Interviewing tips for HR leaders

John: [00:00:19] Welcome to HRDTV. I'm John Corrigan with HRD America. And today I'm joined by Sanjoe Jose, founder and CEO of TalView, an HR tech firm in California. Today, we are going to be discussing how to effectively measure talent. Sanjoe, thanks for joining me. How are you?

Sanjoe: [00:00:37] Good. John, how are you?

John: [00:00:39] I am doing wonderful. I can't wait to get into this. Let's dig right in. Now, before you measure talent, you have to get to know them. What advice do you have for HR leaders when it comes to conducting effective job interviews? 

Sanjoe: [00:00:53] So interviewing, I think, is one of the most crucial elements from a job or decision making standpoint. But it's also a space which is highly known today. Most interviewers receive little training on how to do interviews, and most organizations do not have a formal interview guideline or even review of the interviewing quality at the organization. So while it's being used to make the most important decisions, which is whom to hire, whom to promote, whom to retain, a lot of those decisions are based on interviews as a form of assessment signs. It's completely ignored by most organizations. So that's that's a major challenge which we see in the industry today. 

John: [00:01:43] Now, another major challenge is the idea of bias and how, you know, through the interviewing process, by only accepting a certain pool of applicants, you're really limiting your options in the workforce. What advice do you have for HR leaders when it comes to mitigating that bias and not just the interview process, but the overall hiring process? 

Sanjoe: [00:02:05] Bias overall in hiring has been a challenge for most organizations for many decades, especially with globalization and with people from different cultures coming together with people of different backgrounds starting to work together. A lot of limitations which we have as humans, come in the way of making objective decisions when it comes to hiring and it starts with putting or mitigating all any form of bias, starts with generating awareness, generating awareness about the issue of bias and how that manifests in interviewing, in hiring decision making, in the way you interact with people. I think that's the first step. Second is very thorough review and guidelines on what is acceptable and what's not acceptable when it comes to the kind of questions you ask in an interview, the kind of expectations which you set with the candidates given different backgrounds they might have. That becomes a crucial step. And third, and probably the most impactful measure is about doing periodic review of how interviews are done within your organizations, the VP itself. You have a lot of experience working with customers. You use our video interviewing platform who conduct periodic audits of interviews which are conducted on the platform. The recordings they review and these random sampling provide a lot of insights on what are the areas where the interviewers today lack awareness, they lack training, they lack they need more guidance, and that those interventions have helped a lot of our customers. And in general I've seen across organizations and even for internal hiring interview those have helped us do better when it comes to being more objective in hiring decision making. 

John: [00:04:11] Absolutely. Now, for a company that's unsure of whether they're doing the right thing when in terms of fair hiring practices, what are some indicators that it's a very equitable process that can help them attract top talent? 

Sanjoe: [00:04:27] Yeah, so there are I would say there are a few things which you have seen as very effective, both internally I'll tell you and also for some of our customers. The first is having proper dashboards and analytics when it comes to data around the hiring and especially hiring of candidates across different backgrounds or tracking conversion ratios. So if you have X candidates at the top of the funnel, how do those conversion ratios change across candidates from different backgrounds? Keeping a close watch on that has been very useful for many of our customers and also for us. The second is in terms of connecting venue, I spoke about the periodic audits. There are certain best practices when it comes to how to use the insights from the periodic audits. So how do you do interventions for certain individual groups or for the entire organization based on. Those audits that those interventions can be in form of classroom trainings in terms of doing mock interviews and shadow interviewing and all of those aspects that have helped a lot of interviewers I know and of many of our customers to deal with this. And the the third area, which is more an emerging area and where TalView is also making a lot of investment, is about using AI from helping to monitor measure how interviews are being done. Sampling definitely helps, but then, you're only sampling a few out of a large number of interviews. But with the help of AI, we can make that process a lot more objective, a lot more scalable, where we can not just analyze what's happening within the interviews with the help of techniques like speech recognition and natural language processing, but also provide actionable insights for the interviewers, which becomes a feedback loop for the interviewers to continuously improve upon their blind spots and also help them become better interviewers in a very short span of time. So that's an area which is very promising and TalView has also been making a lot of investment in that space right now. 

John: [00:06:57] Excellent. Very good to hear. And you know, hiring DEI, two main topics that HR leaders are always contending with. So I appreciate you taking the time today to share your insight. 

Sanjoe: [00:07:09] Wonderful. Thank you. 

John: [00:07:11] And thank you, everyone, for watching. This has been another episode of HRDTV.