Recruiting fairly – avoiding bias

When recruiting to fill a particular position it can be too easy to have in your mind a picture of the kind person you think would be best.

This is one way in which bias can occur during the recruitment process, where a manager may find they are looking for someone to fit their idea of who the ideal candidate is, rather than taking each candidate on their own merits.

This can also lead to a lack of diversity in a workplace, where candidates are not recruited due to not being thought of as “fitting” with the organisation, rather than their ability to successfully do the role. This practice is not only an unfair recruitment process for candidates and in some cases could be illegal, but it also creates damaging situations for organisations.

For example, an organisation lacking in age, gender or ethnic diversity is unlikely to reflect or fully understand its customers. Similarly, there is likely to be a lack of different viewpoints in decision making and innovation if the majority of employees come from similar backgrounds with similar life experiences and are likely to agree with each other.

Examples

Affinity bias:

Endowment effect:

Confirmation bias:

Halo effect:

For example, did you know that during an interview process, people can sometimes only remember the responses to questions given at the end of the interview and one other point (peak-end bias)?

There are several ways in which HR can help make sure that bias does not affect the recruitment process, and this can start from the very beginning with the way that job adverts are written (we look at this further later this week) through to taking any identifying information off CVs so they are judged purely on the content without preconceptions about the candidate.