Designing a fair and equitable hiring process isn’t just the right thing to do—it’s also a strategic move to build a stronger, more effective team. At vChief, we recently undertook a comprehensive effort to standardize our job descriptions, interview process, and candidate review practices to ensure equity at every step. This initiative wasn’t just about aligning with our values—it also made our hiring process more consistent and effective.
As an organization that has hired more than 500 candidates into our talent pool since 2016, we’ve gained significant expertise in evaluating talent and identifying practices that truly work. In this article, we’ll share a five-step guide to improving your hiring process through an equity lens, drawing from both our experience and best practices in the field.
Step 1: Edit Your Job Descriptions
A job description is often the first interaction a potential candidate has with your brand, making it an important starting point for reviewing your hiring practices.
Review Descriptions for Accuracy
It’s important to ensure the description accurately reflects both the responsibilities and skills required to succeed in the role. Inaccurate or outdated job descriptions can lead to two major issues: they may deter qualified candidates who misunderstand the role, or they may attract candidates who ultimately aren’t a good fit, increasing the risk of early turnover. Regularly revisiting and updating job descriptions helps ensure they remain relevant and effective in attracting the right talent.
The other thing that’s a must for equitable job descriptions? Publishing the compensation rate. Salary transparency is not only a legal requirement in some U.S. states, it’s also a smart practice that saves everyone time. Without it, you could spend hours screening and interviewing a candidate only to have them turn down the role in the end because the pay was wildly below their expectations. We also don’t recommend using an overly broad pay range in order to maximize your leeway in negotiations, as this practice can exacerbate pay gaps for marginalized groups.
Revise Descriptions to Be Inclusive
Job descriptions can also include terms that may be off-putting to certain groups. To create more inclusive job descriptions, be on the lookout for gender coding—words, phrases, or traits that have historically been associated with either the male or female gender. For example, describing a software developer as a hacker may discourage women from applying. Consider using a generative AI tool like ChatGPT to complement your own evaluation. Here’s a sample prompt: “Can you evaluate the following job description and let me know if there are any gender-coded words in it that I should remove to make the description more inclusive?”
Also, watch out for superfluous requirements that could prevent otherwise qualified candidates from applying. Many job descriptions ask for candidates to have proficiency in skills that could be easily taught, or require credentials that have little impact on one’s ability to do the job. For example, at vChief, we determined that a bachelor’s degree wasn’t necessary for our fractional chief of staff positions if a candidate had adequate job experience, so we removed it from the job requirements.
Step 2: Expand the Reach of Your Recruitment Process
If your current team lacks representation from certain demographics, or you notice that your candidate pool is less diverse than you’d like, it’s time to evaluate where and how you’re advertising your job openings.
Advertise the Job on Targeted Networks and Job Boards
To attract candidates from socially marginalized groups, share your job postings on job boards and within professional networks that serve those communities. For example, organizations like Women in Technology or the National Society of Black Engineers offer targeted opportunities to connect with skilled professionals. But simply posting your job isn’t enough. To build trust with these communities, you need to show that you’re invested in their success. Consider becoming a member of the network, sponsoring an event, or even offering educational opportunities, like webinars, that align with their mission. These actions demonstrate that you live by your values and are intentional about fostering an inclusive work environment.
Make Your Application Accessible and Inclusive
It’s not just about where you post the job—it’s also about how you design your application process. If it’s possible to offer choices within the application, such as allowing a video response instead of a written one, you may be able to attract a more diverse pool of applicants.
Additionally, your careers page should follow ADA best practices, offering features like screen reader compatibility, captioned videos, and high-contrast text to be accessible to candidates with disabilities.
Step 3: Standardize Your Interviews
To create a level playing field where each candidate has an equal opportunity to prove themselves capable of succeeding in the role, it helps to standardize as many aspects of your interview process as possible.
Write an Interview Script
At vChief, we use the application review process to confirm that a candidate has the necessary experience and credentials, so our interview is all about evaluating their competencies. To create a more equitable interview process, we defined what excellence looks like in each competency we evaluate. From there, we created a standardized interview script for each position. This helps us evaluate someone who is a sales expert in the same way we’d evaluate someone who is an expert in human resources.
Prep Candidates Thoroughly and Equally
The interview is often the most stressful part of applying for a new job, but you can improve the candidate experience by providing clear expectations. Let job seekers know how many interviews to expect, the format (group or solo), and if possible, the actual questions you’ll ask. It’s also a good practice to put team members with a variety of backgrounds and identities on the interview panel if you can.
We developed detailed candidate FAQs to provide as much transparency as possible about our interview process. We share all of our interview questions in advance because we’re not trying to evaluate someone’s ability to think of examples that demonstrate their work experience on the spot. That’s not a necessary skill to succeed as a vChief — but being able to articulate their experience in a compelling way to a potential client is, so we want to make sure they have adequate time to prepare their answers.
If you conduct interviews via video, consider sharing your expectations for the environment the candidate will take the interview in. Do they need to be stationary? Or is it OK for them to take the interview while walking or driving? Be mindful of setting expectations that create unnecessary barriers. If the candidate has kids at home playing in the same room, don’t let that be a problem on its face because it’s not “professional.” If it disrupts the interview in an objective, measurable way — maybe the candidate is flustered or you can’t hear their answers — ask to reschedule.
Step 4: Use a Rubric to Evaluate Candidates
Even if you’ve standardized your interview questions, unconscious bias can still sneak into your hiring process, especially during the evaluation phase. If hiring managers approve or reject candidates based on gut feel, they may let factors unrelated to the requirements of the job affect their decision-making, such as likeability or communication style.
To combat the different biases of each member of our hiring team, we use a standardized rubric to assess each candidate. During the interview, we gather evidence to back up our assessment of the candidate’s skills. After the interview, we have to justify our decisions with specific evidence related to each competency, and we don’t let other factors that aren’t named on the rubric influence our decision.
This process takes longer than relying on gut feel, but it’s well worth the investment. Thinking rigorously about the real skills and mindsets needed for the job will help you avoid early turnover and it will improve the overall fairness of your hiring process. Plus, using a rubric like this means you can provide specific, individualized feedback to candidates, rather than sending them a generic rejection letter, which further improves the candidate experience.
Step 5: Review Outcomes to Spot Additional Unconscious Biases
After implementing equitable hiring practices, it’s important to review your hiring outcomes periodically to see if candidates of all demographics are making it through your hiring process at proportionate rates. This can help you identify areas where unconscious biases are still impacting your hiring decisions.
To do this, it’s helpful to implement an applicant tracking system (ATS) such as BambooHR or Workday. We did this at vChief in order to add confidential questions about protected status to our applications. We can’t legally collect that info unless we can do so in an anonymized way, which requires an ATS.
This lets us look at our hiring trends as a whole and breakdown our metrics by individual hiring managers to spot potential areas for improvement.
Equitable Hiring is Good for Your Brand
Auditing your hiring processes with an equity lens takes effort, but it’s well worth it to attract the best candidates, build a more diverse team, and foster a positive workplace culture. Plus, investing in a thoughtful, human-focused process is good for your brand. We’ve had multiple people post on social media that the rejection email they got from our company was the best rejection email they’d ever gotten. That free publicity helps us reach even more candidates.
If you’re looking to cultivate a diverse workforce, vChief can help. Our talent pool represents a wide range of ethnicities and gender identities. More than 80 percent of our talent pool use feminine or gender-neutral pronouns and over 30 percent identify as a person of color.
We have HR executives with years of experience who can help you implement equitable hiring practices. Many of them have held full-time roles as DEI leaders. Schedule a free consultation today to learn how we can help you meet your equitable hiring goals.
