Two years on, how's our 'blind hiring' experiment going for us at Koru Kids?
We ❤️❤️❤️ it!
... and we're NEVER going back to traditional hiring.
I'm a huge advocate of blind hiring because it helps minimise the two biggest hiring mistakes:
🙁 Being fooled by someone who looks amazing but actually isn't that great; and
🙁 Missing out on incredible people because you knocked them out of your process accidentally
Over the past couple of years our blind hiring practices have undergone a lot of refinement and tailoring to specific roles, in a series of mini-experiments. We can see the results in the fantastic people we've hired. They're awesome.
As an evangelist, I was delighted to see our 'blind hiring' process for software engineers highlighted in a recent blog about hiring women on CTO Craft, a great industry resource for software engineers. (I'll post the link in comments.)
Blind hiring is great but it's not enough in and of itself. For our software engineer roles we've also brought in some other important practices:
✅Putting tons of context on our careers page about our software practices, team, beliefs and values, Day In The Life, and everything else we can think of that might help convey what the job will actually be like
✅Removing the take-home test – which could penalise applicants with busy home lives and personal commitments
✅Including more practical or ‘doing things’ assessments to avoid trick questions
✅Blind sourcing using the de-bias toggle on Hired that blurs the photo and changes the name into initials
✅Radical openness by promising to provide detailed feedback from our software engineer interview days -- typically 2 sides of A4 and including input from everyone the candidate interacted with
✅Encouraging candidates we make an offer to have a try-out day - paid, of course - so they can really be informed and confident about deciding to work at Koru Kids
We think all of this makes great business sense, as well as being the right thing to do. So there's really no reason not to.
oh, and did I mention we're hiring 😍
