6 types of unconscious bias to watch out for when recruiting

It is absolutely essential that every single candidate is treated the same way in any recruitment process. If in an interview, you don’t want to hire a candidate because of nothing more than some “gut feeling,” it’s possible, if not likely, that unconscious bias is coming into play.

Don’t worry! This doesn’t make you a villain. Everyone has experienced both ends of unconscious bias at some point in their life. However, it is important to critically evaluate your thoughts and assumptions, making sure that bias doesn’t unfairly affect someone’s chances in an interview.

Below are 6 common examples of unconscious bias to look out for when your “gut feeling” is causing doubt, or if a candidate seems too good to be true. (Read to the end for top tips to avoid unconscious bias!)

Affinity or Similarity Bias,

This is the phenomenon of taking a liking to someone because of a shared trait, experience or interest that can make someone disproportionately favour one candidate over others.

Perhaps it slips into conversation that they come from the same place as you, support the same football team as you, or even go to the same restaurant as you for Sunday dinner. What a fantastically whimsical coincidence! This doesn’t mean that that candidate will be the best person for the job though.

To avoid affinity bias, we adhere to the fact that we’re looking for the best candidate for the job, not the person you’re most likely to be pals with outside of work.

Appearance Bias

Also known as attractiveness bias or beauty bias, appearance bias is where people make a judgement about others based on how they look. In recruitment, this runs the risk of translating into unfair and inaccurate conclusions about a candidate. It’s important not to make any assumptions about a candidate (or indeed anyone!) based on their physical features.

Any kind of comments about someone’s appearance or clothing do not belong in an interview context. Never have the words don’t judge a book by its cover been more relevant…except perhaps when someone picks a book just because the cover is shiny.

Confirmation Bias

Has a candidate done well so far? Were they referred by a trusted colleague? This could be leading the perfect interview and a hire to boot…Or could it?

Confirmation bias is when you look for qualities or information about a person that confirms your beliefs. In the context of an interview, this could involve overlooking someone’s poor performance because you were expecting the candidate to do well. Maybe they wrote a good CV but didn’t deliver on interview day.

It also works the other way, when an interviewer hyper-fixates on a small error made by a candidate, because they expected them to perform badly.

It is important to leave your preconceptions, positive or negative, at the door in order to give the candidate a fair chance. The more objective your approach to an interview is, the more reliable your conclusions will be.

The Halo-Horn Effect

In a similar vein, the Halo-Horn Effect is seen when someone focuses so much on one quality, that they lose focus of the bigger picture. The candidate might be super organised, but if their communication skills are lacking, that also has to be taken into consideration.

Similarly, if a nervous candidate stumbles slightly over one question, that one blip should not go against their favour if they answered the rest of the questions really well.

Taking a look at the interview as a whole, perhaps divided into manageable sections, will help give you an idea of how well the candidate did overall.

Circumstantial Bias

Circumstantial bias is when you project externals factors and circumstances onto a specific person or thing.

It is important not to let external factors influence your judgement when interviewing a candidate. If you had a bad commute to work or your last meeting got a little stressful, that shouldn’t be the reason you score your candidate lower.

That’s why, when possible, it’s important for interviewers to take a couple of minutes before they meet the candidate to focus, and not let separate issues bleed into the context of the interview.

Top tips to combat bias

The first step is to acknowledge that biases exist in many different forms.

There have been studies in the UK and US that have shown that CVs with “English” sounding names were more likely to be accepted than names originating in other parts of the world, despite containing similar credentials. This alone highlights the existence of unconscious bias.

Regardless of whether you think you are biased or not, critically evaluate your thoughts. Being able to put your “gut feeling” into precise, unambiguous terms will help you discover if it’s the result of bias or not.

Standardised evaluation process

Sticking to an agreed set of questions, with a consensus of what a good answer might look like, and how they will be evaluated, will help interviewers remain objective. Using a scoring system will help to quantify your feed opinions and feedback. If every candidate for a role gets the same questions, it’ll be easier to compare their performance and keep the decision-making fair.

Multiple interviewers

Furthermore, having a panel of at least 2 interviewers where possible works as an effective set of checks and balances to ensure all parties are reviewing the candidate with the right mindset.

Evaluating your thoughts

By acknowledging that unconscious bias exists, looking out for it when drawing your conclusions and following these top tips to avoid giving way to it, you’re already taking the steps you need to a fair, honest recruitment process!

About me: Michael is a Talent Acquisition Assistant for Twinkl Educational Publishing, a globally expanding company. Drop him a message at michael.jordan@twinkl.co.uk.

Read more: The ABCs of a Twinkl interview

Read more: Hiring at Twinkl!