Thank you for bringing up empathy. I think you are on the right track with it.
I would like to throw an experiment your way. As you mentioned, the interviewer, and interview questions itself can have its own bias. How about pre-screening questions? First, you would pool the possible set of interview questions. Then, once a month, a meaningful subset (or subsets) of 'regular' interviewers is created. Each subset gets one question from the pool and are required to complete it in 'interview like conditions' (closed room, no internet, just pen and paper). If the question has a poor answer rate with existing employees (aka interviewers), throw it out. It would be great if they explained what they did and did not like about the question and what would have made it easier. Would this process increase their empathy towards the interviewee? It needs to be frequent so it is a constant reminder.
Another, likely chaotic, option is to have the interviewer be randomly assigned a question from the pool. The question cannot have been their own submission. This way, both the interviewer and interviewee are seeing it for the first time and have to work toward a goal (team work).
Changing topics from interviewing to interview metrics... I would be interested in how interviewee - interviewer age differences affected outcomes.
I would like to throw an experiment your way. As you mentioned, the interviewer, and interview questions itself can have its own bias. How about pre-screening questions? First, you would pool the possible set of interview questions. Then, once a month, a meaningful subset (or subsets) of 'regular' interviewers is created. Each subset gets one question from the pool and are required to complete it in 'interview like conditions' (closed room, no internet, just pen and paper). If the question has a poor answer rate with existing employees (aka interviewers), throw it out. It would be great if they explained what they did and did not like about the question and what would have made it easier. Would this process increase their empathy towards the interviewee? It needs to be frequent so it is a constant reminder.
Another, likely chaotic, option is to have the interviewer be randomly assigned a question from the pool. The question cannot have been their own submission. This way, both the interviewer and interviewee are seeing it for the first time and have to work toward a goal (team work).
Changing topics from interviewing to interview metrics... I would be interested in how interviewee - interviewer age differences affected outcomes.