Many organizations still use outdated hiring methods that turn off top talent and fuel unconscious bias. This leads to bad hires and harms employer reputations. By updating interview processes and using undercover research, companies can reduce bias, improve candidate experiences, and build stronger, more diverse teams that succeed.

Nora Burns, a keynote speaker and researcher, went undercover for over 350 interviews across industries to reveal broken hiring practices. Her research shows many companies conduct interviews like it’s 1983—asking irrelevant questions, being unprepared, and favoring men even in female-dominated roles. As founder of The Leadership Experts, Nora helps companies redesign hiring and onboarding by focusing on candidates’ potential and removing bias.

In this episode, Nora shares surprising findings: she was offered jobs she wasn’t qualified for due to bias, traditional interview questions waste time, companies accidentally share confidential info during interviews, and candidates decide whether to stay or leave within their first three hours on the job.

What you will learn from this episode:

  • Why traditional interview questions like “strengths and weaknesses” are counterproductive and what to ask instead.
  • How unconscious bias affects hiring decisions based on gender, area codes, college names, and even Zoom backgrounds.
  • Simple fixes for interview preparation, confidentiality, and creating bias-free application processes.

“Interviews over time have gotten shorter and shorter and shorter, especially for frontline jobs. We’re doing those interviews in 20 to 30 minutes. If I’m spending five minutes on what’s your greatest strengths, what’s your greatest weakness, that’s a high percentage of my overall time to get to know this candidate that I’ve just wasted.”

– Nora Burns

Valuable Free Resource: 

Topics Covered:

02:30 – The genesis of undercover research: How Nora realized she hadn’t been interviewed in over a decade while designing hiring processes for clients, leading to her decision to go undercover as a candidate

05:15 – Research methodology and ethics: Creating character personas, funding the research independently, and ensuring candidates knew she wasn’t a guaranteed hire to maintain ethical boundaries

08:45 – Outdated interview practices: Why organizations are still “hiring like it’s 1983” with tired questions that waste time and generate predictable, unhelpful responses from candidates

12:20 – Better questioning strategies: Moving beyond strengths/weaknesses to ask about development priorities and industry knowledge that reveals actual capabilities and cultural fit

16:30 – Interview preparation failures: How hiring managers show up late, unprepared, and treat candidates poorly, damaging the employment relationship from the start

18:45 – Confidentiality breaches: Shocking examples of organizations leaving candidates alone with payroll records, P&L statements, and unlocked laptops during interviews

22:10 – Unconscious bias in callbacks: A-B testing results showing male candidates consistently receive more callbacks, even for traditionally female roles like receptionist

24:45 – Geographic and socioeconomic bias: How area codes, college names, and Zoom setups create unfair advantages and disadvantages for candidates

27:20 – The critical first three hours: Why employees decide to stay or leave within their first three hours on the job and how organizations fail at basic onboarding

Key Takeaways:

“We need to stop hiring for comfort and start hiring for capacity and for what they actually will bring to the organization. A lot of our old school questions are really built around comfort and, oh, they think just like me.” –Nora Burns

“People were making the decision as to if they would stay a year within the first three hours of employment. We are shockingly bad at the first three hours.” –Nora Burns

“Whenever you say my gut tells me, bias is coming in. That’s your stories that you’ve collected over time. There’s something about me that reminds you of somebody else that you love.” –Nora Burns

Ways to Connect with Nora Burns:

Ways to Connect with Sarah E. Brown:

 

Full Episode Transcript:

(AI helped us put this together, so if you see any weird grammar or missed words—just know we nailed it during the actual chat.)

Nora Burns 

Interviews over time have gotten shorter and shorter and shorter, especially for frontline jobs. We’re doing those interviews in 20 to 30 minutes. If I’m spending five minutes on what’s your greatest strengths, what’s your greatest weakness, that’s a high percentage of my overall time to get to know this candidate that I’ve just wasted.

Sarah E. Brown 

Hello everyone. Welcome to the KTS Success Factor Podcast for Women, where we talk about challenges senior female leaders face in being happy and successful at work. I’m your host, Dr. Sarah E. Brown.

My guest today is Nora Burns. She is a keynote speaker, a researcher, and consultant who is leading the way in reinvigorating workplace culture by reconnecting the boardroom and the break room. Nora’s primary research was done as the undercover candidate or the undercover employee and is foundational in her work guiding organizations about reimagining the candidate and employee experiences and reconnecting the broken relationships that exist.

And that’s what we’re going to be talking about today is her research in this area, primarily her research as the undercover candidate. So tell me more about how you even got the idea to do this. Right. I know.

Nora Burns 

Welcome to my brain. So I actually was sitting in a conference room with a client organization. I regularly help organizations redefine their hiring processes and remake them into the current scenario. And while we were working on this for their organization, all of a sudden it hit me that I had not been to a job interview in over a decade.

And my whole life has been around shifting perspective and how do you look at it from another way, making sure you’re taking into consideration all the different stakeholders. And I thought, “Well, wow, that was just a huge missed step, right? Here I am designing hiring processes, but I haven’t been in the candidates’ shoes for a long, long time.”

So I thought, “Oh, I’ll just go on a handful of interviews.” And so I decided initially I’d just go on a handful of interviews in a neighboring town where it was easy enough to drive to the interview, but less likely that the HR professional would recognize me if they walked through that waiting area.

And I did these first six or so interviews, and quite frankly, I was horrified by what I was experiencing as a job candidate. And I was like, lazy interviews, right, and unethical questions, sometimes questions that if you’re using them as criteria, it’s illegal.

And so I needed a bigger, I’m a data junkie, and I needed a bigger sample size. So I thought, “Well, maybe there’s just like this one pod. Maybe somebody did bad training and all these organizations happen to go to it.”

And so I worked with my coach at the time and we talked it through and talked to some ethicists and some HR pros and put together a project plan. And the initial plan was to go on a hundred job interviews across the country so that we didn’t have a geographic bias and across the organizational chart and across industries. And then over time it has just grown.

Now I’ve been to over 350 job interviews and now we offer this as a service to clients where we will actually go in depending upon what the role is. We have candidates that will go in and assess for five core criteria in terms of reinventing their hiring process to get some biases out, some bad processes out, and make sure that they’re really appealing to candidates.

But yeah, so now I’ve been to over 350 job interviews, not because I’m unemployable, but for research purposes. And it’s always insightful.

Did anybody fund you initially or did you fund this yourself? No, that was a very specific decision that I wanted to fund it myself because I did not want to be indebted to anyone. I did not want that bias coming in.

Yeah, so I funded it myself, and I think it’s really important to recognize, again, I talked to ethicists, and one of the things, I flew myself to interviews. I would not accept as much as a cup of coffee. Like if we met at a coffee house, yes, let’s stop interviewing people at coffee houses unless they’re applying for a job at the coffee house. But if we met at a coffee house, I would be the one buying the coffee, right? I made sure that I was never in a position where an organization financially poured into me.

Sarah E. Brown 

So how did you get these interviews? Did you actually apply for the job and make up a resume to go with it?

Nora Burns 

Yep. I have a cast of characters. I realized early on that, as it turns out, I’m a really horrible liar, which makes this particular endeavor a challenge. So I had to tap into all of my theater background, you know, in high school and college and say, “I need characters and I need to become this character for these interviews.”

And so I had an administrative assistant character. I had a high level leader character, director of operations. Right. So we had primarily five. And then that alters as we do these projects for other clients now. And then, yeah, and so then I would go in as this character.

And there’s a lot of logistics to it. I needed a lot of phone numbers, email addresses, right, like all of the things that are required to be a job candidate. But yeah, so we created, I created, cast of characters and applied for jobs as them.

Sarah E. Brown 

So did you ever disclose to the people that you were interviewing with that you were doing this as a part of research? You really weren’t interested in their job?

Nora Burns 

I did not. None of those organizations where I interviewed will know that I’m that. And I never disclosed where I interviewed nor where I worked as the undercover employee, the follow-up project.

What I did do is I made sure throughout the process that they knew that I was not sure in. So as we went through the interview process, I would say things like, “I’m talking, I have another job interview at that time. Can we interview later in the day?” Right. Like, so I was forever making sure that they knew it wasn’t for sure that I was going to move to Nebraska. I was exploring it, right? And that I was talking to other organizations.

I never wanted to be the singular candidate, again, moving forward into the process. And if I felt I was getting into that spot, I would leave the process and make an excuse for why I couldn’t continue in their hiring process.

My goal was never, like in the undercover candidate, I did not want to get to the point of a job offer, although I did entirely too often. And there’s a lot of broken processes that led to that.

But yeah, so I made sure that I was saying things like, “You know, we’re thinking about moving to Nebraska. It’s, you know, on the horizon. I’m talking to three other companies this week. I’m moving into a third interview with another organization.” So, yeah, but they don’t know.

Some might recognize themselves as I’m writing the book about it. Some might recognize themselves in the interview processes. And it’s funny, when I do keynote speeches on this, I tell audiences right away, it’s not about blame and shame. I’m never going to out an organization, either on the candidate side or an employee side, because it’s about the trends and it’s about what can we all collectively learn from the trends that are happening in the hiring process and the employment process today, not about pointing fingers at an organization.

So I make sure that they know that because when I start describing some of the circumstances, audience members will look at each other like, “Oh my gosh, that sounds like us,” right? And the reality is that’s because it’s a trend. And even though I’m describing an organization in Atlanta, Georgia, the folks that are in Seattle sitting in that audience feel like it could have been their organization, which tells us that we have a shattered lens when it comes to the hiring process. We have a broken hiring lens, and we collectively need to make some changes soon.

So what are some of the trends that you’ve picked up? Well, we tend to still be hiring like it’s 1983, I think. So even if we get to the questioning part, questions are an easy thing to fix, interview questions. We’re asking the same interview questions that we were asked. And the challenge with that is we were asked those questions in 1983 when we entered the hiring process, right?

And so if I can get people to stop asking what’s your greatest strength and what’s your greatest weakness, I would be so damn happy. There is not a book, a blog, a pamphlet, or a job coach that’s not gonna tell somebody how to answer that question. And we all know, right? You take a positive and you wrap it in a negative so that it sounds like, “I just work so hard,” right? Like, “It’s so detail-oriented.”

Nobody is gonna say, you know, like, “Well, I embezzled from my last company,” right? Nobody’s saying that. We’re getting better. “I hate spreadsheets and I refuse to do them.” Nobody discloses helpful information.

And the reality is interviews over time have gotten shorter and shorter and shorter, especially for frontline jobs. We’re doing those interviews in 20 to 30 minutes. If I’m spending five minutes on what’s your greatest strengths, what’s your greatest weakness? That’s a high percentage of my overall time to get to know this candidate that I’ve just wasted, right?

Sarah E. Brown 

So one of the trends is we still have bad interview questions and we try to be, the other is, well, let me just back up a minute. What’s a better question than strengths and weaknesses?

Nora Burns 

Literally almost anything. One of the things leaders should do is when they’re looking at their hiring questions to say, “What am I really looking for?” Right? So what is the why behind this question?

Now, if you’re new to hiring, if you have not been on the interview-er side of things and you’re nervous, and this is your soft land to get your sea legs under you, fine. Acknowledge that, right? It’s just buying you some time to let the interviewee do a nice soft lob and for you to settle into the interview. That’s a good reason to ask this question, but that’s about the only good reason.

The question is, what are you really looking for? Are you really looking for, is the person, and a lot of times they’re looking for, is the person self-aware? Can they acknowledge that there’s something they’re not good at?

And that can be asked later on, as you say, “You know, we invest a lot in the development of our employees.” Only say that if you actually do. Do not put false promises out there. That’s a whole workplace culture thing. “But we’re gonna set up a plan for you in the first 30, 60, 90 days to develop some skills. Some of the things we like to explore are, you know, Excel spreadsheets or, you know, whatever relates to the job. Which of those would be the best way for us to invest in you?”

Because it does two things. It tells the employee, potential employee, that you are a culture that invests in their employees, that you have identified what the actual skills are that they need for the job and that you are willing to make sure that they get the training in them. Right. So it sets you up culturally in a really good spot.

And then you’re less likely to get whatever they prepared because now you’ve given them a list of five developmental activities. They don’t get to do the “Well, I just, my work-life balance isn’t strong. I just work so hard,” right? Answer. So it gets you away from the prepared answer. It gets you to a little bit more likely to be good material.

Also, if that’s the candidate that you hire, when you first sit down on the first day, you’re going to go over that. You’re going to say, “Hey, one of the things you said you really wanted to work on was like pivot tables or, you know, whatever that skill you want to develop or communication skills, public speaking, presentation, whatever, say, let’s put a plan together. You know, what does that currently look like? How confident do you feel? And here are some strategies that we can improve,” right? It gives you a baseline to start the relationship in a much more transparent way.

But we also ask things like we think we’re Freud. People ask questions like, “What’s the most recent book you’ve read?” And here’s the challenge to that question. And they’re saying, “Well, I want to make sure they’re a continuous learner.” Well, that’s great, except what if the most recent book I’ve read is “What to Expect When You’re Expecting?” or, you know, the Quran. Like, there’s just so many bad answers to that question. Not bad from a lifestyle standpoint, but heavily biased answers.

And so to say, if you want to know if they’re keeping up with whatever the topic is, right, “What’s the most recent periodical or article you’ve read about where leadership’s heading into this next decade? What have you read about that? What did you think was interesting about it?” Now I’m more focused on what’s going on in the industry or in their role and those types of things.

Or we ask silly questions like “If I put four frogs on an island and I leave for six months, how many frogs am I going to come back to?” No, stop. Stop being Freud. Let’s get your real information and get to know somebody for the work that they do and the core competencies that they have instead of really the bias-filled questions that we have that are coming forward, right?

Like we need to, it really comes down to is we need to stop hiring for comfort and like, “Oh, they feel like, yeah, they just like me,” right? We need to stop hiring for comfort and start hiring for capacity and for what they actually will bring to the organization. And a lot of our old school questions are really built around comfort and, “Oh, they think just like me.”

Sarah E. Brown 

So you said that a lot of the questions are bad and you said that that’s actually the easiest thing to fix because if you get really focused on why you are hiring and what you are really looking for, you can then tailor the questions. But what else in the hiring process did you look at in your research?

Nora Burns 

Yeah, so one of the things is we are setting a really—timeliness of interviews is one of the elements. So I show up for an interview in something that we can easily track. I show up for an interview that’s supposed to happen at 10 o’clock in the morning. Most job candidates are going to show up 10 minutes to seven minutes early, right? So that’s what I would do.

And then I would be sitting in that waiting room for 5, 10, 15, 20, in the worst case scenario, 45 minutes. If I was not doing this for research, I would have left, right? Most people are going to leave in that scenario.

And then the hiring manager shows up and they’re like, “Oh, hold on. Let me see if I can find a room. Let me see if I can find a place for us to go talk.” So just being prepared is another easy fix, right? Am I ready for this job candidate? Am I treating them with the importance that they deserve to be coming in and giving us our time.

Same thing would be on Zoom, right? Like that, if we’re interviewing them on Zoom, which is a whole nother animal, that we’re not leaving them waiting as we’re like, “Oh, hold on, we’re waiting for one more person.” We would not do that if we were meeting the CEO of our organization. And we need to treat our job candidates and our employees in the precious relationships that they are.

We remember the employment part. It’s taxes and paperwork and all of the regulations. We forget the relationship part. And it’s an employment relationship. And so when we focus on the relationship part, I mean, appropriate workplace relationship, let’s not, you know, go down that rabbit hole. But if you focus on a relationship, if you’re on a first date, you’re not going to show up 20 minutes late and expect the person to give you a second date. Right.

So why can we show up 20 minutes late to a job interview as the interviewer is the organization and expect that that candidate is going to give us a fair shake and feel positive about our organization? Right. Again, super easy fix.

Another one is how leaky our hiring processes are. We’re giving away confidential information. We’re giving candidates access to information that they have no business having. And part of that is because we’re not making sure that we’ve got a secure spot to have the interview.

So I’ve been left in conference rooms with bankers’ boxes marked “payroll taxes 2023,” right? “P&L 2020 through whatever.” Unlocked laptops that I could have either put a USB port into or contaminated the information, either taken information or left information. I’ve been interviewed in rooms where the P&L was on full display and the person walked away. They were in their office. They have their finances in their office in front of them. And then they’re like, “Oh, hold on. I got to go take care of one thing.” And they leave me in that office with their P&L.

And I just, we have leaky processes. So tightening up from a risk assessment, risk management standpoint, what we’re giving candidates access to, same thing, like take it back to that first date. I’m not gonna give my first date all my credit cards and walk away from them. Hey, so why are we doing it in an environment that is a business where we’re literally disclosing confidential information? We don’t know that person yet. And in my case, they didn’t even know my first name. They did not know anything that was real about me other than the fact that I was, in fact, over the age of 18, because there’s just some stuff you can’t get away with.

But yeah, so there’s fixes there. And there’s also, I mean, like literally I’m writing a whole book on the fixes. So those are three kinds of easy to fix fixes, right? Questions we’re asking, the preparedness that we’re showing for an interview and making sure we’re not disclosing confidential information about our organization.

Sarah E. Brown 

Very interesting. So tell me about your business today. How are you using this, all of this research now?

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Hi, this is Sarah Brown again, the host of the KTS Success Factor Podcast for Women. I hope you are enjoying this episode and gaining some tips and inspiration on how you can be happier, more successful, and experience less stress at work. If you would like to learn more about how you can empower the women in your organization to do the same, simply click on the show notes to see how you can connect with me. As an added bonus for my podcast guests, you will see how you can book 30 minutes with me to explore how you can implement a scalable, self-coaching program for the women in your organization. Simply visit bookachatwithsarahebrown.com. Now back to this informative episode.

Nora Burns 

Yeah, so primarily my business is in a couple of components. One is I primarily do keynote speeches. So I will go to conferences for associations for corporations and do the opening keynote. And then I actually deliver a keynote plus a breakout as part of my deal, because I think that’s the best learner.

So we share the big ideas from the main stage. And then depending upon which direction the association or organization wants to go, we’ll do a roll up your sleeves breakout that digs into either their hiring practices or their onboarding practices or their performance practices. So kind of depending upon which point they want to go.

And then I also do undercover research. So we will do a full secret shop of your organization’s hiring process. And sometimes that takes the perspective of we just want an overview look. My one contingency is nobody gets fired, right, unless somebody is blatantly overstepping, making sexual comments, right, racial comments, like really really overstepping, not like they don’t know that that’s a phrase that ties back to something, but really gross overstep, which I have witnessed as the undercover candidate being unquestionably hit on during an interview.

So unless somebody gets really egregious with their behavior, nobody gets fired. This is an exploration for learning so that we can move forward and improve our plans, right? So that’s what we do for the undercover candidate.

I also offer that we do undercover employee where we actually submerge somebody into the orientation process to go through it again, to redefine how we’re bringing people on board the organization, because there’re some big mistakes that are being made there that keep employees from staying.

And the reality is, as the undercover employee, I realized that people were making the decision as to if they would stay a year within the first three hours of employment. And you know what, really? Yes, within the first three hours, they’re talking with their peers about the fact that they’re only going to stay six months or a year based on this, that, or the other.

Now, here’s the thing. We’re really bad at the first three hours. Collectively, organizations are bad at the first three hours. Somebody shows up on the job, “Oh, we’re going to have you partner with Sarah.” Sarah’s like, “Oh, nobody told me I’m going to,” right? Like I’m so overworked already, right? Or we don’t have a plan for lunch. We didn’t even bother to tell you where the bathrooms are. We don’t have a badge for you, we don’t have a computer for you, we don’t have a password for you, we don’t have any of those things.

We were bad at the first three hours. We are shockingly bad at the first three hours. And yet employees are using data from the first three hours to make a major decision about the organization.

And so we do the consulting and do a secret shop. Again, there’s parameters on that. No, I will not spy on your employees. No, I will not do this. One of the most common things I get calls about, or will I do it for a competitor organization and give them a report? No, I will not, as it turns out, do corporate espionage. No, I’m not going to do it for a competitor and give you that Intel. But what we will do is have somebody go through the process. And it’s really interesting. And there’s some things that we can fix pretty easily. Yeah. There’s some things that can be fixed pretty easily.

And I joke in my, and then beyond that, we do workshops and consulting on site to redefine some processes. So really speaking and consulting with some coaching. We want to find the right solution for that organization.

Now, the thing that I think is interesting, especially when we talk about women in leadership, is when I speak at women leadership conferences, which is, P.S., one of my favorite things to do. Oh, cool. If it’s women in the trades, right? Women in male populated industries. Because when women are in leadership, women leadership conferences are held in industries that are male populated, when those women get together, it is magical. Right?

So A, they all wear fancy clothes because it’s the only time they get to. B, They laugh readily because they’re so busy code switching in their jobs on a regular basis and being told, “Oh, you’re not being taken seriously because you’re laughing.” You know, like, hello, we should be able to have fun at work. But at a women in leadership conference in a male dominated field, man, the laughter is right there. And it’s such a gift.

But one of the things I will regularly say and share in the keynote with that group is one of the most often asked questions as a new hire was, “What size men’s shirt do you wear?” Like, what size men’s shirt do I wear? I mean, like, I don’t know, because it turns out I’m not a dude. I don’t buy men’s shirts. I buy women’s shirts.

And as it turns out, women and men are cut significantly differently from the neck to the waist. This is by far the biggest differentiation in how we wear our clothes. And yet, because it’s easier and cheaper to just order men’s polo shirts for the golf outing, for the special charity event, for new hires on the front lines. We order all men’s shirts. And then we say, “What size men’s shirt do you wear?”

And I’m like, I don’t. I don’t wear a men’s shirt. And it’s not cut well. I don’t feel great. It doesn’t wear well. And you want employees who feel prideful, right? So they have pride in their job and their organization, and now you’re going to have me wear this cheap, polyester, male-cut, looks horrible on me, doesn’t fit the right shirt to represent the organization. That is, without question, one of the easiest fixes.

And I’ve seen it and I’ve heard stories because I do this podcast now called Stories from the Break Room. And one of my favorites is this woman, and I’m just restarting it again next month, and this woman called in and she said, she left a story on our recording device that said, “I won a huge sales competition, right? I was one of like three people to win this competition. And part of the prize was this gorgeous leather jacket. But you guessed it, she got a men’s jacket.”

And like, you’re one of the best salespeople in your organization. They spent several hundred dollars on these jackets, but it was cheaper to buy three of the same style than it was to buy two men’s jackets and one women’s jacket. And so how valued does she feel? How important does she feel? She was told that men are more important at this organization than women, not directly, but through this meta message of this is what we invested in. You don’t have the money for two men’s and one women’s jacket? Buy three women’s jackets. I’m just saying. Just once.

So anyhow, those are the ways that I help organizations. Speaking, do a lot of keynote addresses. I love that. Keynote with a breakout. And then as a follow-up, we do some coaching, consulting, or the undercover research project.

Sarah E. Brown 

So I just have to comment on not providing the bio breaks when you’re onboarding a new hire. I can recall from an interview that I had for an organization that I actually went to in the 80s, in the mid-1980s, my interview day, I was not given an opportunity for a bio break at all the whole day. That’s number one. And I had the same experience on my first day on the job. And I still remember that. 30 years later. Isn’t that amazing? The things that stick.

Nora Burns 

Yeah. And that would have been so easy to fix. That’s an easy fix. Also, it goes back to the Maya Angelou quote, like, people won’t always remember what you say, but they’ll remember how you made them feel, right? And how I felt was uptight, holding my legs together.

me tell you, OK, this is a real thing still. Delivery drivers will tell me their schedule is so packed that there’s no time to stop and get a bio break and hit all of the numbers. So the male employees literally carry Gatorade bottles in their trucks to relieve themselves. Lovely, a, you don’t know this about me yet, but there was not enough Purell for me in the world before COVID. So this is something that just turns my stomach, but not a solution that women can use, right? So there’s a natural build-in kind of thing.

We still have biobreak issues. In this day and age, we still have bio break issues and that’s a disability issue, that’s a gender issue, you know, kind of a thing. So, but again, it’s how comfortable you’re making somebody feel.

Imagine a valued guest coming to your home, right? The person that you admire the most in the world comes to your home and spends the day with you and you never tell them where the bathroom is. Exactly. Right? There’s no way you would do that.

So there’s lots of ways for us as leaders to improve our hiring processes and our onboarding processes. And the reality is we have a lot of bias baked into our processes that if we really look at why we’re asking questions, how we’re asking questions, how we’re recruiting, you know, how we’re bringing people on board, we are much more likely to hire for capacity and have the best candidate instead of, “Oh, you look like me, you talk like me, you act like me. Or that’s exactly how I would answer that question.” In which case you should not hire that person because we already have that brain.

But I did, we haven’t even talked about this, I did some A-B testing and I do this for some of our clients where we will test to see if there’s a bias around our age and those types of things. So I’ll send in job applications or resumes with traditionally male names and then equally situated resumes with traditionally female names.

And the male candidates always get more callbacks consistently. I don’t have my spreadsheet in front of me. I know I have numbers that track this over the course of our time, but male candidates will get more callbacks even for positions and jobs that the general public would say is a traditionally female job. Front desk receptionists and male candidates still get a higher callback rate, right? It’s high, not as high, but they still get a higher callback rate.

And so there’s an easy solution to this. Easy, easy, easy. Blind applications. So have the person who is receiving those applications into your system, especially if you’re a small organization, if you’re a large organization, you can have your AI bots do this for you, and remove all identifiable information, right?

If they went to, like, I don’t care what college they went to. We’re gonna verify their college education as part of our background check. I just care that they have the degree or they don’t, if it’s a degree-based organization. But let’s take off the name of the college, because if it’s a traditionally black college, if it is a female college, if it is, right, like, let’s just get rid of that. Let’s remove the name and give the candidate a different identifier.

Here’s another thing. I’m telling you, I’m such a geek about this. We even have a bias around area code.

Sarah E. Brown

Really?

Nora Burns 

Yes. How was that used? I could not break into the Atlanta market for anything. So those of you who are listening from Atlanta, man, you’ve got a tight job market. So when I would submit applications, I was regularly saying, “I’m moving there.” Right.

And so in Atlanta, I could not get an interview until I changed the cell phone number of my candidates to have a 404 area code. And when I changed that one thing, I started getting the calls. And I was like, that’s fascinating.

Now here, the reality is it’s true. If I tell you that somebody has an area code from rural Louisiana, you paint a picture in your head. And now I tell you I’ve got an area code from Boston, Massachusetts. That’s a very different picture. And that has unintentionally made its way in. Like this is 100% unconscious bias, right? We see that area code, but I’m telling you when I did Atlanta was the hardest market for me to get interviews in. And when I changed to having an area code that was based in Atlanta, and the thing is now.

You have an area code from where you grew up. Usually you have the same area code when you’re in your twenties that you did when you were 13 and your parents got you your first phone, right? Which is a very different experience for you. And as a result, you can tell where somebody came from, where they grew up based on. I was absolutely shocked, but all I had to do was change that one thing and boom, I got the interview.

Sarah E. Brown 

So in terms of the unconscious bias in the hiring process, you’ve talked about gender, you’ve talked about how colleges can actually be a problem, talked about area codes. Are there any other areas where we’re probably not aware that we’re injecting unconscious bias into the process?

Nora Burns

Zoom interviews, online interviews have a huge bias in them. Now here’s a couple of examples. So one is most people don’t have a setup like I do where I record in a little podcast, right? And it’s a generic background with a plant in the corner, right? Most people don’t have that.

Now, which also means sometimes when they’re doing Zoom interviews and they work from home and they’re homeschooling or it’s summertime, you hear the kids, you hear the dogs, you hear the spouse say something in the background. You see things about their personal life in the background that you would never otherwise know about.

So I’ve got a background that has all my sailing pictures, or I’ve got chaos in the background, or I’ve got a, you know, all of those things factor into what we’re seeing and we’re taking in about this person and we’re telling stories about them.

For my clients, we send out, one of the things we do as an organization is we send out interviewing kits, which actually includes a little ring light because the lighting is the other thing. You can’t really see a candidate. Send a little ring light that attaches to the top of their computer. 

We send a drapery rod that is a pressure rod that you can put in a hallway or in a doorway that blocks out the background that’s a light gray or the organization’s brand color, and then a drape, right? So the drape, the thing, and all of that, and instructions on how to interview on a Zoom so that people can have the best experience around a video app, right? I use Zoom clearly.

And googly eyes. We also send them googly eyes, and we ask them to put the googly eyes right by that pinhole camera because one of the other big biases that we have is eye contact. So we as Americans have a great appreciation for eye contact and we instill trust and confidence and a whole array of character elements into the fact that somebody can or cannot look us in the eye.

And so most people who are not accustomed to interviewing on a video are actually going to be looking at the image and they’re looking at the people who are interviewing them. Except that as the interviewer, you’ve got this built in unconscious bias about eye contact that now you don’t trust me as much. And you think I might be, you know, looking at some script or something else. Right. Reading notes. Reading notes. Because I’m not. And this is unnatural.

Now, those of you that are listening can’t tell that I’m actually moving from looking at the screen to looking at the pinhole camera. But it’s amazing. Just looking a little inch below the pinhole camera makes it like it makes it feel like I’m not connected to you.

So there’s things like that that we’ve got bias about having to do with Zoom connections. And the reality is we’ve got some socioeconomic things that come into place with doing interviews online. I mean, the nice thing is people don’t have to get in their cars and drive to an interview or fly to an interview. But the bad news is if I’m in a one bedroom studio apartment, it’s hard for me to do a video interview with a sketchy Internet connection. Right.

So guiding our candidates on locations where they could go and interview at the, if there’s a library near them where they could interview if they’re right, kind of a thing. Now, granted, if we’re hiring them for a problem solving thing, we might not want to spoon feed all of it. But the goal is to have a really great interviewing experience.

And the reality is there’s a lot of bias that comes because of this mode of communication on a video versus in person. It has replaced the bias around a handshake. People judge so much on a handshake and I’m like, unless you’re an outside salesperson, I really do not care. If you’re my underwriter in an organization, you’re an underwriter, you’re an actuary, you’re the accountant for the organization, I could, quite frankly, give two snaps about how strong your handshake is. It tells me really nothing about you other than the musculature of your arm, right? And irrelevant to the job.

And yet we, as Americans, have a strong bias for it. Now, we’ll move that to Zoom. It really takes over the eye contact. And what’s in the background? What can I tell you about this?

Now, as a job candidate, as the undercover candidate, I used all of this information to my advantage. So I can tell you that the reason I got offered some of the jobs that I was offered, jobs that I am wildly unqualified for, that I was still offered the job, It’s because I use bias to my advantage. And let’s say you had a picture of a sailboat behind you in this Zoom. Say, “Oh my gosh, you also sail. Like, ah, where do you sail?” And next thing you know, we spend 10, 15 minutes talking about sailing.

I know just enough about sailing to make this work. And you don’t know why it is that you think I’m amazing. You’re just like, “You know, my gut tells me this gal.” Right. Whenever you say “my gut tells me,” bias is coming in. Right. That’s your stories that you’ve collected over time. There’s something about me that reminds you of somebody else that you love or your love for sailing is so powerful that now I’ve won you over.

I don’t know shit about sailing, but I have, in fact, gotten a job because I spent 15 minutes talking about sailing. Because my cousin does sailing competitions. So just by following their Facebook, I know a couple of terms, right? And if you’re like, “How did I accidentally hire this person who really is unqualified?” If you really look back at your hiring process, it’s biased. Something happened. You fell in love with them because they reminded you of someone else, not because of the actual skills that they have.

Wow, I’m such a geek about this. I’m telling you, I could literally talk about this for days and I do. So there’s so much opportunity for us as leaders and organizations to get to the heart of who we are. I mean, we’re talking about the people we give the keys to the kingdom to, right? They have the passwords into our systems. They’re the face of our organization. They’re the people who are leading us into the future.

We need to spend a little bit more time on selecting them and making sure that our selection process is up to date, not reaped in bias. And that once we do that, we’re pulling them into an organization in a way that says you are valued, you are important, and we’re going to make sure you have the tools and the uniforms and the information that you need to really be part of our spectacular future.

Sarah E. Brown 

And that is a great summary of what you have learned from your research and are sharing with your clients. Nora, where do people find you?

Nora Burns 

They can find me on LinkedIn under Nora Burns. I’ve got a black and white photo with my purple glasses. LinkedIn is one of the easiest ways to find me, to connect, to start a conversation with me. But also go to the website. It’s leadershipexperts.com. Theleadershipexperts.com. I almost forgot my own “the” in there. Theleadershipexperts.com. It has an S on it because there’s more than one expert in any field.

And I would be thrilled to connect to answer questions. Watch for the book “Stories from the Break Room.” Same name as the podcast that will be coming out to encapsulate a lot of these great ideas. But yeah, and the podcast is “Stories from Break Room.”

Sarah E. Brown 

Can you find that on your website?

Nora Burns 

They can find a link to the podcast. They can also find it wherever they listen to podcasts. But it’s great. “Stories from the Break Room,” where employees will tell each other, but they won’t tell you.

Sarah E. Brown 

That’s great. Nora, thank you so much for being with me today.

Nora Burns 

I’m thrilled to have been asked. Thank you so much.

Sarah E. Brown 

Thanks for listening to the KTS Success Factor Podcast for Women. If you like what you are hearing, please go to iTunes to subscribe, rate us, and leave a review. And if you would like more information on how we can help women in your organization to thrive, then go to www.sarahebrown.com. You can sign up for our newsletter, read show notes and learn more about our podcast guests, read my blog, browse through the books, or contact us for a chat. Goodbye for now.

Sarah E. Brown
Sarah E. Brown