It's a cool idea, but how do you head off the inevitable reveal of that information face-to-face? Or is it only for the earlier rounds (resume selection, etc).
Yes, for earlier rounds. But I think it would already be a huge improvement if you could narrow down to a handful of final candidates blind.
I'm also skeptical how much value is added face-to-face. I think the long term strategy would be to apply big data techniques to hiring. If you do long-term tracking of hiring outcomes, you could start to develop a suite of accurate hiring predictors. It is clear at least some current selectors are not very good (e.g. gender, first name). I'm aware of an elite academic dept. that doesn't do face-to-face meetings for hiring assistant professors. Someone in the dept. claimed the application packet was the best predictor of the kinds of success the dept. hires for and face-to-face wasn't useful, if not misleading.
It's an interesting idea. I wonder how it would work in the case of jobs where there's a strong interpersonal component. You could get someone who looks great on paper but who is a bad communicator or doesn't interact well with other people.
On the one hand, face-to-face does allow all these preconceptions and prejudices to happen. On the other, it allows the team to assess those things that actually matter in meetings, presentations, and other face-to-face venues.
Perhaps for a purely distributed company, this wouldn't matter. But in many existing cases, the face-to-face is still a factor.
You have to be careful what you're measuring. How well someone works in on a job is different from the first face-to-face meeting/interview. A better predictor of how well someone communicates and interacts in a team is probably (1) how well they communicate in the application process and (2) how well their previous employers said they communicate. A blind interview could still have text correspondence, programming interview questions, etc.
I still think you're not learning what you think you're learning from face-to-face. I don't have data on that, but then again, I'm guessing you don't either.
I know that professional orchestras (a job with a strong interpersonal component) do "blind" auditions behind a screen until the final round and then meet with the auditioners to evaluate the interpersonal component.
I think Gladwell wrote about this in one of his books. And what happened? Orchestras started hiring more women. And, I'm guessing, better overall musicians.
