Actively Removing Bias in Hiring

By P3 Adaptive

Women in business and STEM fields often have a shadow hanging over them when applying for a job. Will they only be judged by their gender or will skills matter? As a result of this completely rational fear, women often try to hide their gender during the application process by using a first initial instead of their name and reworking cover letters, resumes, and work samples to ensure gender neutrality. Sadly, this process is just to get women to the interview stage.

Seems a little over the top, doesn’t it? 

These women have the credentials, the experience, the skills, and all the check marks in the right boxes making them the ideal candidate. Despite achieving the same level of success, men and women are still treated differently in society. Unfortunately, gender disparity is still prevalent and impacts a large portion of the population during the application process.

P3 Adaptive, though, is one of the companies who is intentionally removing bias from the hiring process. 

How is their process different?

Recently, during an interview, one of P3 Adaptive’s most senior directors shared some inside secrets about the hiring process. Ryan Bergstrom, Sr. Director of Client Services at P3 Adaptive explained, in detail, the hiring process for all technical positions and I must say, it is impressive the way P3 Adaptive manages to remove the potential for bias. In fact, most of the process is automated to ensure personal judgements are not involved. Every time a person applies to P3 Adaptive, a skills assessment and questionnaire is automatically sent.  No names are checked, no resumes are read, and no cover letter is passed around. 

Why wouldn’t P3 Adaptive check the resume first for education or for personal background? The answer to that is simple, founder and CEO, Rob Collie, understood from the beginning that education, training, and other information contained on the resume was secondary to the skills a person possesses. Even job experience is subjective when you are working with emerging technology. The most important question at P3 Adaptive is: “Do you have the necessary skills to do the job at the expected level?”

While it may seem counterintuitive, P3 Adaptive takes pride in putting the human first by automating as much of the hiring process as possible to intentionally prevent bias from creeping in. There is a database of FAQs for each assessment and the hiring team has them keyed up to send based upon the communication received from each applicant. Only after the assessment is complete and an interview has been scheduled is any applicant information revealed to the hiring team and often, an offer is already pending or not depending on if the applicant has met the elite standards of P3 Adaptive.

In fact, preventing bias is such a priority, that during my interview with Ryan he carefully considered every question asked to see if further preventative measures were needed. Most of those questions were just seeking clarification such as asking if location figured into the equation. Ryan explained that location is only checked due to international work laws. Local addresses were not considered therefore socio-economic bias is also prevented. 

As for how this inside hiring information can be useful to other companies, we would suggest that while many companies shy away from automating the hiring process, automation can be an effective tool for companies actively seeking to increase diversity in a team. Automation removes potential judgment or bias to leave a truly skills-based application process. In the case of hiring, automation can be your friend. At P3 Adaptive, your skills are the deciding factor. Period. Can you code the DAX? Can you build the model? Can you succeed in the position?

Think you have what it takes to join the P3 Adaptive team? Current openings for P3 Adaptive include Power BI Principal Consultant, Power Apps Principal Consultant, and Principal Azure Data Engineer. P3 Adaptive is always looking for great people to add to the team. Check out their careers page to apply today.