Keep Your Biases In Mind When Hiring

Some tricks to outwit the trickster in our wiring: affinity bias

In How to Reduce Personal Bias When Hiring, Ruchika Tulshyan aggregates a great deal of advice in this piece, earmarking specific biases that get in the way during hiring:

Accept that you have biases, especially affinity bias

Even if you head up your organization’s diversity committee, even if you are from an underrepresented community, you have biases that impact your professional decisions, especially hiring. Affinity bias — having a more favorable opinion of someone like us — is one of the most common. In hiring this often means referring or selecting a candidate who shares our same race or gender, or who went to the same school, speaks the same language, or reminds us of our younger selves.

She suggests that people ask ‘where could unconscious bias show up in this decision?’:

By explicitly acknowledging that we all have unconscious biases and creating a space to call them out, there’s an opportunity to hold ourselves and each other accountable.

And perhaps the best trick, an example of what Howard Ross calls constructive uncertainty (which I wrote about a few years ago):

It is helpful to begin to practice what I call constructive uncertainty. Learning to slow down decision-making, especially when it affects other people, can help reduce the impact of bias. This can be particularly important when we are in circumstances that make us feel awkward or uncomfortable.

Tulshyan suggests a different tack to give yourself time to consider the candidate without hearing others’ views, which can lead to prejudging the candidate:

Reduce the influence of your peers’ opinions on your hiring decisions

In the past, Microsoft would allow hiring managers to see each other’s feedback on a candidate, before it was their turn to interview them. “Everybody on the interview loop could see what others were saying — the words that were used, what was said about a candidate — before interviewing them,” says Edward. “It’s real clear how that could lead to biases and being influenced by someone else’s views.”

Recently, Microsoft made the feedback loop private — a hiring manager can’t log in to the tool and see their colleagues’ feedback until they’ve entered their own assessment of a candidate first. Edward says that the change has allowed people the freedom to form their own opinions, without being influenced by their peers — or their bosses.

Even if you don’t use a software tool for hiring loops, refrain from comparing notes verbally until you have formed your own point of view on a candidate. I recommend writing down your feedback on the candidate and whether you’re inclined to hire them, before you debrief with your colleagues.

Stay in the zone of constructive uncertainty — delaying judgment — as long as possible.