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As a training manager, you’ll likely be tasked with hiring quality candidates to fill various departmental job openings. When that happens, I’m sure you’ll do your best to hire the most qualified individuals based on their resume and interview performance. But are you confident your judgement in selecting the right candidate has not been clouded by some sort of hiring bias?
Hiring bias is a type of unconscious bias you may not know you even possess. Unconscious bias is often defined as prejudice or unsupported judgments in favor of or against someone, in a way that is usually considered unfair. Unconscious bias results in incorrect judgements, overlooked talent or, at worst, discrimination.
Most of us are guilty of some sort of unconscious bias. It’s unintentional and we don’t mean to harbor these biases. However, we likely have some sort of deeply engrained, learned stereotypes that can possibly influence our behaviors. So, how do you avoid these biases? Let’s start by recognizing what they are.
There are all sorts of hiring biases from ageism to sexism. However, there are four relatively obscure hiring biases that can stand in the way of landing a qualified candidate.
Affinity Bias
This type of bias occurs when a hiring manager realizes they have an affinity with the candidate. Perhaps it’s because they both attended the same university or grew up in the same region of the country. When it comes to hiring, affinity bias allows the manager to cast favor toward a candidate they find relatable and reject candidates they feel most different from.
This type of hiring bias gets somewhat tricky because the expectation of most corporate hiring practices is to find a candidate that is a “good fit” for the organization. This standard often causes a hiring manager to not only look for candidates who are professionally skilled, but with whom they most relate.
Attribution Bias
This type of bias occurs when the hiring manager unfairly assesses the candidate’s attributes. Depending on the candidate, their positive attributes may be somewhat discounted, while their negative attributes are often seen as “red flags.”
For example, when interviewing a facilitator candidate, the manager may view that person’s consistent high scores on end-of-course evaluations as pure luck versus hard work. Or if a candidate doesn’t give a firm handshake at the beginning or end of an interview, it’s immediately seen as a sign of weakness.
Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias can occur when a hiring manager forms an initial or early opinion about a candidate based purely on instinct. They then use the interview process to confirm or support those beliefs. This bias prevents the hiring manager from really getting to know the individual to determine their actual qualifications.
If you tend to “go with your gut” when it comes to interviewing and hiring candidates, you may suffer from confirmation bias. According to psychologists, if you have a good gut feeling about a candidate, you’ll unconsciously find a way to support your perspective by favorably highlighting the candidate’s background and experience. On the flip side, if your gut has given you a negative feeling about a candidate, you’ll find a way to support that feeling by being overly critical of that individual’s background and experience.
Name Bias
This type of bias occurs when a hiring manager discriminates against a candidate who has an ethnic sounding name. Name bias might sound farfetched, especially today, as we all pride ourselves on being employed in diverse and inclusive workplaces. However, this type of discrimination is a real issue, and there have been numerous studies to prove it.
Katherine DeCelles, an Associate Professor at Harvard Business School, co-sponsored a 2-year study that documented the existence of name bias in workplace hiring. She published her work in a 2016 article called Whitened Resumes: Race and Self-Presentation in the Labor Market.
The Harvard study suggests that companies are two times less likely to contact minority applicants for an interview if they have an ethnic sounding name listed on their resume. Because of this, job applicants are now resorting to “whitening” their resumes to reflect non-ethnic sounding names.
The results? According to the Harvard study, 25.5% of African American applicants who changed the name on their resume received a call back for an interview. Conversely, only 10% of those same resumes received a call back if they included the original ethnic sounding name. For Asian applicants, 21% received a call back using non-ethnic names vs. 11.5% with an Asian name listed.
Building awareness around hiring bias is often the first step in correcting the problem. According to an online article written by Alexandra Johnson at harver.com, “It might seem to be counter-productive, talking about the elephant in the room. But it’s the only way people will learn that their gut instinct isn’t necessarily a good thing.”
As a training manager responsible for hiring, it might be worthwhile to ask yourself, “Have I been guilty of any hiring bias?” And if you have, examine ways in which you can alter your thinking and behavior, so you no longer make hiring decisions based on your unconscious biases.
For more information on hiring and staffing a high-performing training team, consider enrolling in our course, The Successful Training Manager.
2 Responses to “How to Recognize and Correct 4 Types of Hiring Bias”
Thanks for your comment, Will. It sounds as though you’re doing everything you can to avoid those biases. I can see how it would be frustrating to have HR circumvent your efforts. On behalf of all the job candidates out there, we thank you for doing your job, and doing it well!
Excellent article, thank you for sharing. I possess years of experience, I am a Qualified Instructor Facilitator, and a Sales Performance Coach/Mentor. I work as a contract recruiter now and often run into a bias, of one kind or another, from HR individuals with our clients. As a contract recruiter, we complete the research and qualification checks, have the candidate complete a Sales Aptitude, Personality Profile, and IQ test, facilitate the initial interview, make our summary and recommendations, and then run into roadblocks from our client’s HR person that, for one reason or another, do not seem to give any consideration to our research and recommendation. It becomes very frustrating!