Bias as Hiring Puppeteer: Cut the Strings of Traditional Interviews

Elementary students love marionette puppet shows. Giggles come from the hand-pulled movements. Adult attitudes vary. Why? Hands off my strings! We crave control, and especially in education job interviews.

School interviews are puppeteering theaters with principals and job seekers competing for the strings. Principals set the stage with a traditional interview, where they grasp for command through questions and scoring. Job seekers counter through impression management strategies.

Performances then confuse everyone when phantom hands rule the strings. How? Interview bias. It’s real and persistent, and the strings are mostly invisible. Unknowingly, interviewers skew performances with bias like race, class or income, gender, other demographics, and even mental ability. Awareness won’t remove them, and traditional interviews breed it.

Emily Pronin explains in The Hidden Brain 2.0: the Double Standard podcast: Schools seeking unbiased performances must address their preparation and stage and write a new script before showtime.

Change the Preparation

Puppeteers prepare through practice. But districts often don’t give principals the dedicated time, even though neglecting interview preparation wastes time and money and sometimes makes participants forget their parts.

When districts skimp on preparation time, they’re sacrificing more when rehiring. Often, schools and their districts face a tight budget. They’ll pay more with each change of cast members—your school staff. An article in the Journal of Teacher Education assessed attrition and onboarding costs, which ranged from $4,000 to $18,000 per teacher depending on district size and location.

Consider participant training, too. Uneven, inconsistent, or haphazard interviewer preparation gives bias center stage through neglect or oversight, as noted in an article in the International Journal of Educational Research.

These issues are compounded with each interview, and awareness alone won’t save the show. Enter stage help.

Change the Stage

Traditional interviews set the stage for bias. They often rely on hypotheticals and possibility, not reality.

Consider this opening scene: As the job seeker manipulates the strings, they espouse theory, jargon, opinions, and ideas unmatched to their actual skill. They think they’ve nailed the interview.

But this performance leads to more questions on your end as the interviewer. Will the candidate really prepare lessons appropriately? Will they really collaborate? Will they treat kids equitably?

These traditional interviews don’t—and can’t—predict performance in the classroom. Schools’ traditional interview scores come from innuendo, buzz words, believability, and inference.

Here’s where you rewrite the script.

Write a New Script

Cut the strings of bias by shifting scripts away from theoretical to actual. Start by writing scripts using the four highs—high fidelity, high scenario, high fit, and high context. These use non-cognitive interview measures, which focus on a candidate’s dispositions, moral or value judgments, actual performance, or measures of sociability.

High Fidelity

High fidelity requires interview performances—not questions—that mimic the actual job. The more it’s like the job, the higher fidelity. Rate job seekers on their behavior and what they produce rather than memorized lines. It helps take bias out of the spotlight. During the interview process, have them teach a lesson, grade a paper, write a special education goal from given data, or respond to an angry email.

High Scenario

Improve further with high scenario strategies that cue up interactive situations that require immediate responses, role-playing, and incorporating situational judgment tests. Don’t hand out interview questions in advance. Job seekers will just rehearse their lines.

Instead, storyboard for observable drama from collaboration, conflict, equity, or problem-solving situations. Like high fidelity, auditions should include multiple.

High Fit and High Context

High fit and high context will also cut bias strings. Before advertising, consider the tasks, scenarios, and processes to match the unique needs of your school, grade, team, students, and community.

Keep bias backstage by identifying in advance who will best fit in with the characters, setting, backdrop, demographics, and needs of your school context.

When that script is ready, see which job seeker steals the show. Offer them the contract. New show headline: Higher Ratings for Local School Hiring.

Ryan Preis is a principal in Kent School District in Washington State.