If you’ve experienced an unsuccessful recruitment process in the past, you may be overlooking how unconscious bias could be preventing you from finding the right candidate for your role. To reduce the impact of unconscious bias in recruitment, it’s important to first understand how it occurs, and then consider what you can do to overcome it.
What is unconscious bias?
Biases are tendencies to see the world in certain ways. Everyone has biases but the level of bias can vary depending on a number of factors including our upbringing, experiences and the media. Unconscious bias is an individual’s unaware prejudice against a specific group. For example, this could be based on someone’s age group, gender, race, sexual orientation or other characteristic such as weight, hair colour or even clothing.
Biases are influenced by cultural background, experiences and environment and is made in a split second by our unconscious brain. It’s for this reason that it’s so difficult to establish and rectify. Unconscious bias happens automatically and it affects everyone, everywhere.
A little over 20 years ago a team of social psychologists at Yale devised a controversial test (the Implicit Association Test) to establish whether people were being unknowingly prejudiced.
Whilst the test is academically controversial, the Implicit Association Test (IAT) revealed that the majority of people tested were unable to be completely without prejudice in one form or another. The test revealed that the participants tended to feel biased towards their own race and biased against older people.
Unconscious bias in recruitment
In a world that is striving to represent all walks of life in the workplace, unconscious bias goes a long way to explaining why many cross sections of society are underrepresented in senior management teams and in boardrooms.
For example, in a 2009 experimental study, job applicants with a white sounding name were found to be a significant 74% more likely to be asked to a job interview than applicants with an ethnic minority sounding name (Full fact).
If unconscious bias in recruitment is stopping genuine talent from making it to roles in our organisations, then our businesses are being negatively affected as a result.
None of us want to be biased – unconsciously or otherwise – so it’s important to accept that unconscious bias can occur and affect our recruitment processes and hiring decisions.
Types of unconscious bias in recruitment
Below is a summary of the key types of bias that could be affecting your hiring decisions.
Successive Contrasting bias
Successive contrasting bias may occur when you carry out an interview with an excellent candidate that you think could be the right person for the role, but you are meeting with several more candidates that day. As a result, you may pick fault, and look less favourably on the next candidates that you interview. This could affect up to three subsequent candidates, who may have been more positively judged under different conditions.
Confirmation bias
Confirmation bias might occur if you have previously had a good working relationship or experience with someone that has a specific trait or characteristic – green hair, for example. If you then meet a candidate that has green hair you may unconsciously have a positive association with them, or interpret their application and interview more positively in order to confirm your hypothesis/belief. You may even overlook more capable candidates due to your own biased belief of the green-haired candidate’s abilities.
Halo effect
The halo effect was observed by Edward Thorndike in the 1920s. It refers to the tendency to let a candidate’s good qualities cloud your perception of their less attractive qualities. Take caution, as what we perceive as ‘good qualities’ is also weighted by our own bias. As a result we may overlook a candidate’s other weaknesses and be distracted by ‘the halo covering their horns’. (People Management)
Bandwagon bias
Bandwagon bias or ‘group think’ causes a group to make a decision to maintain group harmony, rather than choosing the correct candidate. A strong-willed group member may insist to the rest of the group that their preferred candidate is better than the others, and is the right choice for the role. To avoid confrontation with the strong-willed group member, the group are persuaded to choose this candidate regardless of whether they are the correct person for the job.
Anchoring bias
This occurs when a hiring manager relies too much on a specific detail of the candidate’s application and makes assumptions and judgements about other elements of their abilities without gaining evidence. For example, because a candidate is experienced with customer service from working in a bank, the interviewer may assume the candidate’s abilities to handle finance issues without having evidence of this.
Affinity bias
This is where a manager has a tendency to build rapport with someone similar to them, they may see themselves in a candidate and therefore immediately build better rapport with them.
In-group/out-group bias
This can occur where workforce ‘cliques’ develop and members of the ‘in-group’ are favoured over those in the ‘out-group’. For example in a law firm, a fee-earning staff member may be favoured more by a senior colleague than a non-fee earning staff member.
How to avoid unconscious bias in recruitment
The following four methods are proven to be impactful in reducing the effects of unconscious bias in the hiring process.
1. Interview scoring – Quantify the Qualitative
Natural human chemistry plays a part in unconscious bias. An interviewer will naturally gravitate to a candidate they can see themselves getting along with on a personal level, or who shares the same interests. This may not mean that they are the best fit for the role.
Much of an interview process may include reviewing qualitative aspects, for example, a candidate’s people skills, how well a candidate may work in the current team culture, or ‘likeability’. Firstly, be careful to consider if these aspects are important to the role in question. Secondly, by quantifying these aspects, in the same way you would any other relevant professional attribute, you will gain perspective and control over unconscious bias.
By using interview scoring methods to measure a candidate’s performance at interview, you can compare applications based on quantifiable scores, and find a candidate that is right for the role by fulfilling far more requirements. Quantifying these aspects might seem like an odd measure, but it will help to gauge competency with less bias.
2. Share the decision making
More heads are often better than one, and by involving more people in the interview process, you will gain a greater insight into the candidate’s suitability. Avoid sharing opinions about candidates until a final stage, or decision-making stage. By including several different managers in the interview process, you can review interview notes, and have more interview scores to compare, and reveal a candidate’s suitability more effectively.
This will also reduce the impact of any bias that may have affected any stages of the interview process.
3. Revise your job descriptions, person specifications and adverts
Words have unintended connotations. To reduce bias from the outset of the recruitment process, stick to neutral language in job descriptions and adverts, or bounce between both masculine and feminine phraseology to encourage as many applicants as possible.
For organisations who employ on a regular basis, or in large numbers, it could be worth exploring software that identifies and suggests alternatives to ‘heavily-gendered’ words. For example, this Gender Decoder tool checks the wording in your job adverts.
4. Drastically simplify CVs
Simon Fanshawe, co-founder of Diversity by Design and a well known leader in the workplace diversity space, has shared how removing names from CVs helped to combat bias in a university he was working with. This allowed the experience to shine through without the filter of gender or ethnicity to cloud the process.
And it didn’t stop there. Simon asked “Why do [those hiring] want to know what university [applicants] went to?” One explanation is that those doing the hiring “are simply biased and … think if people went to Cambridge, they are better,” (Inside Higher Ed)
This approach has been adopted twice by Nottingham University – both positions were taken by women. Furthermore 15% of applicants and 35% shortlisted were women – the shortlist-to-applicant ratio far exceeded the typical ratios, proving that the system works.
Try simplifying your applicant CVs before sending them to hiring managers.
5. Be aware of your biases and address them
Although we all have unconscious biases, the most important technique for addressing them, is to firstly acknowledge them and to establish our own biases. Awareness is the first step towards removing unconscious bias from recruitment practices, and the workplace more generally.
On an organisational level, it’s also important to develop a company culture in which discussions around bias can be held in an open and constructive manner. It’s important to challenge decisions of a recruitment panel if it seems that bias has played a part in that decision.
In recruitment, bias can even come into effect before someone has applied for a role. It’s therefore important to challenge the assumptions about a situation or the stereotypes held in an organisation. One way of doing this is through the use of role models. Something as simple as championing people or using images of people in certain roles around the premises can challenge people’s views on what roles you would expect to see them in.
Another method for breaking down biases that may exist is mentoring. Reciprocal or reverse mentoring can be beneficial in certain circumstances. This is where junior members of staff are paired with more senior members, not only can the senior person mentor the junior employee, the junior employee can provide insight and challenge biases that the senior employee may have about younger or more junior employees.
Final thoughts
Reflecting on our hiring practices and reducing unconscious bias in recruitment where possible will create more successful recruitment processes, and initiate positive changes in our own workplaces.
We hope you found this article useful. If you would like more information on how to address unconscious bias in recruitment, or any other aspects of your recruitment process, please contact our team.
