How can I limit bias when recruiting?

Question

Background: I am a senior team member in a small-sized company that is trying to aggressively grow it's team size. I seem to be the member of the team tasked with reviewing resumes, performing phone screenings and interviews alongside our department's C-level head and HR. I am not someone who ticks any boxes on diversity targets.

When reviewing candidates, I find myself making associations with former colleagues from those parts of the world.

For most places, it averages out eventually. I've got a fair amount of experience, and I've worked with quite a diverse and varied group of people in the past.

For a couple of places, however, my experience has been universally poor. I understand that this is just my bad luck, but I find myself:

• Having a gut feeling about these candidates that they may not be the one to break this streak;
• Realising that this is a stupid thing to think, and so spend far more time considering the candidate at an early stage than I would others and constantly second-guessing my opinion.

In other roles, at other companies, I've been on short "workshops" designed to cover this sort of thing, but these have always been focussed on making the process appear fair rather than any sort of practical advice on how to actually consider a candidate solely on their merit for the job.

What (if anything) can I practically do to a) stop making inappropriate associations, and b) stop second-guessing myself to such a degree in an attempt to correct this?

Answer 1

For late-stage candidates, there's a technique that's intended to eliminate biases arising from naturally getting along with one candidate more than another, but it works here as well.

Make a short checklist of the qualifications for each person--basically a three to five word resume, focusing on their distinguishing traits. So you might compare two developers where A was more experienced and worked on mobile apps, where B was better in start-ups and scaling. You pick who you think you're leaning toward, say A. You then reverse the lists. Would you still want A with B's skills, and by as much? You may have been leaning heavily toward A and now only slighly toward B. If so, then you like A, not A's skills. For sales, that may mean A is a better fit--A sold you on the job regardless of skills. For most other positions, your bias is preventing you from deciding. You can hand off the decision having narrowed down the field, or try to imagine the person with the opposite characteristics of your former colleagues. Replace quiet with loud... still want them? Replace passive with forceful, etc.

Hiring correctly is worth enormous efforts. You don't want to pass up someone good or hire someone inappropriate for whatever reason. Look things over carefully and really let things sink in, and play mental games trying to talk yourself in and out of everyone. You'll pretty quickly see your weak spots and learn to naturally compensate.

Answer 2

I've recently been thinking about bias in recruitment procedures, as part of a consultation at work to help with our Athena Swan application.

For early stage candidates, you may be able to significantly reduce your own bias in selecting candidates for interview by asking for resumes to be stripped of the following information before they reach your desk:

• Name
• Age
• Gender and Sexuality
• Race
• All locations
• All School/college names

^{Suggested edits for additional biases gratefully accepted}

Ideally, candidates would not even include some of these items on their resume, but different cultures have different ideas of what should be on a CV, and this can work against individuals best interests.

The best way to remove your own biases however would be to learn about the sources of bias and critically assess your own decisions.

As a cis white male, I have to be particularly sensitive to any biasses I have with regards gender, race and sexuality. As someone from a working class background, I have to be careful of biasses with respect to wealthy or posh people. As a 'plate glass' university graduate, I have to be careful of bias against both polytechnic graduates and Oxbridge graduates.

Understand your biases, learn about the issues surrounding them and attempt to eliminate them. There is little more you can do, but the fact that you are asking yourself these questions bodes well.