This tip targets faculty search committees, but is useful anytime you have multiple candidates to consider across multiple criteria. Dr. Brian Nosek, co-founder of Project Implicit, recommends that unconscious bias could be reduced if, after explicitly defining the evaluation criteria in a manner that was easy to determine if the criteria were met, candidates were evaluated across each criterion collectively. He believes this increases the probability that the evaluation criteria are each applied equally across all candidates. This is probably different than the path most committees take. Typically, faculty search commitees read each application and consider it against all criteria, then move on to the next application.
While this strategy might be challenging with very large numbers of applications to consider, it is reasonable to do at a later stage in the recruitment process such as near the "long-short list" and "short list" stages.
Bias, Discrimination, Harassment Resources
