Overview

The Harvard Kennedy School's Women and Public Policy Program has produced research on current biases that exist in hiring, promotion, and workplace norms, particularly for women in technology fields.  Iris Bohnet guides this research portfolio and has published several recommendations to debias hiring practices in her book What Works: Gender Equality by Design.  HarvardWIT has gathered resources currently being used within Harvard IT.  We encourage you to leverage these best practices whenever you are hiring for a new position.

Entrance Interviews

Conduct an entrance interview as part of onboarding a new hire to discover the incoming employee's expecations and desires regarding the workplace culture.  this information can also be used as a data point to assist with employee retention and engagement.

Work Tests

Whenever possible, it is recommended to provide candidates with work tests where their work can be evaluated anonymously by the hiring manager and their team.  Harvard Library currently demonstrates this practice.  They ask all semi-finalists to complete a work test (examples provided) that are submitted to HR.  HR removes the identifying data of the work tests for review by the hiring manager and team.  This allows the candidates work to be evaluated without bias.