APATHEIA AND ANTI-BIAS TRAINING: PART II
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The first part of this essay was published on Wednesday, February 3, 2021.
The principle behind behavior based interviewing is that the best indicator of future performance is past behavior. So rather than asking interviewees to hypothesize about how they would act in future situation or their abstracted views on topics, behavioral based interviewing requires the interviewers to determine what skills are necessary to perform the job at hand, determine situations in which such skills could be exhibited, develop questions such that the interviewee can explain a past situation in which they exhibited such a competency, and finally develop a set of evaluative criteria for answers. You would then have every interviewer rank the answers on some objective and agreed upon scale (say, 1-10) and ask all interviewees the same questions for fairness and consistency. In a situation in which only one person can be selected (like a job interview), the highest scoring person gets the position. In a situation where multiple people can be moved forward (such as a commission on ministry interview), the committee collectively predetermines a threshold that interviewees would need to meet in order to advance.
I know this seems very abstract at this point, so let me show how this would work in a Commission on Ministry (COM) postulancy interview (although these principles can be applied to any denomination’s equivalent ordination interviewing boards). The COM would need to determine ahead of time skills they see as necessary for success in ministry for priests, deacons, and any other ministries they are tasked with discerning for, or, more helpfully at this stage, success in ministerial formation. Given that formal ministerial formation will likely involve encountering and wrestling with abstract and complex concepts spanning multiple academic disciplines—regardless of whether the formation is through seminary or a less traditional route—it would not be unreasonable to make “ability to learn difficult concepts in various disciplines” one skill you want to evaluate.
In traditional interviewing, even committees that did this much prework would likely ask a hypothetical question such as “explain how you will meet the demands of seminary where you will be expected to learn multiple new and possibly complex subjects all at once.” While this question would likely be lauded by most for the thoughtful process that led to it, it’s unlikely to get the desired results. The interviewee can give the perfect answer, something akin to “I would go to all my classes, listen attentively, take effective notes, schedule my assignments on my calendar, talk to teachers about concepts I don’t understand, and study for all my tests” and that still doesn’t tell anyone whether they actually have the capacity or propensity to do any of those things—only that they know that these things are what one should do. But if knowing what one should do translates into actually doing it, then the only people who, desiring to lose weight, fail to do so would be the ones who are unaware that eating healthier and exercising more are necessary for weight loss—a proposition that seems empirically untrue (it certainly is for me).
A better approach would be to ask a question that elicits past behavior, something akin to “tell us about a specific time where you had to learn about a new and challenging subject that was unrelated to anything you had done before—this could be a time either in or out of school.” If you have evaluated criteria for whatever anecdote the person tells such as “individual described a complex subject they had to learn,” “subject was truly new for the individual,” “individual showed perseverance in the face of challenges,” “individual sought out help from experts when needed,” and “individual learned to manage new time demands for learning,” then you can evaluate how well they met the challenge of learning a new and complex subject and reasonably extrapolate from that as to how well they will do in another situation such as, say, formal education for ordained ministry.
This approach has a number of advantages over the traditional hypothetical question form of interviewing. First, by deciding ahead of time what are necessary skills for the vocation at hand and having all interviewers agree to use only those questions, the possibility of highly subjective, biased, and irrelevant criteria creeping in is greatly reduced. This interviewing format would render irrelevant de rigeur but largely irrelevant questions like “could you do anything different with your life?” Going through the process described above, one would have to ask what skill for ministry this question actually elicits, and the answer would likely be “none.” However, it is possible that such reasoning would get to a pertinent fear behind the question, namely, “how do we know you won’t bounce if it gets hard,” which would lead to a skill expectation of “ability to keep vows even when it gets hard” and a question like “tell us about a time when you stuck with something you had committed to even when it became very difficult.”
Second, the act of expecting people to use objective and standard measures to evaluate each answer against agreed upon criteria—especially if the expectation is that any member of the committee must be prepared to defend their score with explicit reference to the agreed upon criteria—further reduces the possibility of bias creeping in to evaluation. Rather than just going on gut instinct (again a breeding ground for bias), an evaluator has to reflect on that instinct and evaluate for themselves whether they have good reason based on the external criteria to evaluate the way they feel they should. Combined with an awareness that this gut instinct could arise from bias against irrelevant features of an interviewee (age, race, gender, orientation, etc.), this could be enough for the interviewer to override a bias based evaluation and offer something more objective.
Third, behavioral based interviewing actually frees interviewees from the expectation of intimate familiarity with the specifics of what they are being interviewed for. A significant problem in many COM interviews is that they (largely unknowingly) set the criteria for what would make a good ordained minister so high that only people who are already trained as ordained ministers would be able to meet them. This proposed process slows the committee down and forces them to be explicit about what skills they think would indicate someone could be successful in ministerial formation. Ideally, instead of looking for whether “this person is an adequate preacher” (a skill necessary for ministry), the committee could look for indications that this person would succeed at learning how to preach. While it would take extra work, this could be accomplished through reaching out to preaching professors and asking if they notice any commonalities with the students who succeed or those who struggle and determining their questioning accordingly.
Finally, behavior based interviewing would actually allow COMs to more strategically, specifically, and concretely target areas that interviewees lacked without prematurely recommending underprepared people for postulancy, outright rejecting those people, or sending them away with nebulous suggestions for what they can get better at based on a hunch that they are underprepared. To go back to the example above, if someone can’t come up with a convincing time where they were faced with learning something new or challenging, you can point to that and say “we want you to try learning something that is new and challenging and come back and tell us about it in six months.”
One challenge to behavioral based interviewing is that it could just reintroduce bias at another level now under the guise of objectivity. It’s conceivable that the skills deemed necessary for ministry or the criteria for evaluating answers would unfairly advantage one group. This scenario is all that much more likely to happen if the COM is homogenous in some way. Remember above how I said diversity of those interviewing or evaluating on its own isn’t sufficient to guard against bias? Well here is a place where diversity of various kinds (age, race, gender, class, experience) can help mitigate bias. Having various representative perspectives doesn’t ensure that the metrics, which remember are developed prior to any interview, are less biased to any given prospective candidate, but it likely reduces that possibility.
Another concern that may be raised is that this process seems like it takes a lot of time and effort, and it does…at first. Behavior based interviewing takes a significant amount of group work on the front end to develop a list of skills necessary for the task being evaluated, questions that elicit past behaviors that can illuminate whether interviewees have those skills, and criteria for evaluating those answers. But once this initial work is done, those embracing behavioral based interviewing will find that it cuts down on a tremendous amount of discussion and evaluation time. Really, once metrics are in place, the only time outside of interviewing that is needed is the time to offer rationales for numerical scores and then tabulate those scores.
This last point, though, probably raises this question: Doesn’t all this talk of objective metrics and tabulations and scoring make what should be an organic, living process into a cold, rote, lifeless machine? Doesn’t this remove the je ne sais quoi element of discernment? Where is the room for the Spirit? To all this I would say: There is still considerable room for organic discernment at the beginning of the process in determining the skills necessary for successful contextual ministry. There is also still considerable room for discerning whether and to what extent particular answers meet the criteria decided upon. But, yes, put perhaps more positively than “reducing the human element,” this proposal means to reduce the subjectivity in the process where bias can flourish by requiring people to remain accountable for and reflective about their judgements. Moreover, the Spirit is still more than free in this process to help inspire particularly insightful answers from interviewees and to remove the scales of blindness from the eyes and hearts of interviewers. It is a profound mistake to assume that the Spirit only moves through inchoate and nebulous instinct and impulse and gut feeling, and in fact a structure like behavioral based interviewing seems to offer a means of “testing the spirits” akin to that prescribed in 1 John 4.
A shift toward more awareness of our conscious and unconscious biases, whether in our interpersonal relationships or institutional duties, will not on its own eradicate the systemic racism or the other forms of systemic prejudice that continue to plague our world. There are much larger material and ideological causes keeping these systems in place. At the same time, becoming aware of and mitigating the effects of our biases will only assist the work of deep relationship building and decrease the unfair barriers to decision-making power and material resources necessary for challenging and transforming these systems. And ultimately, taking the time to become aware of and gain distance from our biases is part of our own project of progressing in sanctification. Even if we were in no position for our biases to materially or socially affect others, confronting our biases increases our ability to move beyond ourselves and encounter God when confronted by the irreducible depth and complexity of other human subjects.
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