“I can tell the right man when he walks in the door”
This was proudly spoken by one of the participants in my workshop “Hiring the Right Person”
There are so many things wrong with this sentence!
So you can tell if HE is right?
How? Because he looks like you? He is your age, gender and culture.
Because he was wearing your old-school tie?
Because he had a nice smile and a great handshake?
Of course we are going to have more rapport initially with a PLU (People Like Us)
Psychologists call this “thin slicing.”
Within moments of meeting somebody, we decide all sorts of things about them, from status to intelligence to values.
Within the first two minutes of meeting the candidates, many of us have sorted them very quickly into the yes / no / maybe piles.
And without a structured interview process, we spend the rest of the interview searching for data to support our original impression.
Why pay attention to this? Because our decision-making might go in ways we didn’t intend. Our subtle assumptions affect promotions, hiring, evaluations, choosing friends and lovers.
When a screen was put up in front of musicians auditioning for an orchestra, this increased the likelihood that a woman would move through the evaluation process by 50%, and between 20-50% that she would get a seat in the orchestra.
Only last year a young man whose first name was Kim reported that he received NO offers for 200 job interviews when he submitted applications under his own name…but when he used his second name, Charles, with the identical resume, the offers starting coming in.
If you Google ‘CEO’ in images all you see is men until the first female you see …. is Barbie! You have to keep searching for 58 images until you see a real woman. All this is subtly reinforcing in our minds “Think manager – think male”.
So what can we do about this unconscious bias?
First, accept that we are all biased. We need our subconscious to do a lot of the work for us. And the way they work is by finding patterns, shortcuts, and simple gimmicks that allow brains to take in way too much information and still make use of it.
Probe for relevant evidence-based responses to your selection criteria. A logical decision-making matrix with benchmarked responses will help you focus.
Catch yourself thinking the following: (and I have heard everyone of these!)
Change management: “He is over 50 therefore he won’t manage change well”
Manage multiple deadlines: “A woman will be better at multi-tasking”
Numeracy: “We know Asians are good at numbers”
IT skills: “A young Gen Y will be best”
Decision-making: “Obviously a male”
Unconscious Bias is an issue for organisations simply because you’re not making the most of your people. I encourage you to work with your executives and leadership teams, to surface the unconscious bias that exists in recruitment, talent management, selection and promotion…and provide tools to challenge them.
