Supporting diversity should always be a top priority when designing your screening assessments. For the Weirdly team, it’s been one of our biggest drivers since we wrote our first line of code. Screening assessments that reduce volume and make awesome candidate experiences don’t have to come at the cost of your inclusive, diversity-driving recruitment strategy. That’s why we run every custom Weirdly question bank through a battery of diversity-qualifying tests.
If you’re already a Weirdly fan/user feel free to skip this section. For those of you unfamiliar with our awesome screening assessments, here’s the 101:Weirdly custom assessments test candidates for alignment to your core values and work best early on in your recruitment process - either first stage/pre-application (like an expressions of interest quiz) or post-application. We design each quiz so it’s bespoke to your organisation. That means it looks and feels like you, with your branding, colours, and the kind of engaging interactions your candidates will expect from your brand. But most importantly, that customisation extends to creating a bank of validated questions that reflect your unique culture and values.
This is where Weirdly has been described as “new psych” - differentiating us from the staid, “old psych” approach favoured by many of the other assessment tools used in the industry. Old psych is based in a very static, one-size-fits-all approach - it rewards uniformity and monoculture. We believe better assessments - more valuable and inclusive assessments - are ones that allow for a more flexible, customised approach. One that not only recognises how different people and company cultures are, but sees that as a strength - something to be leaned into and enhanced. It’s about celebrating the diversity of different company cultures on offer to candidates, as much as it is about helping those companies build diverse teams.We’re not throwing the baby out with the bath water, our internal psych team use traditional validation methods to make sure each quiz is rigorously tested and performs as it should. What’s different is we’re not only referencing global or generic norm groups for that validation (old psych standard practice). With Weirdly, your norm group is truly representative of your organisation because it comes from within your own company, and is then continuously post-validated against the candidates you have applying and getting hired.
Every quiz and question bank is run through a battery of tests to make sure it’s going to support your diversity strategy. Our team (alongside yours) work to make sure we’re reducing potential for discrimination down to the absolute minimum. That includes things like:
Eliminating gender-bias in word choice by running all questions and copy through tools like Text.io. This also includes using gender-neutral pronouns across the board.
Being inclusive of diverse education levels. By using the Flesch-Kincaid readability checker across every Weirdly quiz we can make sure language complexity is set at approx a 6th-8th grade reading level. Incidentally, this is the same standard major media channels aim for.
Ensuring balanced representation in imagery for our gold level animated or illustrated quizzes. It’s about showcasing people with a diverse range of backgrounds, ethnic identities, ages and abilities.
Using inclusive scenarios for experience-based questions. That means, for example, we’ll take care to frame a sports-related question in a way that’s really inclusive of wheelchair users. And we (mostly) make Jamie resist his urge to write quizzes based entirely around early 90’s hip-hop culture. This month we’ve also kicked off our latest accessibility project. Our UX crew are systematically auditing and tweaking our user experience (first for candidates, then for customer admins). This will mean our customers can make their Weirdly quiz as easy to complete for someone with dyslexia or vision impairment, as it is for someone without those challenges.
The recognition that “diversity is strength” for an organisation isn’t going anywhere. The opportunity to actively drive that forward is in your hands as recruiters and people-professionals so it’s super-important to make sure your HRTech tools are up to the challenge.
Is creating an inclusive application experience important to your recruiting team? Pick a time now to talk to one of our team about how Weirdly can improve your process.
