Greenhouse Inclusion
Background
Research has consistently shown that diverse teams lead to better business outcomes. However, humans have unconscious biases that impact the recruiting process and decreases the likelihood of hiring diverse teams as a result.
As humans we make connections and associations without realizing it. These mental shortcuts limit our perception and ability to make objective decisions. Without structure and active guidance, people default to hiring candidates who are most similar to themselves, which doesn’t always match up with who’s most qualified for the role.
Greenhouse is uniquely positioned to affect behavior change and ensure each piece of your hiring funnel is set up to support your team's ability to consistently make objective decisions.
My Role
To design, prototype and validate solutions.
The Team
Alex Powell (Product Manager), Joelle Emerson (CEO of Paradigm), Mike O’Neil (Software Engineer), Nitya Bhaskar (Product Marketing), Lucia Huang (QA), Alexa Lytle (UX Researcher), and guidance from our academic advisory board.
Goal
Create better diversity recruiting outcomes for customers, by bringing Paradigm’s research-backed D&I strategies to scale.
User Goals
Usability Research Findings
Reducing Unconscious Bias
Well-timed "nudges" and anonymization can significantly reduce bias by preventing our brains from quickly processing information and using mental shortcuts to evaluate candidates.
To ensure nudges were seen, without adding visual complexity to existing pages, these nudges only appear if you interacted with the relevant field, or shortly after a page loads, depending on the context. Modals were considered initially but felt disruptive.
Resume Highlights allows your organization to show or hide select pieces of information from resumes. By anonymizing this data, recruiters and interviewers make more objective decisions and reduce unconscious bias when reviewing resumes.
Throughout the design, we asked ourselves: What are the most essential information on a resume that recruiting ops can configure? How do we label anonymized fields on the resume in a clear way? Will interviewers on the hiring team wonder why certain information is hidden?
Evaluating candidates consistently
Identifying the "dealbreaker" attributes at the beginning of the process and then revisiting at the candidate roundup can significantly help your team make more structured decisions about who to hire and reduce unconscious shifting between decision criteria.
The design challenge was adding an additional layer of configuration to the existing scorecard setup, and ensuring the attributes marked as "focus attributes" were distinguished from others, without competing with the interviewers' ratings of those attributes on the candidate's scorecard summary view.
Configuration
On the configuration screen, recruiters can determine which stage in the pipeline needs work, and turn on the relevant tools to reduce bias. Originally these tools were conceptually grouped by how we talked about it as a product team, but research showed that our grouping wasn't all that intuitive.
Dashboard
The dashboard is users' first interaction with Greenhouse Inclusion, and therefore needed to provide a comprehensive view of the tools it offered and relevant engagement metrics. In the early iterations, we felt it was important to show the impact of turning on the tools, by showing over time how candidates by demographic advanced. However, this would have been a bigger lift than we wanted for MVP, so we pared it down with simpler metrics.
Results
Overall, customers expressed excitement that this was an area we were focusing on. It's been an incredibly rewarding experience to contribute to a solution that help organizations hire more fairly and create more balanced work environments. This is just the beginning and we will continue iterating on the product based on customer input, as D&I will continue to be a topic of interest in the talent space.