interviews. Each of our product features have been thoughtfully designed to achieve this goal. By focusing on skills, we help our customers hire based on merit instead of background, pedigree, and likeability. By designing workflow features based on evidence-based practices, we help our customers easily adopt structured interviews and scale them across their organizations. The outcome is mutually beneficial to companies and candidates. Companies benefit by hiring the best candidates for their role with valid and legally defensible practices, and candidates benefit from wider access to opportunities and fairer interview experiences.

At Hireguide, we put our money where our mouth is. Hireguide is a certified B Corporation committed to creating positive social impact through equitable interviews. We’re part of a global community of businesses working collectively for economic systems change, and we hold ourselves accountable to continuously improving to meet rising standards for social and environmental performance.

Integrity of Technology Infrastructure

At Hireguide, maintaining the highest level of integrity in our software and the supporting services is mission critical. We are SOC 2 certified and work diligently to select the most accurate, reliable, and protected services to build a world-class interview management platform. Deepgram and Amazon Web Services, for example, are two industry leading technologies that make up Hireguide’s tech stack.

Deepgram: Deepgram is our transcription speech-to-text software. Accuracy in speech-to-text is essential for interviews where transcripts involving candidates should all be highly accurate despites differences in accents, dialects, genders, background noises, and neurodiversity. Deepgram is SOC 2 compliant and leads the industry with a 22% lower word error rate and the most accurate models in the market across use case categories¹⁹.

Note: A lower error rate represents higher accuracy in transcription

20

Amazon Web Services (AWS): AWS is our data storage solution which leads the industry for its strong focus on security and compliance. It provides a wide range of tools to protect client data and complies with industry standards including GDPR, HIPPA, and SOC 2. They also assure 99.9999999999% data durability and reliability to secure and protect client’s data against loss²¹.

Solution Mitigates Risk: Hireguide’s evidence-based platform

The core Hireguide product is a structured interview workflow consisting of multiple features that collectively help companies hire on merit and standardize processes to reduce bias from decisions.

How does it work?

AI Philosophy

At Hireguide, we believe AI is a powerful co-pilot for helping humans make better and less-biased decisions, we do not believe AI should make decisions for them. Hireguide harnesses AI to train interviewers and help organizations optimize their practices. Unlike some other technologies in the market, we also do not plan to leverage AI to summarize candidates transcription into shorter, more digestible notes. Currently, state of the art language models are still known to be biased. For example, cautioned explicitly in the OpenAI system card for GPT-4, the risk of harming at-risk candidates by summarization is too high. Our firm stance is that the choice to hire someone is a decision to be made by a human, not a machine.

Alycia Damp is Hireguide’s Head of Applied Behavioral Science. She has a Master’s Degree in Industrial/Organizational Psychology and a PhD in Industrial Relations and Human Resources. She has spent the better part of her career studying and working in the field of recruitment and selection, including a former role where she worked at Defence Research and Development Canada conducting research on and validating selection programs and assessment centers for the Canadian Military. She has also designed and taught multiple undergraduate courses on Recruitment and Selection at the University of Toronto. Today she advises Hireguide’s product team on interviewing best practices and consults with Hireguide’s customers to help them adopt evidence-based practices that reduce bias and increase accuracy in their hiring decisions.

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