When hiring, have you ever discriminated against a candidate? Your immediate answer is most likely no. However, despite your best intentions, this may not always be the case.
Unconscious bias is one of the biggest barriers to workplace diversity. Unconscious biases are beliefs we don’t even know we have about people based on things like their ethnicity, gender or weight. These can feed into the way we perceive them and then effect our decisions when hiring, without us ever being aware of it.
When we think of unconscious bias, we typically think of underlying sexism or racism that prevents us from hiring certain people, but it can go the other way too. For example, a type of unconscious bias is the ‘halo effect’, wherein we hone in on one positive trait and this overshadows any flaws that may not make them suitable for the role. So unconscious bias can manifest either as dismissing people from a role before they’ve had a chance to prove themselves, or putting people on a pedestal despite possible flaws.
A poll in 2019 found that 96% of recruiters think unconscious bias is a problem in the hiring process.
The main problem with unconscious bias is that it prevents deserving people from getting jobs based on factors that have nothing to do with their value as an employee. But it also comes with costs for the companies that let it influence their hiring process, as research has shown that companies with higher levels of diversity tend to be more successful.
So, what can we do about it?
Be aware of it
The first step to reducing unconscious bias in the hiring process is being aware that it’s a problem. Remember that while it is typically unintentional, that lack of malicious intent does not negate the real-world impact on the people on the receiving end of that unconscious bias, so you really do need to do the work. Research more about exactly what unconscious bias means and the ways it can manifest and as you learn more about it, you will be able to call yourself out when you catch yourself in the act.
Name-blind recruitment
According to researchers at Nuffield College’s Centre for Social Investigation (CSI), British citizens from ethnic minority backgrounds have to send, on average, 60% more job applications to receive as many call-backs as their white peers. This suggests that hiring managers are making judgements based on something as niche as candidates’ names. It is not only discriminatory, but it massively reduces the talent pool and could well be preventing companies from hiring the best person for the job. A solution to this problem is removing names from CVs so that they cannot influence the hiring managers’ decisions.
Look at individual questions in an application
The Behavioural Insights Team (Bit) is a government organisation that has gone a step further than name-blind recruitment. When looking at applications, assessors look at individual questions together (that is, all the answers to question one from all applications) rather than looking at one candidate’s application from start to finish. Then the assessments for each question are aggregated for each candidate. This way one answer in a candidate’s application cannot influence the assessor’s perception of another answer. This perhaps works well to counter the halo effect. If an assessor sees a really good answer to an early question, it may make them more lenient towards a weaker answer later in the application. When questions are looked at individually, this is no longer the case.
Boosting confidence
Another problem is that stereotypes can often be internalised and inhibit a person’s confidence. David Halpern, the chief executive of Bit, cited an online police recruitment test that had 60% pass rates for white candidates and 40% for those from ethnic minority backgrounds. An email was sent to all candidates stressing the importance of the role both for the individual and for their community, following which the pass rate barely change for white candidates but rose to 60% for minority candidates. Halpern suggests that by sending a confidence-boosting message to all candidates, hiring managers would disproportionately boost the performance of those from minority backgrounds. This would allow them to perform at their highest personal level and put them on a more level playing field.
Set concrete criteria for the job
It’s harder to combat unconscious bias when you get to the interview stage of the hiring process, as by this point there is no way to make an interview name-blind or gender-blind or race-blind. First impressions and gut feelings are often crucial to who you decide is the right fit for the job, and it can be impossible to know how your unconscious biases may be playing into these feelings. Therefore it is important to set concrete criteria for the job, using task-based interviews that are standardised and more easily measurable than something like charisma.
Don’t rush your decision
Unconscious bias is more likely to affect your decision when you rush it. After an interview, give yourself some time to reflect on all the candidates and discuss them with colleagues. When the hiring process is collaborative, it means there are more people to check each other’s biases and uncover their blind spots. By taking your time and working together to look through the candidates carefully, you are more likely to come to the right decision.
Unconscious bias is hard to avoid. It is natural for pretty much everyone to have some unconscious beliefs that stem from past experiences they have had or the media they consume. However, just because it is natural and unintentional does not mean it is not a problem that we should be looking to solve. The good news is, there are steps we can take to tackle it and make our workforces more diverse and more successful.