The Tengai blog

Increase quality of hire with an unbiased interview

Written by Debora Hermele | October 17, 2022

At its core, recruitment is about finding the best-suited candidate for the role at hand. But in high volume recruitments, with short deadlines, it becomes more challenging and this can affect the quality of hire. By having an unbiased interview, recruiters get a framework for objectively identifying competency and skill. Collecting the "right" candidate data is not only fair to applicants but will also create a more efficient and reliable process. In this blog article, we explore how you can create an unbiased interview with the help of AI technology and why you should do it.

 

What is an unbiased interview? 

An unbiased interview is an interview focused on identifying and selecting future colleagues based on their skills and competencies. Without taking background or appearance into consideration. Having an unbiased interview gives recruiters a framework to assess candidates in a fair and consistent way. By not allowing unconscious biases to affect the hiring decision you can increase the quality of hire and become more efficient at the same time.

How can bias affect you during the job interview? 

Bias happens when you form an opinion about candidates based solely on subjective impressions. Like when you prefer one candidate over another simply because the first one seems like someone you’d easily hang out with outside of work. If you, for example, find out that you share the same hometown during the job interview, it could influence your opinion more than you think. In short, unconscious bias influences your decision – whether positively or negatively – using criteria irrelevant to the job.

Common biases:

  • Similarity bias
  • Confirmation bias
  • Conformity bias
  • Beauty bias

Read more about unconscious biases that can affect the job interview.

How to create an unbiased interview 

To be able to create measurable data from your process, you need to focus on the right areas for data collection and decide on the right competence for the specific role you’re recruiting for. A common misconception is that competence consists only of theoretical or practical knowledge. The optimal combination for defining competence is not only to look for specific knowledge and experience but also personality traits, aptitude, and motivation. A candidate's competencies should always be related to a specific task or situation. The different areas might therefore vary in importance depending on what role you’re recruiting for, meaning, one candidate might be very competent for one role, but not for another.

During an unbiased interview, you avoid asking questions unrelated to the necessary competence for the role or using gender-based language and terms, or industry jargon. 

Read more about how to create an unbiased recruitment process.

How AI can create a more objective interview

There are many benefits for companies who understand how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be used to complement everyday work. The most obvious gain is getting access to structured data that measure soft skills and personality traits. Not only will this increase hiring outcomes. But it will also help recruiting teams push bias further down the recruitment funnel. AI can gather large amounts of data to assist recruiters in comparing applications. Humans are… human! It is difficult for a human interviewer to assess all candidates without bias or preconceived ideas about whether a candidate will fit into an organization.

AI is objective so any analysis will be scientifically factual. It can also deal with volumes of work much more quickly. In an industry where speed is key to hiring the best talent, it makes sense for organizations to become early adopters of the technology as AI can reduce the time-to-hire by many days.

Related: The role of AI in the recruitment process.

 

Tengai's AI interview creates a more unbiased process

Today, several software can help assess blind resumes. In addition to chatbots that can be used to screen applicants. But until now, there haven’t been any HR-tech tools, that could take away bias from the interview. So we developed Tengai, an innovative screening meeting that combines conversational AI and an unbiased recruitment methodology. To ensure that Tengais' framework is 100% unbiased, we asked psychometric experts to test the interview and validate the assessment. The results show that Tengai can conduct objective interviews, assess work performance, and contribute to a more unbiased interview process.

Book a demo to learn more about how Tengai can help to create a more unbiased interview process.


Strengthen your employer brand and increase the quality of hire

As you might have surmised, employer brand is the perception your company has in people’s minds. It’s a competitive advantage, and it affects everything from recruiting to retention and customer satisfaction. You can think of employer branding as a long-term strategy that helps you stand out from the competition.

In today’s market, job-seekers demand a lot of things from the hiring process, and one thing in particular: equal opportunity. So when applicants experience an unfair interview, even if it was not the recruiters' intention, they will have a negative candidate experience. The cost of having a bad candidate experience is the same as a bad experience for a customer. Which is that people talk...

Having an unbiased interview will make candidates feel respected and this will strengthen your relationship with applicants who aren't offered the job. This will contribute to your reputation as an employer and attract quality candidates for future recruitment. 

Learn about more benefits of having an unbiased process.