If your company claims to value diversity and inclusion, you might consider whether that’s what job candidates experience with your interview panel. Especially in this job market, job recruits are evaluating your company as closely as you’re evaluating them.
The employee experience begins with the hiring experience, so it’s worth giving some thought to the people job candidates will encounter through the interview process.
Here are three factors to consider for to help diversify your interview panels:
1. Age and experience
Interview panels with people from multiple generations will be able to evaluate talent from a wider variety of perspectives. With a hiring team that has a diversity of experience, there’s also a chance for your younger high performers to find those who can mirror their own trajectories. Less-senior employees will have more detailed hands-on knowledge of the requirements for less-senior roles, so they may have a better understanding of the technical requirements of a specific job. Employees who have been in the industry longer may be better suited to evaluate the soft skills a prospect brings to the table.
2. Racial diversity
Adding employees of different ethnicities can help diversify your interview panels and avoid unconscious biases. Interviewers with a variety of backgrounds may pick up on interviewee characteristics that don’t align with an inclusive company culture.
Importantly, when you include people of different racial backgrounds in your interview panel, it shows prospective employees of those same groups that they can have succeed in your company. It gives them assurance that this is a safe place that will help them grow and excel. Creating an environment with inclusive communications comes from the employee culture — which a diversified hiring experience bolsters.
3. Social styles
Outgoing and extraverted people often perform better in person-to-person interactions than their introverted peers, even when social tendencies don’t impact how someone will perform on the job.
You can counteract this inherent advantage for extraverts, and get a better evaluation of talent, with social situations that are more closely related to the types of work your prospective employee will be doing. If your hiring process involves multiple rounds of interviews, introducing panels of different sizes, and that include introverts as well as extroverts, will give prospects multiple chances to shine.
With the ongoing talent crisis, it’s more important than ever to give job candidates the best possible impression of the culture they’d experience working at your company. A diversified interview panel can help reflect an employer brand that values inclusivity.
Need to strengthen your employer brand to recruit and retain talent? Tribe can help.
