How can you send the “right signals” during the hiring process?
Cognitive biases interfere with hiring decisions because we often think we can rely on our “intuition,” thereby allowing our prejudices to take precedence…. But if these biases are inevitable, what can we do?
5 methods…
1. Train your teams to examine their collective decision-making processes. Training helps teams understand that they can collectively develop better decision-making processes to counteract individual biases: “We’re imperfect, but collectively we can be better.”
2. Clearly define the desired candidate profile
“80% of the time, job descriptions aren’t specific enough to facilitate meaningful discussions about candidates”; often, ambiguity is tolerated to allow personal preferences to influence the decision.
The best test to determine whether a job description is specific enough is that it should occasionally lead you to choose a candidate who wasn’t your first choice.
There’s nothing worse than people telling you
“We don’t have a typical profile; we’re looking for interesting personalities.” That means they’ve decided to give free rein to their biases, preconceptions, and personal preferences…
3. Recruit collectively… while working separately
If you want to benefit from collective intelligence in recruitment, you must ensure that individual judgments are not influenced by those of others throughout the process, because more robust processes can guarantee the independence of perspectives so that the collective outcome is the aggregation of a set of separate viewpoints.
4. Evaluate skills separately
A candidate’s impression is influenced by the first criterion evaluated—their appearance, the way they speak, etc.—which can affect the assessment of their technical skills. Conduct structured interviews and relevant tests (rather than so-called “clever” questions that primarily assess candidates’ ability to make themselves look smart).
5. Accept mistakes
There’s no way to never make a hiring mistake; no system can guarantee you won’t make a mistake… By definition, hiring a candidate is, in fact, a prediction about the future.
“Based on 45 minutes of listening to someone who is doing their best to lie to me,
it’s time to accept the idea that a significant percentage of all our hiring decisions will inevitably be mistakes.
We’ll then be more willing to acknowledge our mistakes and learn from them—such as by implementing a system in which flexibility in decision-making is the norm.”
inspired by " Welcome to the Jungle"