Bias is bad. As a leader, you should be looking to eliminate it from any decisions.
In every hiring process, three deadly biases can thwart organizations from making the right hiring decisions: the urgency bias, the confirmation bias, and the personal bias.
200,000 years of programming, which helped us survive in small hunter-gatherer tribes (e.g., rapidly identifying friends from foes), have left us with behaviors that are counterproductive in the modern world. We need to be aware of our own biases so we can protect against them in the hiring process.
1) Urgency Bias
Every hiring manager and recruiter has urgency bias. They can’t help it. They need to fill open requisitions as fast as possible to meet objectives. By definition, they are in a hurry.
This bias causes hiring managers to lower their bar and sacrifice quality for speed.
Every experienced manager I know (including me) has made this mistake several times.
2) Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias is when you seek to conform to or confirm an opinion that has been expressed. For example, when a senior leader expresses their view on a topic and you change your opinion to be more like theirs.
In hiring, this confirmation bias shows up in almost every step.
For example, when you are one of multiple interviewers on the loop, and another interviewer tells you their impressions of the candidate before you interview them. When you go to interview the candidate, you walk into the room (or Zoom) with an expectation that the candidate is bad or good, depending on what you heard before. That means you are biased.
A candidate’s resume causes you to form an initial expectation of the person, so you will naturally look for ways to confirm that initial impression in the interview.
In the first 5 minutes of an interview, based on the initial impression, you have subconsciously formed a hire or no-hire bias for the candidate.
3) Personal Bias
We all have personal biases. They are formed based on the differences in our individual life experiences. The methods and cultures of our prior companies, industries, leaders we previously worked for, and our functional expertise all affect our views. With respect to hiring, I’m sure you have heard experienced leaders express their beliefs through statements like:
“I like to hire people with grit and a willingness to work hard.”
“I value competitive spirit, so I recruit and hire accomplished athletes.”
“I look for people who are highly intelligent, detail-oriented, and hungry to succeed.”
These preferences are all versions of bias, and they don’t necessarily lead to the most productive hires. If every manager is free to rely on their individual view for each hiring decision, cults of personality, randomness in the culture, and politics will follow.
The Bar Raiser process goes to great lengths to counteract each of these biases.
You can learn more about Bar Raiser hiring here: https://lnkd.in/gyg8ThGc
