Insights from behavioural science have shown that recruitment processes are often heavily skewed by a number of “unconscious biases”, according to a report from the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development, A Head for Hiring: The Behavioural Science of Recruitment, argues that those with hiring responsibilities should consider these insights to overlook their first instincts about a person and instead gain a more rounded and accurate picture of a candidate’s suitability for the job.
Initial perceptions of whether a person will be a good fit can be determined by a number of visual, cultural, demographic and situational factors which have no real impact on performance. For example:
- Both male and female managers tend to favour men over women in hiring decisions;
- Evidence suggests that we hire “mini-mes” – people like ourselves in terms of hobbies, experiences and dress/presentation at interview;
- The time taken to make a recruitment decision often increases for the first few candidates, but can drop as early as the fourth, at which point confirmation bias or “selective hearing” can come into play;
- Open-ended interviews can lead to different participants being asked different questions to unconsciously reaffirm initial impressions;
- Identical CVs seem to get more call-backs when the applicant is typically deemed to have a “white” name rather than one associated with an ethnic minority group.
Jonny Gifford, research adviser at the CIPD, comments: “We like to think we can spot talent, but insights from behavioural science show that our decision-making is actually highly prone to sloppy thinking and bias. Even highly trained assessors make systematically different decisions depending on the time of day and their cognitive load or brain-strain at that point in time.”
The report makes a number of recommendations to ensure consistent and effective hiring practices. Before job interviews, companies should test the wording of job adverts, to see how this affects who applies, and group and anonymise CVs when reviewing them.
During interviews, the hiring manager should spread assessments and decisions across days but keep other conditions – the interview room itself, the questions and even the refreshments – similar. Experiments have shown that interviewers experiencing physical warmth by holding a warm drink prior to assessing someone were more likely to judge them to be generous and caring.
Managers should pre-commit to a set of interview questions that are directly related to performance and structured to focus on the job in hand. After interviews they should stick to what the scores indicate, and consider Including colleagues who weren’t involved to help make a more objective, final decision.
Read the research report at www.cipd.co.uk
