Disclosing the Interviewer's Own Bias
Launch library · evergreen read
No interviewer approaches a conversation entirely without perspective, and pretending otherwise is less honest than acknowledging, at least to oneself and sometimes to the reader, where a genuine bias might be shaping which questions feel natural to ask and which follow ups go unpursued. Most interviewers never pause to name this perspective explicitly, even to themselves.
This kind of disclosure need not be elaborate or constant, but a private habit of checking one's own assumptions before and during a sitting helps guard against a bias quietly steering the conversation without the interviewer ever consciously noticing it happening. A quiet, private habit of checking assumptions helps considerably here.
Where a bias is significant enough to genuinely affect the interview's fairness, disclosing it openly, either to the subject or to the eventual reader, is often the more honest path than attempting to disguise a perspective that was shaping the exchange all along. That honesty, however uncomfortable, generally serves the material better than a false claim of neutrality.