If you have never considered evaluating job candidates as a group (rather than one at a time), read this article published by the Harvard Business School: Better by the
Bunch: Evaluating Job Candidates in Groups.
The first paragraph says it all: "New research suggests that organizations
wishing to avoid gender stereotyping in the hiring or promotion process-and
employ the most productive person instead—should evaluate job candidates as a
group, rather than one at a time."
The article
summarizes a report resulting from the collaboration between the Harvard Business
School and the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS): When Performance Trumps Gender Bias: Joint versus Separate Evaluation. HKS Professor Iris Bohnet, doctoral
student Alexandra van Geen, and HBS Professor Max H. Bazerman coauthored the document. The
report is supported by a thorough scientific analysis whose parameters have
been carefully thought-out.
So
now, how can you leverage this? By simply using TalentCircles. With TalentCircles, you can, of course,
perform one-on-one interviews with candidates, record these interviews, take
notes and send the link to hiring managers, who in turn will be able to give
you immediate feedback. What you can also do just as easily is to perform group
video evaluation. Here is how you proceed:
1) You
send an invitation to members of your TalentCircles
network, a subset of this network (that we call "circle"), or to
people who have not yet joined your network. You can invite up to 20 candidates
for a group video live (inviting more people could be impractical — so you may
want to switch to our webinar mode).
2) Once
the candidates are in the video booths, they can interact via video and also
send text remarks. Meanwhile, the recruiter can write notes on what he/she
sees.
Candidates in the video both
3) As the
conversation unfolds, the recruiter can also check the participants' live
profiles in the network and
include work history, education, and any other information they have added.
Checking profile information
4) During
the conversation, participants can discuss documents that have been
communicated to the candidates, as well as documents that are presented in
real-time to the participants for instant discovery and analysis.
Discussing a document with the candidates
5) The entire conversation can be recorded and sent to a hiring manager for evaluation.
Joint
evaluation is a powerful tool: it encourages judgments based on people’s
real-time performance and attitude — both how they answer questions and how
they behave within a group. Incidentally, it's also a very cost-effective way
to evaluate lots of people at once! Of course, after your group interview is
done, you can choose to conduct thorough one-on-one video
interviews!
