6 most common recruitment biases

This article was originally written in September 2020.

COVID-19 has already affected companies, cities and even entire economies. Even though we are done with COVID-19, COVID-19 is not done with us. So, what does this mean for the way we perceive work?

COVID-19 has heavily impacted the way we work. I believe that, even if there will be a vaccine to the virus, there is no way we are going back to ‘what was before’. The way we work has been impacted in such a way that companies have finally recognized the value of alternative forms. It baffles me that, for some reason, we are still holding on to Dolly Parton’s nine to five dogma which was originally based on agricultural economies and even pre-historic cultures (you need natural light to hunt and grow crops). Now with the miracle of human-made light a lot of industries have the option to re-design their working days. So, in this blog I will be talking about how I will think that the way we work will be impacted (and what we are going to do with all those empty office buildings).

Working remotely

First, let’s get into the obvious. With the COVID-19 crisis many offices closed their doors, forcing people to work remotely. This often involves Zoom meetings with: people who are dressed in cosy clothes, interruptions of cat’s, children, and the occasional doorbell, and connectivity issues which makes you pull your hair out. But we have gotten used to it, more or less. The opinions are divided on how good it works. Some people want to go back to the office to socialize and others hail it as the new way of working. I am not going to take a stance in how well it works, but I am going to take a stance in whether this is a temporary phenomenon or not. Just to be clear: it is here to stay.

I think there will be some alterations in the future. Working remotely all of the time will still be an option, but I think that many people will opt for a combination of working remotely and working from the office. I think that people will be going back to the office for a part of the week to get in touch with their colleagues and stay at home for the other part to ‘really get things done’, but overall, I believe that working remotely is now an integrated part of working.

Working (very) flexible

Working remotely also opened up another door to working (very) flexible. Flexible working has already had its place in the workplace before, but the COVID-19 crisis and working remotely really accelerated this trend. It is not unusual anymore to receive messages early in the morning or late in the evening, while not being able to reach certain colleagues during the day. This sense of flexibility has opened up a sphere of ‘working a couple of hours here and there’ which means that we can restructure our entire day. What a relief for all those early birds or night owls out there!

Bringing the kids to school? No problem, work when they are to bed in the evening. Tired of recycling socks and in need of a laundry run? Easy, just run it and work a bit overtime. Still have to do groceries for the dinner of tomorrow? Fine, just get up an hour earlier, put in some work, and do groceries during your extended break.

Private and professional colliding

What working remotely and working flexible have caused is that there is not a clear distinction anymore between our private and personal life. You are not walking in an office anymore at 9AM and you are not leaving it anymore after 5PM. That is something people will have to deal with on a mental level, which is easier for some than it is for others. For people who are struggling with this, I think that lot of companies will (or should) move to a model where the teams meet (digitally) in the morning to open up the day and close down the day (digitally) in the afternoon. This brings back a mental sense of opening and closure, clearing up the blurred divide of private and professional life.

Another point that I want to make here is that there will be new models of facility, with options for people who work a lot remotely. In that sense you can think about compensation for the cost of living at home and facilities.  

Three cups of coffee a day does not cost a lot, but if you multiply with the number of days in a year, then costs begin to show themselves.

When it comes to facilities you should not only think about laptops and that kind of hardware, but also chairs, tables and ventilation. Basically, everything which turns your living room into an ergonomic working environment. I would argue that employers will also have a stake in this. Their cost of building up a workplace and providing coffee basically stays the same, but their cost of their physical buildings will go down as they can close down offices when people work permanently or flexibly, from home.

Working holidays

One form of impact that I have not heard yet is how this whole COVID-19 crisis will make us reconsider the line between work and holidays. I predict that people will rethink the way that they take holidays and how they plan their holidays, permanently. Firstly, right now, there is the obvious of not taking planes anymore and more regional travelling instead of international travelling.

But I would also argue that also the structure of our holidays will change, moving to being more flexible on holidays. Perhaps you are not able to leave the office for the entire week, take off four entire weeks in the summer, or even miss that one important meeting that distorts your family plans. So why not go to your holiday destination and work for a couple of days, one week of the four in the summer, or attend that one important meeting. I would say that combining work with holidays will become more common and it can provide a possible positive trade-off for employees (as long as they know how to properly balance it).  

Let’s talk office

Now that I have discussed the consequences for outside of the office, let’s move on to how this will impact things inside the office. First and foremost, I think that the current pandemic will influence the way we are perceiving as a hygienic working environment.

In this sense you can think about sanitation, disinfection, and ventilation, but also on policies regarding when somebody is considered healthy enough to enter the office (regarding the spread of infections). Most companies right now have a sort of ‘laissez faire’ attitude towards this issue and let employees decide when they deem themselves fit enough to enter the office.

We might move to a scenario where employers more actively encourage employees to stay away from the office when they show symptoms of a disease. Then there is of course the topic of training and education, which will also play a role. New guidelines will require training and education for your staff.

Last but not least, there are already companies who specialize themselves into making virus-free environments, such as the six-feet-office introduced by Cushman & Wakefield. Again, I believe that COVID-19 will have a lasting impression on how we regulate health in the office.

In conclusion

I believe COVID-19 has a significant impact on how we perceive ‘work’ going forward. It has shocked the working world, turned it upside down, and made us realise that there is a contingency (the idea of choice) in what we do. In a last remark, I would add that all of this is just a prelude to much larger changes which will improve the quality of our lives. If working regimes become more flexible to adapt to our preferred lifestyle, then you will notice that:

• less and less people press themselves into public transport during rush-hour;
• more people will move out from the cities into the countryside to work remotely;
• we travel less to work on location (decreasing our environmental footprint);
• people can organize their lives better to their own preference;

and this will ultimately benefit our (mental) health and wellbeing as human beings. Therefore, I embrace this change and am looking forward to keep working in the new normal.

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The simple truth is that everybody is bias in some sort of way. This is not because we inherently want it to be that way, but the way we are brought up and the environment we are brought up in, gives us a certain perspective of the world. Our upbringing gives us certain values which we carry with us throughout our lives and we associate symbols with those values to identify whether or not somebody else cherishes the same kind of values. Biases in this sense are basically short-cuts to get to know somebody and what they represent. However, as with all things in life, taking short-cuts means involving risks. In this blog I will talk about the 6 most common recruitment biases and how they can affect your business negatively. In the conclusion you will find a link to how you can overcome these biases.  

Confirmation bias

The confirmation bias is the idea that you have a certain idea about a candidate and you are trying to look for hints which ‘confirm’ that idea, while (actively) ignoring signals which might disprove that idea. Often it is linked to a first impression which is either positive or negative and after that you try to confirm that impression by looking for clues which indicate that the impression was correct. This can either be a positive idea about the candidate or a negative idea about the candidate. Both instances can actually be hurtful to the recruitment. For instance, if you have a certain negative idea about the candidate, the confirmation bias makes it that the candidate can hardly prove him- or herself otherwise. This way you can overlook qualities and miss out on good candidates, just because you are looking for the wrong clues. But a positive confirmation bias is also not good. Unfortunately, this implies that you know something positive about the candidate and are looking for ways to confirm your suspicion, ignoring all clues which might prove you wrong. This way you might send the wrong candidate through to technical interviews, or even worse; you might up hiring the wrong candidate. Do you want to learn more about the confirmation bias? Watch this short video on confirmation bias.  

Heuristic bias

The heuristic bias is a fancy way of saying: ‘judging a book by its cover’. It has strong similarities with the confirmation bias as it is based upon first impressions. In contrary to the confirmation bias, it does not look for extra clues and remains just one set image, which often involves physical appearance. This has the advantage that it does not get reinforced the way the confirmation bias does (by looking for clues), but it has the disadvantage that it is quite difficult to overcome the set image you have of a candidate. German scientists have looked into it and questioned 127 HR professionals who often make decisions about recruitment and promotion. They basically gave them pictures of individuals and the outcome was that the test candidates continuously underestimated the prestige of obese individuals and overestimated the prestige of the normal-weight individuals. The test candidates in this sense quite literally judged the content of an individual by his or her appearance. Read more about their research here.  

Halo and Horn effect

The halo and horn effect is the idea that you attribute certain traits to a person based upon some traits that you already know. Quite simply put you see a person either in an entire positive light (as a saint with an halo) or in an entire negative light (as a sinner with horns) based upon a couple of known traits. In this sense you might see an attractive candidate and assume that they are also successful and competent as well. That is the halo effect. On the other hand, you might find out that a candidate has had a criminal record in the past, which might make you assume that they are unsuccessful and incompetent. That is the horns effect.  

Similarity attraction bias

The similarity attraction bias has no fancy name, but it is a very important bias to be aware of as I believe that a lot of recruiters make this mistake. Simply put, the similarity attraction bias makes you more bias towards persons who are similar to you and your colleagues. This leads to more candidates further down the pipeline which are similar to the people that already work at the company. Now you might be thinking: well, what is the big deal? I need people who are similar because they work better together. Well, that myth has been debunked and it turns out, if you are looking to build quality teams, then you need to be aiming for diversity. That is why the similarity attraction bias is quite dangerous. Do you want to find out more common myths about the perfect workplace?

Conformity bias

Conformity bias is quite an interesting one and often happens when recruitment processes are hiring in teams. Firstly, I want to point out that every company should hire in teams. Why? Secondly, there are some dangers with hiring in teams as well, and the conformity bias is one of them. Basically, it revolves around the idea of peer pressure and that people suppress their true opinion about a candidate to conform to the general opinion of the panel. This often happens in groups which are too large for effective hiring (another lesson that Google teaches us: the magical number for hiring teams is four persons). It is important to address and apprehend this bias as each and every team member might prove to have crucial information as to why or why not you should hire a candidate. You need to be aware of these insights and not have them be suppressed just because everybody likes to adhere to the opinion of the team.  

Expectation anchor

Expectation anchor is the idea that you have first impression of a candidate or a first piece of information a candidate, and that you basically make decisions based upon those first impression or first piece of information. The idea is that we have a very difficult time to shake our idea of somebody once a first impression or idea is established and that we will make decisions based upon those impressions and ideas accordingly. It is very hard to sway somebody and their future actions from that first impression or piece of information, and can often lead to hasty and wrong decisions.  

In conclusion

Firstly, I would say that a lot of these biases overlap in terms of definitions and effects. The expectation anchor for example, is more or less intertwined with the halo effect. Secondly, I would argue that a lot of recruiters are unaware of their own biases and how to overcome them. I myself even find it hard to critically reflect on how I base my decisions and if they are bias-free, but there are solutions to solve these biases. Want to find out more? Get in touch with us and see how we can get your recruitment process bias-free, starting tomorrow.  

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In the last post, I discussed how culture eats strategy for breakfast, which is almost a well-accepted mantra in the business world. If I elaborate on that train of thought, then I believe we can almost certainly say that culture eats processes for lunch and dinner. Not only because processes are the consequence of a strategy, but also because we even look at the theoretic idea of a process versus the practical application of a process.

A strategy is an overarching plan for an organization on how to achieve its business goals. From the strategy, we derive tactical and operational plans and create processes to ensure that we achieve the goals of those plans as efficiently as possible.  

When we look at the general idea of a workplace, we see that the overarching framework for a lot of workplaces is very similar. People travel to an assigned geographical location, have a time that they start and finish, have colleagues they work together with, and collectively they work towards an objective. Apart from that, professions differ in a lot of different ways. A police officer has a distinctively different set of tasks and responsibilities than a receptionist or software developer. Still, they have a lot in common too. One major thing that most jobs have in common is that they must deal with a lot of ambiguity. Whether you ask a police officer, receptionist, or software developer what they do on a daily basis, a lot of the answers boil down to a variant of “every day brings new unforeseen challenges”. It is hard to describe daily activities as they can vary immensely. No day is the same. Still, each one of those people knows what is expected of them in various situations. They know how to behave, even when the situation is new to them.  

Structures & Processes

One way of dealing with this problem is to build processes that give people guidelines on how to act in different situations. These processes are good to show other organisations on how you intend to run your businesses. A prime example of this is ISO certifications. Huge amounts of documentation on how an organisation has set up its processes to be able to guarantee a certain level of standardization and quality. But even the detailed documentation of ISO certifications leaves room for interpretations and ambiguity and requires employees to be adaptive and creative. Do not get me wrong; ISO certification can be critical for organizations to improve both the quality and efficiency of their work. I merely argue that it is not the ultimate tool for guiding your employees in their everyday work. These are often sophisticated texts and process flows to guide individuals on how to deal with complex issues, hidden in manuals or quality support systems. Only a small proportion of people have read these manuals and to make matters worse the theory always slightly differs from reality. This means that we need to give our people more guidelines on how to act, even with ambiguity and ever-changing situations.

Culture to the rescue

This is where culture comes in. I have already extensively talked about how decision-making, culture, and empowerment are correlated here. But besides taking decisions, we also behave in a certain way as people. Our behaviours are shaped by motivations, that which drives us individually, and by what is acceptable in a group, that which drives us collectively. As I am not a psychologist, I will not speculate too much here on how individual motivations are shaped, but as an HR specialist, I can tell you that group behaviours form and are shaped by company culture. In other words, as a company we cannot determine the motivations of an individual person, however, we can influence the overarching culture of our organisation. The culture that we create will in turn influence group behaviours, which in turn will influence individual behaviours and decisions.  

By creating the right culture, we can create the right group behaviours which will provide guidelines for individuals on how to behave and make decisions. This is the set of guidelines that help people make consistent decisions despite ambiguity and ever-changing situations. A good example of this is the cultural value of Facebook “Move fast and break things”, which got adopted by a lot of small fast-growing companies. Why? Simple: these companies often lack the structure to properly guide their employees through their decision-making process. A company value like that shows your employees that they should not be afraid and wait too long with making decisions. They are rather encouraged to rely on their own strengths and “Move fast and break things” instead of “Going slow and steady”.  

Although I am not arguing that this is a good cultural value (Facebook had to roll back its original bold value), it is a clear guideline and message to people on how to act in unclear situations that demand adaptability and creativity. That is something that processes can never give your employees. Processes can only help you with the predictable, but culture can help you with the unpredictable – and remember it is the case for most jobs that “every day brings new unforeseen situations”.  

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