Jointly pre-defining what qualifying is, is a known protection against bias later in the process. I think that it's an underappreciated part of this whole thorny problem, the fact that the END of a hiring process can start to warp and introduce uneasy and invisible bias as people start to parse things as differences under the pressure of decision making. Same with grad school admissions imo: it's foolish to act like we are identifying the ten best when the top 100 are completely comparable.