Ducks may be cute but they are not to be underestimated when getting in rows. “Get your ducks in a row,” right?
Ducks are masters of teamwork. They seem to form lines easily and know who the flock leader is and who goes left or front… all while flying at 65 to 95 kilometers per hour(40 to 60 miles per hour). Humans might not be as graceful with team formation, but we do our best. The Sam Altman saga was the ultimate example of how important hiring (and firing) is and how weird, loud, and expensive it can get.
In the IT sector, like any other, teams sometimes struggle to make hiring decisions. A hiring “mistake" can be costly for both the employee and the team.
To improve hiring, teams reflect on various factors, including the application process, candidate assessment, market, budget, and timeframe. However, the topic of bias has been overlooked in practice for a long time, even though it influences decisions at every step of the hiring process.
From defining role criteria to creating offers for candidates, you might let bias slip through the hiring process. However, unaddressed bias can fuel poor hiring decisions and missed opportunities. In this blog, we will talk about what bias is, how harmful it can be, and how to overcome it.
The limits of human perception
Max Park solved the Rubik’s cube in 3.13 seconds, Shakuntala Devi multiplied two 13-digit numbers in 28 seconds, and some really cool people went to space! All this despite a range of human limits.
For example, there is a broad range of sounds that we can’t hear. This limit prevailed through evolution, and it can help us adapt, e.g., save energy and avoid getting overwhelmed. To adapt, we also have to assess our surroundings quickly. When we hear a sound, we make many evaluations quickly, and we unconsciously “mark” the sound as pleasant or unpleasant, distant or near, threatening or not, and so on.
We can also assess other humans fast, without even realizing it. Human cognition is flawed, so we rely on shortcuts to assess, decide, or act. These cognitive shortcuts are called heuristics, and some involve systematic bias, e.g., the availability heuristic or representativeness heuristic. Our speedy assessments are often useful but sometimes incorrect. It seems that we evolved into a powerful species - with a predisposition for fast hiring mistakes.
What is unconscious bias?
Bias can be defined in psychology as any inclination or predisposition for or against something, and it can refer to any tendency or preference.
“Unconscious bias” is a popular term that stresses the unconscious nature of bias and its potential to be “invisible” to us. However, the term is used inconsistently in the Human Resources Management literature, so to keep it simple, we will stick to the broad definition mentioned first.
The key takeaway for hiring is that biases can lead to unfair hiring decisions that harm the whole team, like favoring candidates based on irrelevant factors rather than qualifications or potential. Biases can fuel poor individual performance, discrimination, lack of diversity and inclusion, and even affect the team’s motivation and performance.
How can our minds trick us in the process of hiring
1. Confirmation bias
Confirmation bias leads us to seek information that confirms our preexisting beliefs or assumptions about someone. This can skew the interview process and evaluation criteria, resulting in unfair hiring decisions.
Example of this:
We are selecting the best candidate for a student internship in our Engineering department. If we believe that candidates from specific universities are more competent, we may focus on and remember the positive attributes of candidates with such backgrounds while overlooking or downplaying their flaws.
Candidates from other universities may be assessed more harshly, and we might pay more attention to their weaknesses. This can lead to selecting candidates who fit our preconceived notions rather than those who are genuinely the best fit for the role.
2. The anchoring bias
Anchoring bias is the tendency to be overly influenced by the first piece of information that we process. Just like the doctor’s first impressions of the patient can create an anchoring point that can incorrectly influence diagnostic assessments, anchoring bias can influence a hiring team’s decision.
It seems that humans tend to give excessive weight to the starting value (anchor) and not modify the anchor sufficiently in light of later information. The well-known Tversky and Kahneman study from 1975 showed that estimates of the product of 9 × 8 × 7 × 6 × 5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1 could be higher than estimates of the product of 1 × 2 × 3 × 4 × 5 × 6 × 7 × 8 × 9.
This is why hiring teams can rely too heavily on the first piece of information encountered, such as the qualifications and previous job titles of the first candidate interviewed.
Let's see what that would look like in an example:
We are hiring a senior-level Software Developer. We review Penny’s application. Penny has 10 years of experience and the job title of "Senior Developer,” judging from her CV. This can set an anchor that skews the evaluation of subsequent candidates.
We screen Joe’s CV next. With 8 years of experience and the job title of "Developer," Joe seems less qualified.
Then we review Max, with 12 years of experience and the job title of "Lead Software Developer." Max is perceived as overqualified.
Reading Peny’s CV might have changed our decision to invite Joe or Max to an interview. We may favor candidates who align more closely with the initial anchor (10 years of experience and the job title of "Senior Developer”), potentially overlooking candidates who might be more qualified or a better fit for the company. Our judgment can be overly influenced by the initial candidate's profile rather than considering each candidate independently.
3. Similarity bias
Similarity bias, also known as affinity bias, is the tendency to favor candidates who share our characteristics, backgrounds, or interests. Just as teachers might give higher grades to students who remind them of themselves, hiring managers might prefer candidates who share their school, hobbies, or personality traits.
Example:
Remember Penny? Let’s say we hired Penny and it did not work out. We are hiring a senior-level software developer again. Our selection process finalists hit the stage - Bob, Sarah, and Alan.
They meet the hiring manager in the final round of interviews, and this hiring manager’s hobby is going to the gym. Bob has 10 years of experience, the job title of "Senior Developer," and he goes to the gym, just like the hiring manager. Sarah and Kris have the same years of experience and job title as Bob. Sarah’s hobby is gaming and Alan loves fishing.
The hiring manager may favor Bob due to similarity bias, potentially overlooking poor Sarah and Alan, who might be a better fit for the role.
4. Halo effect
A rating bias is when a general evaluation (usually positive) of a person or an evaluation of a person on a specific dimension influences judgments of that person on other dimensions. For example, a person who is generally liked might be judged as more intelligent, competent, and honest than they actually are.
Thanks to the Halo effect, the perception of a company’s success or failure may be influenced by its already existing reputation, and in hiring, a hiring manager might let one outstanding characteristic overshadow other aspects of a candidate's profile.
What would be an example of this?
We are hiring a senior-level Software Developer again. Before you ask, it’s not for the same company where Penny worked. We meet Carrie, who has 10 years of experience. She worked on a very famous project for 3 years.
Due to the halo effect created by her prestigious project, we might see her as hardworking and great at coding or mentoring too, without even checking if that’s true. We may even hire her without noticing that one candidate’s project affected our hiring decision too much.
But what about other candidates and their projects? What role did Carrie even have in this project? How recent is the project? We would need more information about the candidate’s career and the project to ensure our hiring decision is not skewed by bias.
Storytime - Unconscious hiring bias (horror) stories
Throughout my hiring career in tech, I've witnessed various biases at play, and I have some real-life examples. No, they are not horror stories, of course, but I admit some of them did make me scared. And before you stop reading - I promise I won’t mention Penny again. Or name any names.
Bias was present in every company I worked in, which is no surprise. Bias is, as mentioned before, very human and prevalent. Internal hiring teams, candidates, managers, external agencies - bias is there.
If you find yourself in the following examples, please remember that it happens to the best. If you are aware of a bias you have or someone else is pointing it out to you, open discussion and active work on controlling the negative effects of bias is the good way to go. And that’s because facing your bias might be less scary than the following stories.
1. Education bias
For technical roles like Software Developer, I rarely hear that education is a hard requirement. The hiring managers I worked with mostly dismissed the idea. I am not proud, but a hiring manager laughed at me once for even asking if we should make education a requirement. I find it funny now too, but the topic is actually quite serious. It’s unwise to reject good candidates because they went to specific schools or are self-taught.
For a Project Management role, one hiring manager suggested we list a BA from specific universities as a nice-to-have requirement. We agreed that candidates from other schools can do the job and go from CV screening to interviews.
But we had no proof that candidates from the preferred universities would do better at this job in our company. Nobody in our team was an alumnus, and the LinkedIn search even showed the same thing for our competitors. Alumni mostly worked on projects of different scopes, sizes, and domains. The manager’s argument? “We all know those are the best schools.”
We were about to give advantage to candidates from that university, possibly overlooking those with degrees from lesser-known institutions who possess the same, if not better, skills and potential. This manager was not intentionally discriminating against anyone, and he even believed that we would avoid discrimination if we made it a nice-to-have, not a must-have requirement.
Unfortunately, even nice-to-have requirements mean you are giving preference. If you are, e.g., creating a niche product and/or the needed skillset is very specific, that makes sense. If you, e.g., work in the aerospace industry, you will probably keep the education of your engineers in mind.
If you list education as a requirement, make sure it is relevant for the job, and it can filter out candidates with competencies you need - just like any other requirement in your job spec.
2. Job hopping bias
If only I got a cookie for each time I heard worries about "job hoppers" not being loyal to their employees. They are reasonable worries to have but not a good base for hiring decisions.
Overall, job-hopping behavior is influenced by various factors, but loyalty itself is a complex construct that different individuals and organizations can interpret loyalty differently. From an empirical research standpoint, studies often focus more on employer perceptions of job hopping rather than on direct measures of employee loyalty associated with job changes.
What I mean is that there is no research proving that all people with frequent job changes are not “loyal” to employers. Often, this judgment stems from seeing multiple short-term positions on a candidate's resume, which we could equate with instability or a lack of commitment. Despite efforts to highlight the candidate's diverse skill set, adaptability, and potential for bringing fresh perspectives, teams can remain fixated on the negative connotations of frequent job changes.
This approach overlooks the candidate's true capabilities and undermines our ability to attract versatile talent in a dynamic job market. The past few years have seen significant job mobility in the US and also in the EU, where labor mobility remains an essential aspect of the market.
In 2021, the employment rate of EU movers increased, and a substantial number of EU citizens (10.2 million) continued to live in another member state despite the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. This is just the tip of the iceberg and one of the reasons why I advocate a more holistic evaluation of a candidate’s career trajectory.
3. Cultural fit bias
While considering how important cultural fit is, it can sometimes translate into a preference for candidates who mirror the existing team's demographics and mindset. I am probably grumpy too often because of this topic, which some of my colleagues can confirm.
Before Devōt, I had seen a number of candidates rejected due to cultural fit without any further feedback. Cultural fit is important, and there are real benefits for companies that define it and incorporate measures of cultural fit into their selection process.
But saying “we did not click” after one unstructured interview does not mean conducting a cultural fit assessment. Defining cultural fit is the first prerequisite, and the second is developing a system to measure that fit.
You can assess cultural fit with questionnaires, interviews, and other techniques, but keep bias in mind and avoid using cultural fit as the “Joker card” rejection reason.
When rejecting any candidate, it can be a challenge to verbalize our arguments and name our rejection reason. But remember, some candidates will require feedback and ask you what the rejection reason was. They have a good right to do so. If “cultural fit” is the rejection reason, you want to be ready with some real arguments.
How are we working to overcome unconscious bias at Devōt?
After that little venting session, let’s focus on potential solutions. How do you tackle something invisible like bias? There are multiple measures you can implement in an organization to deal with bias, the first one crossing my mind is psychological assessment.
Psychological assessments, such as cognitive ability tests and personality inventories, can improve the objectivity of the hiring process and help reduce biases. Structured psychological assessments help predict job performance more accurately than traditional interview methods, often subject to unconscious bias and subjective judgment.
We are currently implementing psychological assessment into our hiring practice. As we have not completed this implementation yet, and the topic itself would be difficult to cover well in this blog, I will focus on the measures we did tackle.
As we strive for an inclusive, objective, and fair recruitment process, here are some of the solutions we've implemented:
Creating interview structure
At Devōt, we use structured and semi-structured interviews to keep our bias in check. We develop custom question sets for each role, and each applicant is evaluated based on the same criteria, reducing the influence of personal biases. An increased degree of interview structure can help reduce the effects of potential unconscious biases.
Structured interviews can be compared to speed dating with a script. You ask every candidate the same questions, ensuring fairness and making it easier to compare candidates.
This can seem boring or unflexible, but it is the go-to for keeping things objective and uniform and controlling bias. In studies, structured interviews have the highest reliability and validity, enabling consistent candidate evaluation.
Semi-structured interviews are the mid-ground. You start with a set of questions but you add questions and dig deeper if someone says something intriguing or unclear. It’s great for discovering how candidates think on their feet and fit into your company, but it’s already a slippery slope for bias. Semi-structured interviews balance reliability with depth, allowing flexibility while maintaining some consistency.
Unstructured interviews are the wild west of hiring. There are no question sets, just free-flowing conversations. They are great for getting to know candidates better, and they might seem more pleasant than structured interviews. But they can be chaotic and inconsistent, endangering the candidate experience and employer brand and fueling hiring mistakes.
You can use unstructured interviews to uncover hidden gems, but beware—this is the bias red zone. Unstructured interviews offer rich insights but lack reliability and validity, increasing the risk of bias and inconsistent assessments.
Having technical assessment
The hiring process should help employers predict whether a candidate will be successful in a job. A candidate will need specific knowledge and skills to do the job, and employers should check if they have them.
According to studies in psychology, structured assessments that directly measure job-relevant skills and knowledge are more reliable indicators of future job performance than unstructured interviews or subjective impressions alone.
By incorporating the Devōt challenge stage into our hiring process, we can focus on the candidates' abilities rather than subjective impressions. This helps us assess their suitability for the role more objectively.
Whenever we open a role, we define the job specification first. We outline essential skills, qualifications, and experience required for the role and detail the responsibilities and duties expected from the candidate. Based on this, we develop role-specific technical assessments - tasks covering relevant know-how and skillset for each role. Each task is graded carefully based on the previously set criteria, and candidates with positive feedback move forward to technical interviews.
Technical interviews help us collect more detailed information about whether the candidate’s competencies and way of work match our hiring criteria.
Enhanced bias awareness training
Companies can opt for diversity and inclusion training designed to help evaluators recognize unconscious biases, such as age, ethnicity, gender, race, or sexual orientation. We dedicated a part of our hiring training in Devōt to bias, and we strive to create a more detailed educational program focused on diversity and inclusion.
We’ve implemented our "Licence to hire" training for all cross-functional hiring teams. We start with hiring terminology, process steps, and our favorite tools like Greenhouse and LinkedIn. The real fun begins with tips and tricks for successful hiring, where we dive into bias awareness with terminology, real-life examples, and a nudge toward self-awareness.
New team members can also undergo an interview shadowing process to see experienced interviewers in action and receive feedback from more experienced colleagues for the first interviews they conduct. We strive towards continuous education, and based on the feedback we receive, we will expand the training, tackling bias in a more practical way and on a more regular basis.
Access to information - to restrict or not to restrict?
When it comes to bias, sometimes restricting access to data might be helpful. Some companies foster the practice of blind recruitment, removing personal information like names, location, or gender from job applications.
We are not there yet, but modern applicant tracking systems (ATS) offer functionalities to implement similar practices to tackle bias. In Greenhouse, our ATS, there is a full set of such functionalities, including the possibility of restricting access to other interviewer’s feedback. We provide our feedback about candidates in the form of “scorecards.” For panel interviews and shadowing, we practice restricting scorecards.
When several interviewers in the hiring team assess the same candidate in one stage, they don’t see other's scorecards before completing their own. Creating the scorecard means making a hiring decision. Each interviewer’s decision remains independent as much as possible, reducing the influence of others' opinions and promoting a fairer evaluation process.
Continuous feedback and improvement
In line with the Agile way we work, we evolve through continuous improvement. We're serious about feedback, so we implemented concrete measures to encourage it. We regularly use candidate surveys to get information about candidate experience.
Our hiring teams? They're feedback champions. After every Licence-to-Hire training, we explore insights that may help improve it. After each hiring process, we implement retrospectives, ensuring the cross-functional teams get together and create solid action points based on two-way feedback.
Providing and receiving constructive feedback is encouraged at all times, so our meetings are not your average snoozefests—and biases do get called out. Transparency is one of our values, allowing everyone to be open about the biases they notice. We can take that feedback and turn it into improvements. Why? To make our hiring process as fair and inclusive as a unicorn at a disco. So, bring on the feedback!
Final words on the hiring bias and hiring process
To sum up, it's crucial to work on our own existing beliefs and be aware of common hiring biases. Their presence needs to be acknowledged and understood.
It's possible to fight the negative effects of unconscious bias in hiring. My advice is to increase interview structure, use technical assessments, and implement other measures that will help you reduce bias. Also, educating hiring teams about unconscious bias and providing training sessions can increase awareness and help teams make more objective hiring decisions.
In this blog post, we dived into hiring bias, drawing insights from ducks' teamwork to Sam Altman's saga and psychological heuristics. Beware of hidden biases, not just in the workplace! And if your job includes hiring people, combat bias with proven predictors of job success. Good luck in making every hire count with smarter, bias-free decisions!
If you have any additional strategies for fairer hiring processes, feel free to reach out to me. I believe we can avoid unconscious bias and benefit both employers and potential employees. Remember, overcoming unconscious bias is an ongoing effort that requires continuous learning and adaptation.
If you want to see our job process firsthand, feel free to check our careers page. If you don't find what you're looking for, send us an open application, and we will gladly review it for potential opportunities.
