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Because we naturally want to make sense of the world around us, so we have no problem weaving a candidate’s words into a narrative that fits with the way we view things.
It’s taken as read that hiring the right person is a major boost, but equally, hiring the wrong person can have a large impact, too, and not the one you want. Numerous studies estimate the cost of a bad hire to be at least five figures, and even higher if it is for an executive role. Several heuristics and biases can lead to judgment errors during hiring, but when we understand them, we can start to build safeguards to keep ourselves from being swayed by them. Here are the most common offenders that crop up in interviews, and they would love nothing more than to throw a wrench in your hiring process. Confirmation bias, is if you were asked whether you thought you were a helpful person or not, you would likely search your brain for instances in which you were, in fact, helpful and conclude that the answer is “yes”. That’s because we look for hits, rather than misses - because it’s easier. When we form first candidate impressions in those precious first seconds, we then spend the remainder of the interview searching for things that confirm our initial thoughts. Unfortunately, our initial impressions are often inaccurate. Availability bias, is whatever piece of information is easiest to recall has a disproportionately large voice in making decisions. Often, this can be the most recent piece of information we see or hear, so we give it more weight in influencing our decision than it perhaps merits. This works both in how we’re assessing the candidate during the interview, but also after, when we’re making our decisions. For example, perhaps your interview is scheduled for immediately after you returned from a meeting with your boss and she was frustrated by; “the lack of process around here”! Because of that, you will most likely be more focused on the process-oriented aspects of a candidate’s experience than perhaps the role merits. Similarity bias, simply means we like people who are like us. In one study, interviews rated job applicants higher who shared hobbies or interests with them. This is a large reason for the hiring discrimination that is often reported regarding race, age, gender, orientation and more. We’re looking for a match with a target, versus weighing the relative value of the candidate. Representativeness heuristic, is closely related to similarity bias, and this mental shortcut is applied to judging how likely something is to occur. So, if the candidate seems generally representative of the team you’re hiring them onto, it could lead you to thinking they’re a better fit than they actually are. Affect heuristic, is the embodiment of going with your gut, we often make snap decisions based on emotions. Does the candidate inspire awe, or inspiration? Is he or she incredibly likeable? When we have a positive gut feeling toward a candidate, we assume they are a high benefit and low risk option. Now that we know what we are up against, the good news is there are several strategies HR leaders can use to debias either themselves or the
“P-HACKING” IS A PRACTICE IN WHICH RESEARCHERS MANIPULATE
DATA UNTIL THEY HAVE THE RESULT THEY WANT. NOW, MORE RESEARCHERS ARE PRE-
REGISTERING THEIR
EXPERIMENTS TO AVOID THE TENDENCY
TO MAKE THE DATA FIT THE CONCLUSION THEY WISH TO SUPPORT
environment to improve hiring decisions. Debiasing is the art of employing techniques that aim to improve the accuracy of individual judgment. Ensure you are in an optimal state to make a decision. Just as judges have been shown to be more lenient at the beginning of the day or just after a food break session, so should you consider what factors may be influencing your decision. Are you tired or hungry, or perhaps having a stressful day? If so, hold off on making a decision. Create - and use - a consistent script, by following a pre-determined conversation script, you increase the reliability of the interview while simultaneously reducing the chances of veering into territory that could lead you into talking about personal interests that activate the similarity bias. Prioritise your “must haves” - in advance - in some social sciences. In the field of research “p-hacking” is a practice in which researchers manipulate the data until they have the result they want. Now, more researchers are pre-registering their experiments - stating up front what they expect to happen and sharing their data after the fact - in order to avoid the tendency to make the data fit the conclusion they wish it supported. By “pre-registering” candidate must haves, you reduce the risk of manipulating the candidate and interview data to support the conclusion of hiring the person you’re most drawn to, who may not be the person who best matches up with your “must haves”.
Determining how important relevant factors are before beginning interviews enables you to pick out which factors you will make your decision on - experience, results, personality, education, etc. - and then allocate percentage points to each factor so that the sum is 100. That can help bring more focus to something like experience, which could be quite critical to the role, and lessens the focus on personality, which could be more subject to certain biases. This technique of importance weighting is a way to make intuitive judgements more visible for all. Recognising that debiasing yourself entirely is incredibly difficult, consider implementing predictive hiring tools to supplement hiring decisions. While the interview is here to stay for the foreseeable future, being aware of the heuristics and biases that can influence decisions - and controlling for them - can go a long way in improving your hiring decisions. And when you have the hiring process right, you achieve something even more valuable: engaged employees who power businesses.
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DECEMBER 2019 | thehrdirector | 45
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