Inclusive Technical Hiring: Higher Innovation And Creativity in the Workplace

Group of diverse applicants waiting for their turn to be interviewed for technical position.

Diversity is a valuable asset in any organization. Having various backgrounds and perspectives at work can encourage innovative thinking, better decision-making, and a more positive work environment. To achieve greater diversity, you must start with inclusive hiring. Understanding how to plan an interview, encourage fairness in the hiring process, and ensure thoroughness is the best way to have quick inclusive hiring while still focusing on each candidate's potential. This blog will look at some steps to encourage a more diverse hiring process.

How To: Encourage Inclusive Hiring 

When it comes to inclusive technical hiring, the key is to ensure that the process is fair and unbiased. This means recognizing and valuing different origins and perspectives and reaching out to a diverse range of candidates. Your recruitment team can do this by being neutral during the interview process and considering each candidate on their individual merits. By ensuring that your interview includes detailed planning, fairness, and thoroughness, your recruitment team can ensure that they are making decisions for your company that reflects a diverse workplace with the most talented employees.

Detailed Planning

Planning for inclusive hiring is a lot easier said than done. Inclusive hiring requires unbiased opinions and tentative patience. When a talent pool is so diverse, it’s not easy to compare. That is why the planning process is so important. Before going into the interview, confirm that your recruiting team understands these key pillars:

  • Understand the skill gaps in the currently employed team.
  • Understand that each candidate will have strengths and weaknesses.
  • Understand that your ‘ideal’ candidate might not exist, so be realistic.
  • Understand your own bias’ and set them aside before the assessment.

To truly plan for each candidate's interview, the first step is to screen their resumes. Unfortunately, time is of the essence in interviewing, especially for technical roles. Therefore, the best option is to use artificial intelligence (AI) resume screening. AI can review resumes as candidates submit them in a fraction of the time it would take a human. The AI can determine the candidate's hard, technical, and soft skills and save the information to candidate profiles for future reference. Understanding which skills each candidate possesses will lead to more thorough questioning. 

If a candidate shows a lot of confidence in themselves, ask about a scenario in which they didn’t have confidence in their work. What did they do? What did they learn from the experience? How would they have done it differently if they could redo it?

Although it’s good to ask different questions during the personality interview, it’s important to ask the same technical questions. Personalities will always be different. Allow candidates to showcase their personalities but confirm the same technical questions promote fairness when comparing baseline knowledge. Therefore, before writing up the technical interview, your recruitment team should interview the current employees to understand where there is a gap in skill sets. Understanding your team's weaknesses will allow you to customize questions assessing those specific skills. After all, it’s important for technical teams to have an overall knowledge covering all bases in case an issue involves a specifically needed expertise. This method will also lower employee turnover rates

Encouraging Fairness

Fairness is the other aspect of inclusive hiring that helps recruitment teams keep an unbiased approach. The most frustrating thing for a candidate is when they feel as though they are unable to represent their potential or unable to showcase their skill sets fairly. It’s also a loss for the company if they cannot impartially assess potential candidates. After all, that candidate might be a better fit than the one they hire. 

To promote inclusive hiring practices with fairness, the recruiting team should ensure each candidate receives the same platforms for their assessment. Hold the live-coding interview over a virtual conference platform specifically built for interviewing engineers and include the same integrated development environment (IDE) to each candidate. If each candidate used their own IDE, this could give some of them an advantage over other candidates because of the extra features available to some, but not others. Virtual whiteboards may also help candidates visually represent their thought processes to the interviewer, so hiring teams should provide each candidate with one. 

Ensuring Thoroughness

Inclusive hiring also encourages thoroughness. It’s a common misconception that a thorough interview takes a lot of time. Fortunately, data-driven recruiting technology and techniques can shorten the time necessary to assess a candidate without cutting corners. 

Giving all the candidates a take-home test on a virtual platform that supports code snippets and various questions, like recorded answers, can encourage a vast overview of the candidate's knowledge. If the take-home test questions were all the same style, it would limit the candidate's ability to showcase their skill sets, which, by proxy, could affect the hiring process results. 

During the take-home test, automatic grading and proctoring will promote speed and thoroughness. Additionally, when giving a take-home test without proctoring or identity verification, there's a possibility of submitting fraudulent answers or plagiarism. Automatic grading from artificial intelligence helps recruitment managers quickly run through scores without needing to manually delegate an individual to grade the assessments. 

Analytics and insights can also help encourage thoroughness with inclusive hiring practices. 

Get Inclusive Hiring With Filtered

When utilizing inclusive hiring practices, ensure detailed planning, encourage fairness, and guarantee thoroughness. Data-driven recruiting technology and practices promote these while maintaining a speedy process. 

Filtered is a leader in skills-based hiring. Our end-to-end technical hiring platform enables you to spend time reviewing only the most qualified candidates, putting skills and aptitude at the forefront of your decisions. We’ll help you automate hiring while applying objective, data-driven techniques to consistently and confidently select the right candidates. To get started, contact our team today or register for a FREE demo.