The best compromise I’ve found is to have a dedicated person or team perform high-quality first pass filtering of candidates so that the engineers don’t waste their interviewing energy on interviewing any and every candidate. It’s an iterative process that requires constant fine-tuning. It also tends to have a higher false negative rate, so you’ll have to increase the number of candidates entering the funnel.
It’s also important to give interviewers an out to bail early on candidates who are obviously unqualified early in the process. Multi-stage interviews are good here, but you can’t drag the process out for too long. Avoid scheduling more than a 30-60 minute interview before you have a good idea that the candidate is on the right track. Don’t be afraid to politely dismiss a candidate halfway through an interview if they’re obviously not going to work out.
The second topic is more difficult:
> Am I complicit in a racist, sexist system?
If you’re not familiar with all the permutations of this line of thinking, it goes much deeper than you might expect. The pop culture definition of various -ists and -isms varies greatly from person to person. The fear of accidentally crossing into territory that might classify ones self as the “bad” person is a growing fear for people who grew up in the age of Twitter shaming and hyperbolic news stories about evil corporations. The pressure to avoid feeling like one is on the wrong side of history can lead people to make choices in a self-protective fashion rather than doing what’s best for the team or company. I don’t have a great answer to this, but it’s important to keep the dialogues open rather than forcing everyone to determine their own narratives internally. Those unspoken narratives can have an outsized influence on decisions if you don’t get ahead of it as a company.