Shared decision-making
Each person involved in the hiring or assessment process has individual idiosyncratic biases and can only get an imperfect signal of a candidate’s value to the organization. Having a panel of multiple people independently consider the information about a candidate can be expensive because it requires more staff time.
However, aggregating over multiple people’s independent judgments will tend to get closer to the truth if their individual biases tend to cancel each other out. Having each staff member review evidence, and develop and submit preliminary assessments independently, guards against groupthink based off others’ analytic effort and increases the chances of gaining benefit from multiple evaluations. It can also promote more fruitful, shared deliberation afterward. When everyone develops assessment simultaneously, attention wanders and herding can occur. There are costs, though. Interviewees do not want to sit through the same kind of interview many times. Video recording may help in this context, as it allows for multiple, independent, asynchronous assessments. Similarly, child protection staff assess, investigate, and adjudicate each situation, and group decision-making promotes more consistent judgment, and more effective outcomes. Further, investing in the quality and capacity of child welfare supervisors is critical for supporting caseworkers and enhancing the quality of their assessments.