[White Paper] Removing Bias from Hiring Surveys for Diverse Applicant Pools

The frontline, hourly workforce represents the diversity of this country: they are racially diverse; range in age from teenagers through decades past retirement; speak a variety of languages at home; and can have post-graduate degrees or may not have completed high school (we recommend Brookings Institute’s recent report, Meet the Low-Wage Workforce). It’s important that all these different groups understand the StellarEmploy job survey questions in the same way so that we can draw conclusions about each applicant uniformly.

StellarEmploy worked with educational research firm, WestEd, to review the best ways to design surveys to be reliable across all types of people. In this document, you will find descriptions of the ways that different types of people might change their answers to questions in order to “please” the survey provider; that one group of people might think a given quantity is “a lot” and another might think that same quantity is “a little”; and the recommended design tricks to avoid these -- and other -- pitfalls.