More often than not, the hiring process comes down to the emotions or feelings that the recruiter has during the interview process. For example, you may hire an applicant because they “feel right” for the role or share characteristics with someone else who performed the same task successfully.
As per research by the Signium Executive Search & Leadership Consultancy Firm, 96% of respondents said that intuition is a “very important” skill in hiring and promoting staff. This gut feeling or intuition is a cumulation of past experiences, cultural outlooks, and traits. Unfortunately, while our instincts can help us make quick decisions about individuals, they also have a negative impact- they result in unconscious bias.
A lack of a clear recruitment strategy makes hiring subjective and intuitive, e.g., an interviewer may reject a candidate based on a lack of cultural similarity or a bias against their hometown. Tammy Harper, Chief Human Resources Officer at CAI, warns that “hiring on intuition alone can be dangerous,” and it is essential to determine the “why” that supports your stance.
This article will highlight the common problems in the hiring process, how skill-based interviews can tackle these issues and how you can use FloCareer to improve your hiring model and create a diverse and inclusive workforce.
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What are the most common problems in the hiring process?
A bad hire hurts a company in many ways- 33% more time wasted, 27% decrease in staff productivity and morale, and 22% increased stress on the supervisor. Without a structured recruitment model, your hiring efforts can be negatively impacted by the following factors:
Lack of attention span
Since hiring managers often have to go through stacks of CVs quickly, they tend to spend little time reading each application: on average, recruiters look at a resume for only six to seven seconds. Moreover, our declining attention span- which has decreased from 12 seconds to eight seconds in the past two decades- makes it difficult for recruiters to go through resumes in detail and evaluate each candidate thoroughly.
Technology-driven solutions such as FloCareer’s JD to CV Match can help mitigate this problem by shortlisting resumes based on the job description and providing % match scores. This use of AI makes screening CVs more accurate and efficient.
Inherent Bias
In recruiting specifically, bias often occurs as a preference for one applicant or another because of culture fit. Emily Tetto, VP of Talent & Culture at Acceleration Partners, says you should “never, ever, ever trust your gut” when hiring for culture fit” as “your gut guides you to hire people who are similar to you, which can lead to a homogeneous culture.”
Hiring bias can occur as discrimination based on many factors, including race, age, gender, sexual identity, and disability status. Despite corporations' diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts, racial bias is still prevalent in America: research by Duke University found that black women with natural hairstyles like afros or braids are less likely to land a job interview. The researcher behind this study, Ashleigh Shelby Rosette, explained how this bias is rooted in a Western standard of beauty that considers White women and straightened hair as more professional, which influences recruiters.
Hiring bias can express itself in many forms, such as comparison, status-quo, anchor, and affinity bias. Regardless of the type of bias, it can negatively impact the diversity of your workforce and make your firm less inclusive. When combined with the low attention span of hiring managers, inherent bias can increase the odds of you making a bad hire.
However, using a structured recruitment model with skill-based interviews is a good practice for hiring more suitable candidates and reducing discrimination in the workplace.
What are skill-based unbiased interviews?
A traditional interview is a casual conversation with no pre-determined question flow. While it may be an enjoyable chat for the interviewer and interviewee, it scores lower on validity than a structured interview.
A structured interview is a systematic method of interviewing where a pre-determined set of questions is asked in a fixed order. The questions asked can be technical or skill-based and often present applicants with job-based scenarios. The responses are scored using a pre-set scale and allow candidates to be compared objectively, especially when there are multiple interviewers involved in the process. By evaluating all candidates with the same rubric and gauging them on their skills alone, structured interviews reduce bias and improve hiring.
FloCareer’s live interviewing platform provides you a framework to carry out structured interviews and a question bank of over 50,000 crowd-sourced questions, allowing you to create a unique assessment for the specific position. The platform also allows you to set up assignments for specialized roles such as those involving coding. Besides this we also have over 3,000+ freelancer interviewers who have conducted 300,000+ structured interviews, allowing our clients to find the best fit for their team.
Video-based interviews come with many advantages. Apart from improving efficiency and reducing inherent bias, they also improve the candidate experience since they can appear for the interview from anywhere and through any device. This flexibility reduces the barrier to entry and logistical issues.
Better hiring for a diverse & efficient workforce
As the global demand for skilled talent increases, companies need to constantly improve their recruitment efforts and use the tools available to reduce bias and inefficiencies in the hiring process.
Video recruiting is the future of hiring and 89% of human resource managers now use this method. While the move to virtual interviewing resulted from the pandemic, it has proven effective: HR professionals who rated their firm’s workforce as above average or top-notch were 15% more likely to use video-based interviewing systems than their counterparts.
FloCareer’s interview as a service provides results quickly- a case study found that outsourcing the first round of interviews to FloCareer made the process five times faster. Moreover, the 3000+ FloCareer experts are trained to assess interviewees on technical and soft skills, thus shortlisting the most suitable candidates for your company. Don’t wait, sign up for a demo today!
