By Gary Hinde, Toronto Technology Recruiter
The hiring process is not fair. In fact, it’s very biased. Everyone has a bias, and this impacts how they perceive people, how they approach situations, and it impacts them during the hiring and recruiting process. People tend to hire people who are like themselves. It’s one of the reasons for lack of diversity and inclusivity in the workplace.
Hiring bias happens, and it can have a big impact on your company’s hiring practices if not managed and addressed. Often, most people don’t even realize they are guilty of hiring bias until it’s brought to their attention.
How Does Hiring Bias Impact Recruiting?
A hiring or recruiting bias has a significant impact on your organization. It will directly play a role in shaping your company’s organizational culture, moral compass, values, and beliefs. It will also have a huge impact on the diversity of your organization.
Types of Hiring Bias
There are a number of types of hiring bias interviewers and hiring managers should be conscious of when interviewing and interacting with candidates:
- Intuition: Many hiring decisions are made based on a “gut feeling” or intuition. These assumptive decisions are based on emotions and tend to be strongly biased. Focus on making decisions based on the facts and candidate performance.
- Confirmation bias: This happens when people make an assumption and try to prove it right. For example, an interviewer makes a decision about a person based on something they read on their resume.
- Expectation anchor: This happens when the interviewer believes one candidate is better than the others, based on favoritism or other fictitious expectations.
- Superficial bias: This happens when people make an assumption about a candidate based on a superficial characteristic such as their appearance.
Tips to Reduce Hiring Bias
There are a number of things companies can do to reduce bias in the hiring process. While you can’t eliminate it completely, there are things you can do to minimize its impact on your hiring decisions:
- Attempt to identify your hiring bias.
- Review your job descriptions and seek to eliminate biased words and language.
- Create a standardized job interview process. Use the same questions and process for all candidates.
- Be conscious of hiring people you personally like and get along with naturally.
- Include more people in the hiring process. Conduct panel interviews.
More Hiring and Recruiting Tips
Why the Onboarding Process Is More Important Than You Think
Traditional Talent Acquisition Methods No Longer Effective – Technology Gap to Blame
Lousy at Conducting Job Interviews? Here’s Why
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