How To Avoid Making Primal Hiring Decisions

Take a look at the job candidate above. What do you see?

Do you see a confident, high-performing, future executive?

OR

A timid, young girl, destined to be steamrolled by her coworkers?

No matter what you saw, you probably had a first impression, right? It’s a primal human response.

But the problem with our primal response is that it often causes interviewers to make quick judgments about a candidate — many times within the first few seconds of meeting them.

And whether they know it or not, interviewers can make their hiring decision before a single question is even asked.

This reaction is called “interviewer bias” and it can lead to discrimination and hiring mistakes unless you’re aware of it and have strategies to overcome it.

TYPES OF INTERVIEWER BIAS

First impression interviewer bias is the conscious (or unconscious) impression that you have of a candidate in the first few moments of meeting them.

Types of interviewer bias include:

– Appearance (How attractive/unattractive a candidate is, how their dressed, etc)

– Demographics (Age, gender, race and religion)

– Verbal (Speaks too softly, too fast, too slow, with a lisp, with an accent)

– Non-Verbal (Timid body language, weak handshake, lack of eye contact)

For a one-page summary on “Types of Interviewer Bias” click here and download the PDF.

WHAT THE RESEARCH SAYS

In an interesting study conducted at the University of Toledo, Psychology researchers found that it only takes a person less than 30 seconds to decide if a candidate will be successful in a given position.

According to the research, a group of trained and untrained interviewers arrived at the same hiring decision despite the fact that the trained group conducted a full assessment while the untrained group only watched a short clip of the beginning of the interview.

Researchers postulate that both groups arrived at the same decision because they were both acting on the impressions that they formed in the first 15 seconds of the interview. Everything that happened after that only served to support their original opinion.

This phenomenon is often referred to as “The Halo” effect, which means that interviewers will find reasons to like (or dislike) a candidate to support their initial first impression. This works for both positive and negative first impressions.

MANAGING BIAS

So what can you do to manage interviewer bias and overcome primal hiring decisions?

Well, the first thing is to be able to identify the various types of bias.

Knowing what they are will help you become aware of the times when your mind wants to pass judgment on a candidate in the early stages of an interview. In these moments,awareness will help you manually put a lid on your bias.

Second, the structure of your interview process should prevent quick judgment.

Your interview process should end with a post-interview candidate debrief, huddle or calibration — whatever you want to call it.

Having a formal decision process will allow for judgment only AFTER you’ve asked all of your planned interview questions, AFTER you’ve reviewed your notes, AFTER you’ve provided ratings and AFTER you’ve discussed your thoughts with the hiring team.

This data-driven approach to hiring (along with a handy guide) is available on the HireBar blog.

CONCLUSION

Even the most experienced interviewers fall prey to bias. It’s a difficult thing to overcome because it’s hard-wired into our DNA. Thousands of years ago, this intuition probably helped our ancestors stay alive by making it easier for them to spot hostile visitors.

And while your “gut feel” still has some merit in the interview process, I hope that we’ve evolved to the point where we can put our primal instincts aside, and conduct a more thorough analysis of our candidates.

For more on how to make better hiring decisions, please visit the HireBar blog.