Re:PoC or GTFO 15 [pdf]
by sillysaurus3 on Monday June 19, 2017 @12:25PM
(#14588129)
What are some ways to counter this effect?
Be intimately familiar with, and fully accepting of and comfortable with, every culture that applicants may potentially come from.
Or, explicitly require / assume that all applicants be fully familiar with your culture.
Or, define an industry standard artificial culture - whether implicit or explicit - and require everyone on both sides to be familiar with it. This could include things like suits and golf for execs, hoodies and beer for techies, social justice activism for webdevs, etc...
I'm hardly an expert, though I'd probably suggest focusing on avoiding the four pitfalls I mentioned. Like any hard process, it involves working hard to achieve gradual improvement, learning from others where appropriate.
However, I can guarantee that resting on your laurels and calling your process "unbiased" from the start won't work.
There are lots of ways any test which (ostensibly) aims to test raw ability can be very biased indeed. A lecturer of mine once told a story about a horrible experience he had during an exam trying to whisper an explanation of the rules of Checkers to a student who was from a country where the game was rarely played - the possibility hadn't even crossed his mind.
Declaring the interview style you use as "unbiased" from the start seems like a great way to get complacent and have large amounts of bias creep in unnoticed.