7 Types Of Hiring Bias And How To Avoid Them

“…chances are high that recruiting
and retaining talent end up in the top three challenges
an organization faces.” — Sachin Gupta, HackerEarth CEO and co-founder

Consciously or unconsciously there is hiring bias attached to every decision we make.

Making the right decision when hiring is essential to any company as it will determine if the new hire will be a perfect match for the required skills, the team attitude, and the company culture.

Today, technology and data have been of immense help while making recruitment decisions.

We have more information, and we are able to combine this information to make the best possible decision for any occasion.

Nevertheless, the ones who will make the decision, in the end, are people, and as humans, our decisions sometimes are not only based on facts and logic but on emotions and personal experiences as well.

We are vulnerable to bias. It is important to acknowledge that bias exists. That is the first step to avoiding such biases and being careful in the decisions that we take.

For more of such awesome blogs, hiring tips, and the latest trends, subscribe to our carefully curated monthly newsletter, The Hire Wire!

Common hiring biases to be aware of

• Confirmation bias

This is the type of bias when people create a hypothesis in their minds and look for ways to prove it.

The best example of such a bias is when you go through a CV and see that the candidate attended Harvard Business School; you expect the candidate to be a top performer because they are from an Ivy League school.

You do not dig too deep for fear your hypothesis may be invalidated and only take into consideration those factors that confirm your impression of the candidate. The candidate could be an exception or despite the skills he/she may possess, the candidate may be a mismatch for your company culture.

• Affinity bias

Affinity bias can be seen when you look for people who went to the same college as you did, or who grew up in the same city as you did.

You do not focus your attention on the necessary skills or knowledge but focus on similarities you may have with the candidate concerning your personal, educational, and professional background.

That said, finding someone from the same home city or someone who owns the same exact diploma as you do, can lead you to compromise on matching the desired skills and the full job requirements for your own similarities.

• Halo and horns effect

The Halo effect is the phenomenon where you assume that because people are good at doing one thing right, they will be good at doing other things right as well.

It is closely associated with first impressions. If you have a good first impression of someone, it is difficult for you to change the way you perceive this person later.

The opposite happens under the “Horns effect.”

If you formulate a negative impression about a candidate when you first meet him/her, then you tend to ignore any of his/her positive characteristics and concentrate only on the unfavorable ones.

• Expectation anchor

This particular type of bias occurs when a recruiter does the screening of several CVs and likes one of them more than the others.

Thus, the recruiter while interviewing all candidates will expect the candidate with the CV that he/she liked to perform better than the other candidates.

The recruiter will make decisions that are in favor of this one person whose CV he/she liked during the pre-screening process.

Consequently, all other candidates are at a disadvantage “compared” to the candidate that the recruiter favors.

• Intuition

In other words, it represents judgments we make based on our “sixth sense.” In some cases, recruiters do not have all the necessary information about a candidate, and they make assumptions based on their feelings and intellect.

Of course, sometimes you need to make decisions based on what you think, feel, or believe, but why make risky decisions when you have the opportunity to take “controlled risks”? (See the last caption of the article).

• Beauty Bias

You are guilt of beauty bias when you feel that because someone is “beautiful,” he/she will be more successful as well; or, if someone is tall, then this person will have better chances of becoming a CEO.

This actually happens today.

Sixty percent of American CEOs are over 6 foot while only 15% of the total population is over 6 feet tall; this shows some kind of bias in terms of what we think a CEO should look like.

A funny example here is the fact that Nicolas Sarkozy-a former French President, used to wear 2-inch elevator heels to boost him to 5 ft and 8 in. and look taller than he is because all his colleagues (presidents and prime ministers of other EU countries) looked taller.

• Effective heuristic

You are being an effective heuristic when you judge someone’s job suitability based on superficial factors such as the shape of his/her body, the type of his/her haircut, or the tattoos this person may have.

One very interesting fact related to this type of bias is what German researchers found:

• HR professionals who participated in the study use an alarming type of bias while making decisions
• The ability of obese individuals to achieve supervisory positions was underestimated
• Normal-weight individuals’ ability to achieve supervisory positions was overestimated

Judging people’s ability to perform well based on their body weight/shape, their appearance, or their tattoos is quite illogical, wouldn’t you say?

Everyone is special in his or her unique way, and no one has the right to make assumptions based on the aforementioned characteristics.

The same applies to recruiters.

They should avoid making decisions based on the way someone looks, and recruiters should avoid being biased in terms of how the performance of a candidate could be related to his/her superficial characteristics.

Best practices for avoiding hiring bias

Now that you are aware of which biases to be wary of, the next step would be to strategize how to not fall prey to such biases. Read the full article here to understand the how and why of avoiding bias is crucial for a more diverse hiring process.

Originally published at https://www.hackerearth.com on November 27th, 2017.