Bias impacts almost every decision we make both personally and professionally. But biases—especially unconscious biases—can be dangerous when allowed to influence the hiring process. The following is from a Q&A session with Pete Hamilton, vice president and managing director, APAC, TestMSP. Pete outlines some of his thoughts on unconscious bias and how it can impact an organization’s ability to find and hire top talent.
Q: How can we recognize our biases, especially our unconscious biases that may play a role in our ability to recruit and hire?
PH: Everyone is biased. And it’s not easy to truly understand our own personal, hidden biases.
Someone recently shared a valuable exercise with me. The idea is to list all of the major decisions you've made in the last six months and then ask yourself what assumptions went into your decision-making process. How did your biases play a part in the decisions you made?
Since it can be difficult to understand your own biases, it may be smart to ask a friend or colleague to review your decisions and tell you what they honestly see. It can be enlightening to see how often boas is present.
Of course, biases or assumptions aren’t always problematic. We often have to make quick decisions and replicating what's been successful in the past can be useful. But we need to be aware of our biases so that when we make a decision, we’re confident that it stands up to scrutiny as fair, equitable, and defendable.
Q: Where in the hiring process do you see bias being the biggest problem, or occurring most frequently?
PH: I think the most common issue is hiring people that are quite similar to other people in the organization. And it may be for very good reasons—because you've seen them be successful in the past. But we need to realize that may lead you away from thinking more broadly about the composition or the diversity of the team. You end up hiring people that you think we'll get on well with the existing team and “fit in”—so you merely reinforce a culture rather than providing a diverse addition or real growth to the culture.
My feeling is that bias is probably prevalent at the outset—in the way that you construct a job requirement or description. You may be building bias into that and, as a result, influencing the entire recruitment process. Even something that seems simple—like set work hours or a lack of flexibility—may make the job less accessible for people with parental responsibilities. There are numerous bias traps throughout the process of designing a role, but I think it starts as early as when you are thinking about the job description. Bias is something we all need to consider from the very beginning.
One way you may be able to counter bias is thinking less about a traditional job description—which is usually a mix of skills, behaviors, and responsibilities. Instead, focus on the skills that are needed to get the job done.
Q: You just touched on skills-based hiring as a counter to unconscious bias. Do you think this is where hiring is headed?
PH: A skills-based approach can certainly help prevent you from preconceived ideas or forming a picture in your head of what kind of candidate will be successful. Instead, you can stay open to thinking about the underlying skills that will get the job done.
This won’t work for every organization, and not every role lends itself to being skills based, but I think it's it could be a helpful way of challenging biased thinking.
Switching to a skills-based model isn’t easy. Organizations need to evaluate their process. One of the ways they might be able to do that is starting internally. Thinking about your internal talent pool—what skills they have and how transferable they are—is a way of getting started.
At the last TestMSP Talent Leadership in Action (TLIA) event in Singapore, a customer in the financial services industry shared that they have created an internal talent pool to take different gigs or assignments across their organization. They’re taking a very skills-based approach in that they look at the skills an employee has and how those skills can transfer across different functions and roles. They described it as sort of an incubator to start thinking differently, and an interesting way of overcoming biases and getting skills-based hiring up and running.
It also lends itself to blind hiring or anonymous recruiting—where you remove gender, age, name, address, and other information from a candidate's application. This can help recruiters more fairly evaluate a candidate and reduces the probability of their biases creeping into the hiring process.
It can be a good practice—especially when working with AI screening tools where you don’t want to introduce human biases into the algorithms.
Q: That brings up an important topic, how does bias impact AI used in the recruiting and hiring processes?
PH: Many companies are already using AI tools in recruiting and hiring. While AI has great potential to overcome human biases, it comes with its own significant risks. We have to be careful when relying on AI for things like candidate screening or writing job descriptions. Inherent biases can be fed into the technology depending on how it was set up, flaws in the data itself, or problems with the data sources used to “train” the AI models. AI tools must be trained with diverse, unbiased data. Due diligence, education, and transparency will be key to minimizing the risk here.
Big picture, regulations governing bias and the use of AI in hiring are being written even as you read this, and we need to actively monitor these laws as they develop.