IMPROVING DIVERSITY

HOW TO REDUCE UNCONSCIOUS BIAS WHEN HIRING

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CONTENTS

REVELIAN ASSESSMENTS

TOP TIPS FOR REDUCING UNCONSCIOUS BIAS

HOW CAN I MITIGATE UNCONSCIOUS BIAS AT MY ORGANISATION?

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF REDUCING UNCONSCIOUS BIAS?

WHAT IS UNCONSCIOUS BIAS?

HOW DO BIASES IMPACT OUR BEHAVIOUR?

Read the following passage and think about your answer before continuing.

A father and his son were in a car accident. The father died on impact, and the son was taken to the nearest hospital. At the last minute, the surgeon pulled away from the boy and said, “I can’t operate on this boy, he’s my son.” How can this be?

The answer is…. The surgeon is the boy’s mother.

Many people struggle to come up with this answer, and actually, most people don’t get it. Some of us might think that the boy had 2 gay fathers, and earn a tick in the LGBTI box, but not the gender equality box.

If you haven’t heard this puzzle before, it’s a great way to demonstrate how our unconscious bias works, and the impact it can have on diversity in the workplace. Unconscious bias – by its very nature – is unconscious, meaning that we are unaware of it, making it all the more difficult to address. It’s a way for our brain to save resources and make quick decisions and judgments with minimal effort, but that doesn’t always work to our advantage.

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I HAVE A CHALLENGE FOR YOU…

Biases are something that every single person on the planet has, because they’re human and have a brain. They’re incredibly useful in many ways: because our brains have to process millions of pieces of information at any one time, most of this processing happens unconsciously. In other words, we’ve created mental shortcuts for ourselves (the word ‘bias’ derives from the Greek word ‘oblique’, meaning a diagonal line).

These shortcuts actually help to keep us on an even keel. As David Rock, Director of the NeuroLeadership Institute puts it, our biases help us navigate the world with marginal effort. Making conscious decisions takes a lot of brain power, and our brains have evolved to take shortcuts for the majority of the decisions it makes to conserve energy for the more important decisions.

So, when we make a quick assessment or judgement about other people – which we do every time we see or interact with people – most of it happens unconsciously on the basis of our background, cultural environment and personal experiences. It’s fast, automatic and, as the name suggests, unconscious.

We’d like to believe we are open-minded, fair and without bias, but research shows otherwise. This is an important, even if uncomfortable, realisation for all of us.

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard University and author of

Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People

WHAT IS UNCONSCIOUS BIAS?

EVERYONE WITH A BRAIN IS BIASED

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It’s easy to feel offended when someone tells us we’re biased. Most of us like to think we’re open-minded, rational, enlightened people who treat everyone equally, regardless of ethnicity, gender, age, weight, height, language, sexual identity and so on. Bias has a stigma attached.

The fact is that regardless of our very best efforts, scientists have shown that every single brain has over 100 biases built in. They’re built in to our brain structure and are a critical part of how we process information. In short: if you have a brain, you have biases.

Even if you think you’re not biased, there’s a reason for that. It’s called Blind Spot Bias, also known as ‘naïve realism’ and is one of the most challenging biases to overcome. It leads us to believe that our own perception of reality is objective, accurate and not influenced by other biases. So while we can see biases in other people, we’re easily convinced that they don’t affect us or impact our judgement.

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Some claim we have over 150 different biases embedded in our brains; others place the number around the 100 mark. In a workplace situation, some biases are clearly going to be more important than others, particularly those that discriminate against people.

The infographic at the end of this whitepaper highlights 21 of the more dangerous ones, including biases that lead us to prefer people who are similar to us over those who are dissimilar.

On a practical level, biases can come into play when we’re hiring new people, conducting performance reviews, bringing teams together, looking for ‘expert input’ for a project, promoting someone to a leadership role, and offering development opportunities. They can also impact team performance, decision-making effectiveness, organisational culture and, ultimately, the success of the organisation.

Most of us are aware of the more well-known biases such as gender and ethnicity: making assumptions about people based on their gender or ethnic background. In many ways, even these ‘common’ biases can be more insidious than you might think.

Let’s look at few examples.

Perhaps the most famous example of gender bias is from orchestras. Realising that less than 5% of their members were women, the top international orchestras began conducting blind auditions. Today, the numbers of women are closer to the 25-30% mark.

HOW DO BIASES IMPACT OUR BEHAVIOUR?

GENDER BIASES

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A study from Yale University asked male and female science researchers to rate two candidates with the same qualifications for a lab manager position. All of the researchers rated the male candidate more favourably than the female candidate. They were also willing to pay him a higher salary.

Men were found to be more likely to critique females for coming on too strong, and to attribute a woman’s success as being due to external factors or ‘luck’, according to Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research. On the other hand, the same men attributed men’s success to their individual effort and abilities.

During a recent study conducted by the Australian National University, over 4000 resumes were sent out to different organisations. Each was identical, apart from the candidate’s name. They found that to get as many interviews as an applicant with an Anglo sounding name:

• An indigenous person had to submit 35% more applications;• A Chinese person had to submit 68% more applications;• An Italian person had to submit 12% more applications; and• A Middle Eastern person had to submit 64% more applications.

Revelian product manager Salih Mujcic has also had a similar experience, which you can read about here.

Associate professor of linguistics at Stanford University, Meghan Sumner, found that where we’re from and how we feel about particular accents dictate how we listen to others. Most of us prefer a particular type of voice in terms of gender, accent and intonation. For example, in the US, she found that most people preferred listening to a “Southern Standard British English” voice over a New York City accent, and so were more inclined to remember what the person with the English accent said, and consider them to be more intelligent than people with other accents.

And, despite MRI data analyses showing that bilingual people have better cognitive processes including attention and inhibitory control, memory and cognitive flexibility, than monolingual people, many people with English (or any other language native to the country they now live in) as a second language find themselves discriminated against because of their accents.

These are just a few of the different types of bias that impact our HR processes. Others include educational background (where the person went to school); location (where the person grew up or currently lives) appearance (weight, height, level of attractiveness, disfigurement); age and disability.

To read more on this topic we highly recommend Ramon Martinez – Mendoza’s blog post on Why does my accent influence people’s perceptions of my intelligence or ability?

NAMES/ETHNICITY

VOICES/ACCENTS

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We all want to hire and retain the best talent. While the impact of a poor hire can be felt more keenly by smaller businesses, it has repercussions for organisations of all sizes.

If we’re automatically disqualifying people based on unconscious biases, without really understanding the basis of our decisions, we’re immediately reducing the pool of talent we invite into our organisations, which in turn means we’re reducing the likelihood of hiring the very best people for the job. In other words, we’re hiring someone who fits into an unconscious, probably irrational pre-conceived idea of what the best person will be like.

If you haven’t already, download our Definitive Guide to Hiring Employees for Small and Medium Businesses for lots of great tips on creating a successful recruitment process.

We all want our teams to be engaged, committed, productive and satisfied. And it’s been proven repeatedly that diverse teams are more innovative and better able to tackle complex problems more successfully. Multiple perspectives, backgrounds and experiences help to improve problem-solving capability, raise team intelligence and increase creativity, while reducing mindless conformity.

The reality is that if we don’t address unconscious biases, we’ll never create an inclusive work environment with all the benefits of diverse ideas and ways of working.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS/IMPACT OF REDUCING UNCONSCIOUS BIAS?

GETTING THE BEST PEOPLE

IMPROVING DIVERSITY AND INNOVATION

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Attracting and retaining great talent is competitive, particularly for smaller businesses who don’t always spring to mind as a desired employer when compared to the bigger companies with better known brands. So it makes no sense to unwittingly damage your employer brand reputation through biased hiring, management or promotion practices. Adopting practices to mitigate unconscious bias in your recruitment can have the effect of strengthening your employer brand and attractiveness. Let’s face it, people talk –either face to face or via various social media platforms – so you want that word of mouth to be positive.

There’s also a very strong financial case for building a more inclusive workplace. According to the Diversity Council of Australia, greater executive and board diversity in organisations leads to equity returns more than 50 per cent higher and gross earnings 15 per cent higher than organisations with lower diversity.

A study of 506 US-based companies found that gender and racial diversity was associated with increased sales revenue (businesses with high racial diversity earned 15 times more sales revenue than those with the lowest levels), more customers, greater market share, and greater relative profits.

ENHANCING YOUR EMPLOYER BRAND

FINANCIAL RETURNS

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Google, Facebook, IBM, Salesforce and Microsoft, amongst other tech giants, have been working hard at trying to overturn bias by making the unconscious conscious: in other words, raising awareness of unconscious bias in the workplace. They’ve introduced workshops for their teams, and many have released publically available diversity videos than anyone can download and use.

The question is: do they work? One year after Google began its training program, the composition of its workforce remained largely unchanged. The ratio of women to men stayed the same. The number of white employees fell from 61% to 60%, while the number of Asian employees increased from 30% to 31%. Hispanic and African-American employee numbers remained unchanged.

Of course, it’s early days for these organisations, many of whom have only begun focusing on unconscious bias in the past 2 or 3 years. However, there is a large problem with relying on training programs to mitigate bias: many scientists claim they don’t actually work.

A recent Harvard study looked at data from more than 800 organisations over 31 years to see which diversity programs had increased the numbers of women and minorities in leadership roles. They found that, on the whole, diversity training had “no positive effects in the average workplace.” They further commented that “Overall, companies that try to change managers’ behaviour through training and evaluations have not seen much change. This is disappointing, because training is the most popular program and, by most accounts, the most costly.”

So, if awareness and training on their own won’t improve the problem, what can we do that will have an impact?

HOW CAN I MITIGATE UNCONSCIOUS BIAS AT MY ORGANISATION?

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Of course, the first step is becoming aware of our biases. While awareness on its own doesn’t help us overcome our unconscious biases, it does help us recognise that we’re subject to them. This can involve identifying the different biases that might exist in our workplace, and then developing strategies to counter their impact. Methods could include conducting employee surveys to identify problem areas and openly discussing biases that can lead to unfairness.

As we mentioned earlier, we want to hire the best people for our business: people that are going to be superstar performers. And because biases can hinder us from identifying the most suitable candidates, we need to design a robust recruitment process that protects us from their impact at each step of the way.

A best practice recruitment methodology looks something like this: structured, consistent, objective and designed to remove bias and enhance diversity at every step of the process.

Let’s take a look at each step.

INCREASE AWARENESS

ADOPT A HIGHLY STRUCTURED RECRUITMENT PROCESS

Job description: checked for

inclusive language

Source candidates: ensure multiple

channels

Screen candidates: according to the same consistent

criteria

Assess candidates for suitability:

scientific, validated, objective criteria

Interview candidates: structured and

consistent, notes taken, multiple perspectives

Reference check candidates: same as

interviews

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1. WRITE AN INCLUSIVE JOB DESCRIPTION

While this might seem like the most innocuous part of the process, there’s still room for bias when writing job descriptions. For example, studies have shown that particular words and phrases are more likely to attract or repel female candidates.

Textio, a recently launched company that analyses the text of job descriptions and advertisements and suggests how to make them more successful and inclusive, has shown that words like exhaustive, enforcement and fearless(masculine toned) and transparent, catalyst and in touch with (feminine toned) actually exerted a bias effect. Simply using more masculine words in an ad made it significantly more likely that a male would be hired and vice versa.

What does this mean for inclusive hiring? We need to be very careful about the words and phrases we use in our job descriptions and ads, to make sure we’re not inadvertently excluding brilliant candidates because the language doesn’t appeal to them. This can have repercussions not just in terms of gender, but also age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity and so on.

Interestingly, Textio also found that jobs with descriptions that included equal opportunity statements and inclusive phrases such as gender equality were filled more quickly than those without.

The more candidates you can get your job in front of, the better your chances at attracting top performers. In practice, this means identifying all of the places your ideal candidates are likely to be and ensuring you get the word out to them. Different job boards, forums, social media platforms and publications can attract different demographics in terms of location, ethnicity, age and gender amongst others, so it’s imperative that you cover as many as you can.

The whole purpose of a recruitment process is to identify the most suitable candidates for a role. And the best way to find out if people have the skills and qualifications you need is to ask them to fill out an application form. This is easy if you use an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) or a job board that allows you to ask questions of your candidates. However, if you don’t have access to either of these, the next best thing is a simple checklist, which could include:

2. SOURCE CANDIDATES FROM RELEVANT PLACES

3. SCREEN CANDIDATES CONSISTENTLY

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At the end of this process, you should have a list of checks in boxes and ratings. You can assign a ‘1’ for each check, and add this and your ratings together. You can then sort your applications into 3 groups: Yes, No, and Maybe.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that we’re advocating the use of psychometric assessments during the recruitment process. But it’s for a good reason: properly constructed and validated psychometric assessments give you a clear, objective, scientific appraisal of each candidate.

A meta-analysis conducted by Gallup found that when companies selected the top 20% of candidates using a scientific assessment, they were likely to experience 41% less absenteeism, 70% fewer safety incidents, 59% less turnover, 10% higher customer metrics, 17% higher productivity and 21% higher profitability.

What is surprising is that some organisations still aren’t convinced of the effectiveness of psychometric assessments, despite all of the evidence that confirms they’re the most efficient and effective way to

identify top performers.

For example, after analyzing over 85 years of research across 32,000 job applicants and 500 different jobs, Frank Schmidt and John Hunter found that a valid cognitive or general mental ability (GMA) assessment was the single best and most effective way of predicting performance at work, regardless of industry, role type or location.

• A list of the absolute essentials for the position, based on the job description e.g. residency status, required licenses, qualifications or skills, with a checkbox next to each one (this will help you quickly eliminate the people who don’t meet your minimum criteria)

• A list of the ‘nice to have’ criteria, based on the job description with a checkbox or rating scale for each one

• A rating (e.g. 1-3) for how polished the application is (especially if the role requires a high level of literacy or written communication skills).

4. ASSESS CANDIDATES OBJECTIVELY AND SCIENTIFICALLY

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They can also help you identify people who will:

And the best thing about them? They’re blind: assessments will objectively measure people’s attributes and behaviours, regardless of their ethnicity, gender, age, level of education and other background characteristics.You can learn more about psychometric assessments on our website at www.revelian.com.

Unfortunately, many hiring managers prefer unstructured interviews – an informal, ‘getting to know you’ type of process that allows them to explore different facets of each candidate – over a more structured, scientific approach. It’s unfortunate because unstructured interviews have been repeatedly shown to be one of the very worst methods of predicting performance at work. It’s little better than picking someone from your shortlist at random, yet people prefer them because they feel confident in their ability to determine the best candidates.

The best – and most scientifically reliable – strategy at this stage is a structured, standardized interview process with identical questions, used consistently across every candidate. As Iris Bohnet of Harvard University notes, while this approach can make the flow of conversation throughout the interview feel a little more awkward, the payoffs are definitely worth it.

• Share your organisation’s values and culture • Have the emotional intelligence to work well with others, lead a team and interact with

customers• Behave with integrity• Enjoy the day-to-day requirements of their job• Take personal responsibility for safety

5. CONDUCT STRUCTURED INTERVIEWS

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Bohnet suggests several other strategies to increase objectivity for interviews:

Like interviews, reference checks can be inadvertently influenced by biases. The best strategy is similar to conducting structured interviews: each referee should be asked the same set of questions; their responses should be recorded and scored at the time; when reviewing we should ensure we have sufficient evidence to make a judgement.

Based on the orchestra recruitment strategy of blind auditions – or, if you prefer, The Voice – blind recruitment removes key identifiers such as name, gender, dates, educational institutions: anything that could trigger human biases. It’s gaining popularity across the world: companies such as Deloitte, HSBC, the BBC, Virgin Money and KPMG are using variations of the strategy.

Recently, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) wanted to increase the numbers of females in senior roles, so they removed names, genders and other identifiers from applications. In addition, they emphasised flexible hours and working from home options as well as providing training for their interview panels and management on unconscious bias. As a result, 15 of 19 senior hires were female, whereas previously only 21% of their senior roles were filled by women.

• Questions should be asked in the same order for all candidates.• Each interviewer should score each question immediately after the candidate answers it. This

means we don’t need to rely on memory, or be swayed by any other judgements our unconscious mind might make during the rest of the interview.

• We should compare responses horizontally when reviewing them. So, for example, if we interview ten candidates, we should review each candidate’s response to Question 1 at the same time, then Question 2 and so on.

• When reviewing each candidate’s answers we should continually ask ourselves what evidence we have to base our decision on.

• Each interviewer should keep their assessment separate from other interviewers to prevent being influenced by their point of view.

• Once everyone has reviewed and scored all of the candidates, their scores should be aggregated before all evaluators meet to discuss each candidate.

6. CONDUCT REFERENCE CHECKS

BLIND RECRUITMENT

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Also in Australia, an initiative of the Victorian Government called RecruitSmarter is currently rolling out across organisations including Westpac, Ernst & Young, Deloitte, Australia Post, PwC, Dow Chemical and the Victoria Police. They’ll be removing names, and other details that could provide clues about gender, cultural background, ethnicity, age, location, educational institutions – even interests that could indicate a specific demographic. Recruiters will need to decide who advances further based only on each applicant’s skills, relevant qualifications and reasons for applying for the job.

So while this sounds promising, the effectiveness of blind recruitment warrants further research (particularly in the psychological literature) to determine the overall effectiveness over and above other initiatives. It may be helpful, and a good step towards decreasing the impact of unconscious bias, but it’s not a silver bullet by any means.

As the saying goes: if you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it. It’s important to set goals for your organisation and then monitor your progress periodically. This gives you something to aim for, and also helps to keep reducing bias and improving diversity front of mind across the organisation. Pinterest, Twitter and other organisations have adopted this approach, and have also shared their goals publically to make them more accountable.

Any strategy to mitigate bias and improve diversity and inclusion must be part of a larger push to address these factors at all levels and across all areas of the organisation.

A study by Dobbin et al systematically analysed data from a large group of companies to see which kinds of programs had work best to increase diversity. They found that “The good news is that companies that give diversity councils, or diversity managers, responsibility for getting more women and minorities into good jobs typically see significant increases in the diversity of managers. So do companies that create formal mentoring programs.” Having teams and individuals responsible and answerable for improving diversity and inclusion across the organisation can go a long way to tempering the impact of unconscious biases.

The key is to identify the processes and situations that are impacted by bias and take an holistic approach that aims to increase awareness of dangerous biases, put in place procedures that reduce their impact, and make people responsible and accountable for improving diversity and inclusion.

SET DIVERSITY GOALS

ADOPT A MULTI-FACETED APPROACH

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To summarise, here are our top recommendations for mitigating the effect of bias on your hiring process.

TOP TIPS FOR REDUCING UNCONSCIOUS BIAS

1. Understand that breaking biases is hard, because they’re complex, automatic and unconscious.

2. Remember that there’s no shame in holding unconscious biases: our brains are hardwired for them and they help us navigate the world more easily.

3. Ensure that people understand the importance of reducing the impact of biases and are on board with the relevant initiatives.

4. Review hiring processes to understand when biases can creep in and influence judgement.

5. Implement scientific and equitable recruitment processes to reduce the impact of biases at each stage.

6. Ask each candidate to answer the same questions when applying and assess responses consistently.

7. Conduct structured interviews with multiple interviewers to increase objectivity and neutrality.

8. Use psychometric assessments to appraise each candidate objectively.9. Appoint people or groups to suggest and spearhead diversity and inclusion initiatives

across the organisation.10. Measure it! Make sure you define what success looks like and measure your progress

over time.

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COGNITIVE ABILITY TEST

Identify people who will learn quickly, reason effectively and solve problems.

SEPARATE ABILITY TESTS

Focus on just one aspect of ability: verbal, numerical or abstract reasoning ability.

THEME PARK HEROAn engaging and interactive way to understand a candidate’s mental agility, cognitive speed, spatial aptitude, attention and numerical reasoning ability.

COGNIFYA set of 5-7 mini-games or puzzles that measure problem-Solving, numerical reasoning, processing speed, and verbal knowledge.

BEHAVIOURAL PROFILE Understand how people prefer to interact with others, deal with rules and procedures, and solve problems.

16 PERSONALITY FACTORS

Get a more comprehensive profile of a person, with an in-depth assessment of the unique characteristics that underlie and influence their behaviour.

EMOTIONALINTELLIGENCE (MSCEIT)

Understand how well candidates can identify and manage their own and other people’s emotions.

WORK SAFETY ASSESSMENT

Identify people who are more likely to behave safely at work and avoid risky behaviour.

RELIABILITY SCALE Identify whether a candidate is likely to be trustworthy and reliable.

VALUES INVENTORYPredict organisational commitment by measuring how well the candidate’s work-related values match the organisation’s values.

WORK PREFERENCESPredict job satisfaction by measuring how well the candidate’s task preferences match the requirements of the role.

900+ SKILLS TESTS Measure technical and practical skills to ensure candidates have the skills required for the role.

VIDEO INTERVIEWINGScreen candidates quickly with tailored interview questions and ask everyone involved to review and score each candidate.

REVELIAN ASSESSMENTS

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Our assessments will give you objective, scientific information about your candidates to help you make more equitable and bias-free selection decisions.

View the full suite of assessments and further information about how each one helps you identify the best people at www.revelian.com.

www.revelian.comenquiries@revelian.com

Contrast biasTThis happens when we form an opinion based on the standard of what came previ-ously. For example, we might interview an absolutely stellar candidate in the morning. When we interview our next candidate in the aernoon, we’re likely to assess her by comparing her to the stellar candidate from the morning.the morning.

Halo effect/Horns effectThis is a sub-type of the confirmaon bias and refers to having a posive (or negave) first impression of someone or something, which then leads us to interpret subsequent events posively ((or negavely).

Availability heurisc O en, we believe that things we can recall easileasily are more frequent or important than they really are. We tend to take mental short-cutsand make decisions based on the informaon that comes to mind most easily.

Anchoring bias TThe classic example of anchoring bias is price negoaons: the first price quoted or offered will set the range for (or anchors) the rest of the negoaons. In other words, we let the first piece of informaon we have, or a prior belief, set the benchmark or range for the rest of the process.

Dunning-Kruger / Superiority bias Unskilled people tend to overesmate their abilies oabilies or desirable qualies, and underesmate their shoralls and undesirable qualies, relave to other people. In other words, when we don’t know much about a parcular topic, we’re quite likely to believe that our judgement is less biased and more acute than other people’s.

FramingWe can draw different conclusions about the same piesame piece of informaon depending on how, or by whom, it’s presented. The media, adversers and policians use this tacc fre-quently to persuade people to change their minds about an issue.

Group aribuon error We believe that the characteriscs of one person represent the whole group. So, for example, if the only female engineer we’ve ever worked with is very efficient and well-organised, we might think that all female engineers will have the same characteriscs.

Confirmaon bias We interpret new informaon we receive in a way that confirms our original beliefs and tend to ignore informaon that contradicts them. For example, we might think that someone who has the same qualificaon as us will be an excellent candidcandidate for a job, so we’re more inclined to look on them favourably during an interview and disregard anything that suggests otherwise.

Blind-spot bias/Naïve realism This is one of the most difficult biases to overcome: when we think our percepon of reality is objecve and accurate and not influenced by biases. For this reason, we also believe everyone else should share our point of view and beliefs.

Conformity bias/Bandwag- on effect/Herd mentalityWe’re oen influenced by the choice of the majority, even if it goes against our own judjudgement. As more people accept a belief or point of view, the more likely we are to accept it as well. So if most people who’ve interviewed a candidate want to make an offer, you’re more likely to agree with them despite your reserva-ons.

Recency biasWWe usually assign more weight or value to recent events or informaon rather than ear-lier events. For example, if the last person you hired without formal qualificaons in his field- – we’ll call him Sanjay - turned out to be a star performer, you might focus on his performance, rather than the five people bebefore him who didn’t perform well at all.

In-group vs out-group biasWe tend to prefer people who belong to the same group as us, with a shared interest, identy or characterisc. For example, if we love collecng stamps in our spare me, then we’re likely to think favourably about a job applicant who is also a kkeen philatelist.

Fundamental aribuon error/actor observer biasg

We oen think that the way other people behbehave is based on their personality, rather than sit-uaonal influences. So, for example, if Mei is aend-ing a work sample interview for a sales role and stumbles during her presentaon, we could assume that this is because she’s not a confident presenter. In fact, Mei could’ve been up all night with a sick child, or need more informaon about your product before she presents confidently.

Commitment bias (sunk cost fallacy)d

Once we’ve incurred expense or invested in something, we’re less inclined to let it go, despite eevidence to the contrary. For example, if we’ve flown Ariko in from overseas to meet the CEO – who also had to fly in from another state; paid for his accommodaon, spent hours interviewing him and discussing his ideas the role, we’re more in-clined to offer him the job than go back to the draw-ing board and start looking for another candidate.

Gamblers’ fallacyThis occurs when we think that future pprobabilies are altered by past events – such as be-lieving we’re more likely to get heads on a coin toss if the past 5 events have landed on tails. So we might also be inclined to believe that because our last two hires into the Markeng department were top performers, the next person we hire into that team will be one as well.

Affect heuriscr

If we have posive feelings about a parcular acvity, we tend to magnify its benefits and downplay any risk. When we have negave feelings about something, we tend to exaggerate its dandangers and downplay the posive factors. As a consequence, when we make decisions based on quick and possibly superficial evaluaons, such as physical aracveness, height, or resemblance to someone you like or dislike.

Outcome biasWe can oen judge a decision based on the eeventual outcome, rather than the process we used to reach that decision at the me (parcularly if the process was sub-par). So, if we hired Rita based on an employee referral and didn’t put her through our usual recruitment process, but she’s a top performer, we might judge the decision as a sound one, even though our process was flawed.

Pro-innovaon biasSSomemes, if we strongly believe in a parcular in-novaon, we believe that everyone should adopt it as it is, without taking the me to analyse any possi-ble shoralls or limitaons. For example, you might decide you need to hire a data scienst to predict which candidates will perform beer if you hire them, without analysing the alternaves, or what kind kind of ROI you could expect from the exercise.

Social comparison biasWe might be inclined to dislike or want to com-pete with someone we perceive as mentally or physically beer than us. So, when hiring, we could favour people who we think are not as good as us, so we don’t feel threatened or over-shadowed by them.

Stereotypes One of the more well-known types of bias, this is when we form over-simplified opinions about a person or group that doesn’t take in-dividual differences into account, oen based on gender, ethnicity, age or weight.

Egocentric biasThis is one to look out for in candidates: the tendenctendency for people to claim that they were solely or primarily responsible for an outcome that was actually the result of a joint acvity. O en candi-dates will imply that they had more involvement in past iniaves than they actually did, so it pays to probe further and uncover who else was involved and what exactly their role was.

21 DANGEROUS PEOPLE BIASES THAT CAN INFLUENCE HOW WE HIRE

When we make a quick assessment or judgement about other people and situaons, it’s oen influenced by our background, cultural environment and personal experiences. These biases – known as unconscious biases or cognive biases - usually happen automacally and unconsciously, influencing our decisions in ways we don’t noce or control.

And, if you think you’re not biased, well – there’s a bias for that too.

Let’s take a look at some of the most common – and dangerous – biases that can impact our hiring processes.

Revelian assessments give you objecve, scienfic and bias-free data about your candidates. Try them for yourself at revelian.com/express

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