Bias-free Hiring Process
Thank you for your interest in our open positions.
What is systematic Bias?
Human beings have millions of years of evolution ingrained in our quick-to-judge brains. For some large portion of those millions of years, many day-to-day decisions were geared toward evaluating threats from the natural world - threats with life or death consequences that forced us to develop our decision making processes with very low risk tolerance, invariably favoring homogeneity in an attempt to be more predictive.
Systemic bias occurs when organizations or systems tend to stick to what it expects will be a more predictable outcome, regardless of whether those expectations actually produce predictable or desirable results; The assumed predictability becomes favored over the optimal performance of the organization. Over time, the normalization of these practices forms the basis for structural bias, which suggests that these practices are “just how things are”.
Why Bias Free Hiring?
As a technology company, we recognize the status quo mentality as a destructive force in productivity, performance and innovation. It’s the lazy way. The world doesn’t need more excuses to be lazy. We can do better.
In fact, today we live in a more complex, modern world where adaptability is more valuable than ever and predictability is attained through more reliable methods such as science and data. Having a more diverse group of team members at Troy Web will fundamentally make us more versatile, more relatable and give us access to a more rich palette of ideas - critical qualities for a tech consultancy agency that strives to be kind, be flexible and kick-ass.
We’re on a mission to have the most versatile, diverse group of business-savvy technical consultants and the most important thing we can do is find new team members who fit that need. If we let our hiring process be clouded by the fast-brain, fight-or-flight thought processes that would push us toward homogeneity, we’d be doing a great disservice to our clients and our team. That’s just not how we roll.
What steps have we taken in our hiring process?
Here’s our four-point plan:
We’ve removed names & other personal information from the review process
This helps reduce racial bias, ethnicity bias, gender bias & attribution bias.
We’re using the same set of questions for all first interviews
This helps reduce affinity bias, confirmation bias & contrast bias.
Our first interview is written
This helps reduce affinity bias, attribution bias, confirmation bias, contrast bias & physical bias.
Our written interview submissions are reviewed independently, no discussion takes place amongst reviewers during an initial evaluation
This helps reduce conformity bias.
Our Process
All applicants will be pre-screened based on only the following questions:
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Legal work authorization status
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Access to transportation & willingness to work onsite or hybrid at our downtown Cohoes NY Location
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Appropriate experience as required for the individual job posting
All candidates who qualify based on pre-screening suitability for the job will be sent a written interview.
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Responses are due in (1) week, candidates can take their time to respond, no need to juggle an interview during work hours!
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We ask all candidates to be thoughtful in their answer to not disclose gender or other personal attributes that might introduce bias in the review process. Please don’t include things such as the name of schools or what neighborhood you grew up in.
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In addition to scoring answers on technical accuracy and reasonableness, applicants will be scored on their written communication skills and ability to follow directions, invaluable skills in the consultancy field.
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Applicant scores will be compiled by the bias-free team who will take action on the highest ranked applicants in order to schedule follow-up interviews.