Avoid These Common Hiring Biases with One Simple Strategy

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Hiring the most effective person for a job is undeniably a delicate process that requires a mix of precise assessment and decision-making. To ensure fairness in the hiring process, one mechanism organizations often employ is interview feedback.?

There are two scopes of interview feedback in the hiring process:

1. Interview team’s feedback to the hiring manager
2. Hiring manager’s feedback on their selection decision

This week, I’m exploring how to make a feedback exchange meaningful and ensure it is bias-free.

Why Feedback Matters

At Team JTC, one of the challenges we’ve identified is that the post-interview feedback often doesn’t serve its intended purpose. Sometimes, it even falls through the cracks, with interview teams sending no feedback at all. Just crickets!

Interview feedback is the crucial link between the interview and the final selection decision, and the better we do here, the better candidates we land in an organization. When making a selection decision, feedback is not just a nice-to-have, it is what enables you to identify and mitigate biases.

Navigating Feedback Conversations

Imagine this: you’re a recruiter, and you’ve just finished a round of candidate interviews. But the feedback you receive from the hiring team leaves you scratching your head. “Just not a good fit for the team,” they say. You’re left wondering, “What does that really mean?”

The hiring manager, after interviewing a candidate, isn’t convinced about his suitability. The primary reasons are Ryan’s lack of eye contact and inability to sell himself. But is this feedback rooted in the qualifications listed in the job description? More often than not, conscious and unconscious biases seep into the decision-maker’s judgments. Aspects like ‘gut feelings’ or ‘intuition’ are often laced with such biases.

How to Navigate This?

In principle, an interview team can consist of only the hiring manager. However, to mitigate interview bias, it’s essential to have multiple people, ideally, a diverse panel, assess a candidate. After evaluating a candidate, each interviewer should provide substantive feedback to support the hiring manager in making an equitable decision. It’s essential to understand that biases can influence both hiring and rejection choices.

As such, regular and consistent feedback is imperative. Ensure that every member of the interview team offers feedback, whether verbally or in writing. Regularly reinforce the importance of unbiased decision-making principles with your hiring team.

After those post-interview chats with hiring managers, recruiters can partner with hiring managers to take a moment to double-check that they are focusing on objective criteria and connecting the feedback to the job description. This not only ensures that candidates are assessed against tangible, role-related criteria but also guards against unintentionally biased decisions.?

If a hiring manager is thinking of passing on a candidate for reasons that don’t quite match the job’s requirements, gently nudge them to revisit their decision. Keep an eye out for things like a candidate’s eye contact or how they present themselves; sometimes, these are just cultural norms and not indicators of their fit for the job.

The Five Golden Rules of Effective Feedback

Effective interview feedback checks the following boxes:

1. It is consistent: Surprisingly, post-interview feedback can sometimes be forgotten. Ensure that it is always submitted, whether verbally or written, without exception.?
2. It is relevant: Connect the feedback directly to the role’s qualifications or the job description, not to random perceptions, gut feelings, and instincts.
3. It is explicit: Clear feedback prevents misunderstanding. Encourage clear and understandable feedback.
4. It is timely: Feedback should always precede the selection decision. It shouldn’t be an afterthought.
5. It steers clear of bias: Effective feedback checks for biases, like confirmation bias, which can skew the decision-makers' perceptions.

Concluding Thoughts

Let’s face it: We’re all human. And with that comes a natural predisposition to biases. While we’re trained to evaluate others, we need to apply the same rigor when it comes to checking biases on our end. Awareness, training, and proactivity are key to this process.?

By ensuring mandatory feedback, systemizing the process, and connecting it closely to role qualifications, you can ensure your hiring decisions are both fair and effective.

Next time you’re confronted with vague feedback, challenge it gracefully. Delve deeper, ask the hard questions, and encourage connections to the role’s qualifications. Train your mind to identify where bias may creep in, and steer the conversation back on track.

Let me ask this: how do you handle ambiguous feedback? Dive into the comments section, and let’s swap stories and strategies.