How blind scoring of Video Interviews improved hiring diversity by 20%
The biggest issue with using Video Interviews is the possibility for human biases to creep into hiring decisions.
As soon as you require a human to evaluate another human, the unconscious signals that we humans naturally form biases around, appear.
However, the way you design the interviews and the scoring process can minimize the possibility of bias, contributing to an improvement in hiring diversity.
Video Interviews should always be used as a secondary step in hiring
The first step should always be blind, maximizing inclusion and removing the possibility of bias. Using Smart Chat to evaluate candidates out of the gate is the best way to ensure that you’re shortlisting candidates only based on role fit and no other factor.
The other considerations for using Video Interviews as a secondary step are:
- Candidate Experience – video can be intimidating, and time-consuming as a first introduction. By introducing video to shortlisted candidates only, who are already engaged in the hiring process, you’ll maximize completion and satisfaction rates.
- Efficiency – reviewing video interviews takes time. By only video interviewing the top candidates, you minimize the time impact on hiring teams.
Sapia.ai Customers that use our Video Interview capability use it as the second step after a blind Chat Interview. Candidates are automatically shortlisted from the Chat Interview based on only their written responses, maximizing the diversity of the shortlist. Those shortlisted automatically progress to a Video Interview, which is also chat-based, untimed, and generally designed to enhance candidate comfort.
How the design of a Video Interview scoring experience can maximize hiring diversity
When designing our hiring team experience in reviewing and rating video interviews, we wanted to make sure that the possibilities of bias were minimized.
Last year we introduced two new features to our Video Reviews.
- Panel reviews – enabling more than one assessor to rate a candidate’s video interview responses; and
- Blind scoring – keeping other assessor’s ratings hidden from reviewers.
We hypothesized that hiding other assessors’ ratings from hiring managers would reduce the possibility of conformity bias, encouraging assessors to rate candidates solely based on their perspective and not be influenced by others’ opinions.
The results are in, and we’re over the moon to see that our hunch was correct. The below details outcomes from a Sapia.ai customer using Chat and Video Interviews to hire customer service representatives.
On the introduction of the panel review feature, there was a sharp increase of 41% in video interviews with more than one assessor rating from one month to the next.
When comparing diversity data between applied, AI-shortlisted, and hired pools, the customer saw a 20.87% improvement in diversity distribution in terms of ethnicity in the same period.
These outcomes demonstrate how a human-centered approach to design can result in real, beneficial outcomes for organizations, and the people they’re hiring.
For more information on how Video Interviews with Sapia.ai work, check out this guide to Responsible Video Interviewing.
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