A candidate steps into the interview room. She describes her experience and achievements fluently, saying ‘we’ and ‘our team’ a lot, and hardly utters the word ‘I’. As she leaves, the chairman of the interviewing panel asks two executives on the panel how they rate the candidate.
“Fantastic team player, clearly thrives on working co-operatively with others. A great candidate for us,” says the first executive.
“What has she actually done? Looks to me as though she’s dodged taking responsibility for anything, she’s totally reliant on other people. A hopeless candidate for us,” says the second executive.
How could two leaders from the same organisation come to completely opposite conclusions? The answer is found in unconscious bias. And the ‘candidate’ is actually an actor, hired to play a role that will flush out the unconscious bias within a company’s executive team members, as part of a group coaching session.
We all have unconscious biases – our years of experience, our culture and our own personal outlook combine and build over time to create a formidable battery of instinctive prejudices and preferences, which we are rarely aware of. These can range from the trivial – assuming that a passer-by with a big beard and a man bun must be a creative – to the pernicious, such as assuming men are better at science than women.
‘First impressions’ – snap judgements of people made without any hard evidence whatsoever – are likely to be the result of an unconscious bias. These are harmless in the coffee shop queue or while people-watching on your daily commute, but can cause some real problems in recruitment and selection.
In the situation described above, the first executive has revealed an unconscious bias in favour of people who value getting along with others and seek consensus, and the second executive has an unconscious bias in favour of people who value power, status and recognition. Both executives have, without realising it, allowed their own bias to dictate their opinion of the candidate, regardless of the candidate’s actual experience, skills and potential value to the organisation.
The most common manifestation of unconscious bias is when you warm to a candidate basically because their outlook is closely aligned to your own; and the first executive in our experiment is displaying what is termed ‘affinity bias’.
In theory, recruiting somebody whose outlook chimes well with the senior person hiring them isn’t a disaster; the organisation hired the recruiter and put them into a position of authority, so it’s likely that the new hire is going to fit in well. But the long-term issue with affinity bias is that it leads to the organisation hiring clones, people with the same outlook, values and thought processes.
This lack of diversity in thinking and outlooks can become very limiting. If a team of 12 people all think the same way and have the same approach to a problem, it is less likely to come up with a creative solution than another team where several members have quite different outlooks and thought processes, and can bring alternative perspectives to bear on any issue.
How can recruiters rise above their unconscious biases?
Interventions like the one we describe at the beginning of this blog can help decision-makers build up self-insight, so that they can first uncover and then acknowledge their unconscious biases, and understand how those biases are likely to skew the recruitment and selection process.
The coaching then helps the executives to take their own biases into account when recruiting, allowing them to move away from making intuitive judgements and instead deploying informed, data-driven decisions. As a result, the organisation will benefit from more even-handed assessments of candidates, with their qualities and skills being properly mapped against the business’s defined needs. And that has to be a good thing.
