14 Types Of Bias In Recruitment: How To Reduce Bias In Your Hiring Decisions

Every recruiter wants to believe that they are making objective and fair hiring decisions for their team but in reality, we are more biased than we think. Our unconscious and conscious bias starts right at the beginning of our screening process and plays a huge role in how we interview various candidates. It influences not only our final hiring decision but also whether our top candidates choose us in the end. To be able to bring more diversity and inclusivity into our organization, we need to learn how to reduce bias in our hiring process.

The consequences of recruitment bias might not show up in a business immediately but they are all the more grim in the long run. Onboarding and investing in a professional who isn’t the right fit culturally or in terms of their skills is a mistake more costly than one might think. According to the US Department of Labor, a bad hire could cost up to 30% of that individual’s annual earnings. This can easily reach tens of thousands of dollars for a company with over 1000 employees.

When hiring bias decreases the quality of recruitment decisions, it doesn’t just burn resources but also bleeds into the efficiency of the team overall. In a survey by CareerBuilder, 95% of employers confirmed that a bad hire has previously affected their work team, productivity, and stress levels. The higher the position the new hire fills, the more damage they might do with their strategic decisions.

It’s not just more ethical but also good for the business. Teams that have greater ethnic and gender diversity have been repeatedly shown better performance. Beyond just visible diversity, unbiased hiring brings more perspective into the room and can uncover hidden talent with untapped potential in their field.

In this article, we’ll cover what types of biases you need to look out for, the unfair hiring practices you need to stay away from, and how to overcome them all with unbiased hiring strategies and the right technology.

Types Of Bias In Recruitment

Every hiring decision consists of a series of smaller decisions: from opting for a particular talent pool to shortlisting candidate profiles, all the way to the complete selection process leading up to an offer. There are more than a dozen different types of bias in recruitment that can affect our final choice on a role. These biases may be present at any stage of the hiring process and we’re often dealing with more than one of them.

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago defines bias as “favorable or unfavorable attitudes, or beliefs about a group that informs how we perceive, interact, behave toward the group that are automatically activated.” These attitudes stem from our everyday experiences, whether we have directly interacted with these groups or we’ve learned these attitudes from someone else.

It’s important to highlight that bias doesn’t always show up in the form of prejudice against a socioeconomic group. Our fair judgment can be hindered by purely situational factors too like the order of the candidates, who filled the position before them, or whether we woke up feeling rested that day.

Another common misconception about bias is that all bias is negative. These preconceived notions can actually be both positive or negative and either one can lead to unfair judgment in a selection process. Overemphasizing a candidate’s positive traits (also known as the “halo effect”) puts all other applicants in an unfavorable position and poses the risk of hiring someone inadequate for the role.

The same thing happens when we base our hiring decisions on sympathy or the opinion of someone else who referred the candidate for the role (also known as nepotism). This isn’t just unfair to other candidates and the team but to the person being hired as well. If they don’t have the skills, experience, and knowledge required for the role, it will likely set them up for poor performance. Besides, if their subordinates know that this person isn’t fit for the job, they will probably not support and respect them, or collaborate with them as willingly.

The more decision-makers are present in a selection process, the more complex it gets to deal with bias. Partially, because we all see people through a different glass and it might bring more biased views to the table. Secondly, because peer pressure of multiple people voting against or for a candidate can also affect our decision, a bias called conformity bias.

Overall, we can divide all types of bias in recruitment into two main categories: conscious bias and unconscious bias. Let’s look at what they each mean in detail.

Conscious Bias In Hiring

Conscious bias is the attitudes or inclinations we have towards or against a certain person or group that we are aware of. For example, hiring managers who say they prefer to hire a person from a certain gender or age group for a role are consciously aware of their bias and they decide based on them intentionally.

Conscious bias is easier to catch as it’s often voiced by the person, and it can also be observed from their behavior. In most cases, intentionally biased decision-making has malicious intent and is considered discrimination.

Exclusion and unequal treatment both within your organization and in your hiring process need to be addressed and dealt with as early as possible. By establishing policies and procedures for just hiring and educating your team on important values such as equality and diversity, you can create a more open and safe work environment.

Discriminative behavior should not be tolerated at any level of an organization. Every employee who exercises such behavior can be traced back to a bad hiring decision or the absence of a clearly defined and outlined company culture. This shows how important it is to establish inclusive and ethical cultural values in a company and to use it as your primary filter when it comes to your employee selection process.

Unconscious Bias In Hiring

Unconscious biases are learned stereotypes that are automatic and unintentional. They are beliefs we aren’t consciously aware of and are therefore harder to catch. Unconscious bias can be a part of our first impression of a candidate which, according to studies, is formed in under seven seconds — clearly insufficient time for a thought-through, data-based decision to be made.

Beyond just our first impressions, unconscious bias may show up at any point during our selection process, or even after hiring the person. They affect where we source profiles, our screening and interviewing process, our final hiring decision, and the way we develop and nurture talent within the organization.

To reduce biased decisions in your hiring, you need to examine your procedures across the talent pipeline. To do that, we first need to understand what unbiased hiring means and how it can be defined.

What Unbiased Hiring Means

Unbiased hiring is technically a misnomer in itself since human decisions are never completely bias-free. Our brain has a tendency to constantly look for patterns in the world around us and take shortcuts in our decision-making process. It’s what makes us human and what makes it possible for us to be efficient at learning and navigating the world around us.

When we refer to unbiased or bias-free hiring, what we mean is that we try to reduce and eliminate as many of these biases as possible with the help of certain decision-making strategies and the right technology. As a ripple effect, this will lead to better candidate selection, more equitable recruitment efforts, and bigger diversity in teams.

Types Of Hiring Biases

There are several aspects of a candidate’s profile that can cloud the judgment of hiring managers, for example:

• Race
• Gender
• Age
• Religion
• Political views
• Disability
• Family status
• Appearance and charisma
• Personal sympathy
• A certain type of education or experience

During the first screening round, we may already form an opinion about the applicant based on their resume picture, name, date of birth, or hometown without even realizing it. These are perceptions that influence how we continue the interview process and how soon we eliminate candidates before we even understand their professional achievements.

Hobbies, personal interests, and volunteering work may also hint at religious views or political ideology that recruiters may or may not personally resonate with. While the core values of a person should be assessed for culture fit, these stereotypical attributes rarely give a reason to jump to conclusions.

Beyond personal data, previous experience and education can also become a basis of bias. The age-old cliché that certain workplaces and educational institutions will “look good on your resume” is perpetuated by recruiters who are quick to judge experience based on a prestigious name alone. This is not to say that these qualifications aren’t valuable but making them the end of the hiring process fails to consider candidates with non-traditional training and experience.

Define A Bad Hire?

Hiring the wrong person doesn’t necessarily mean that this person is a bad professional or that there’s something wrong with their character. A bad hire simply means someone who doesn’t fit the competency or culture fit expectations of the role they were hired for. Picking the wrong person in a selection process has costly implications for the company — and not just because of their salary.

The longer they stay, the more training costs you burn in your talent development budget. Moreover, the quality of their work and the decisions they make can potentially put the rest of your team at risk. The higher their position ranks, the bigger impact these decisions will make.

A bad hire is normally the result of either a false negative or a false positive error in a recruitment decision. False positive means hiring an unqualified candidate for the role, while false negative is rejecting a qualified candidate. Both mistakes can be accredited to one or more biases in the recruitment process.

Bias In Recruitment And Selection

Bias in hiring has a much bigger influence on the business in the long run than just replacing one bad hire. It prevents the organization from cultivating a diverse human capital and consequently hinders its potential for productivity and innovation.

Companies with more diverse teams perform better financially but it’s not as simple as hiring more employees from underrepresented groups. It’s the result of more data-driven and more carefully evaluated, in other words, unbiased recruitment practices. Additionally, it’s also a positive byproduct of cultivating a more inclusive work environment that celebrates differences and evaluates performance justly and objectively.

So what holds recruiters back from making that happen?

Usually the culprits are the various unconscious biases that we’re influenced by. No matter how well-intentioned we are, these cognitive patterns direct our thought process and there’s normally more than just one at play. By making yourself familiar with these 14 types of bias in hiring and adopting more conscious methods in our selection process, you can be more effective and ethical in your work.

14 Types Of Bias In Hiring

Affinity Bias

We naturally sympathize with certain people more than we do with others. This sixth sense makes us gravitate towards people we connect with on a personal level. It’s how we make friends, decide who to follow online, or go on a date with.

While this sort of chemistry is a good guide for our personal relationships, it can be the basis for biased hiring decisions. When we have an affinity for someone, we might encourage them more in the interview process than other candidates or try to justify our preference towards their profile.

Similarity Attraction Bias

Similarity attraction bias appears when we discover we have certain similarities with a candidate which clouds our judgment of their real capabilities. Something simple as interviewing someone who turns out to have graduated from the same college as us can change the way we perceive them and talk to them.

We might get a sense that they are “on our team” based on personal details unrelated to the job they are applying for. This kind of positive bias, similarly to affinity bias, may give an unfair advantage to candidates who happen to possess similar traits or past experiences as we do.

First Impression Bias

We all know that first impressions count in social interactions. In fact, some studies show that we form an impression of a stranger in under a second and it can influence the way we relate to them later on. Despite being our evolutionary instinct, first impressions aren’t the right way to judge the competencies of a person in an interview process.

If our candidate arrives in a hurry to the interview room and appears nervous, we might misjudge them before they could have a chance to present their professional abilities. Looking at the photo or the social media profiles of a candidate can also make us form our first impression early that we might later try to justify in our decision making process.

Beauty Bias

According to statistics, people who are more conventionally beautiful according to society’s standards earn an average of 3 or 4% more than people with below-average looks. They also tend to be hired and promoted sooner than others. Men earn 2.5% more per inch of additional height than their shorter counterparts and are more likely to become CEOs.

The physical appearance of a person rarely correlates with the skills required for performing their job, yet we seem to fall for this common bias time and time again. When a candidate is being hired to fill the job of another professional, we might favor someone who looks similar to their predecessor, thinking their personality would also be similar.

Recruiters who believe that they have “great instincts” can sometimes develop something called overconfidence bias. They might miss important details about the candidates or ignore them altogether to support their sense of intuition about whether or not they are the right fit.

Overconfidence Bias

This bias often occurs when there’s no objective evaluation model set for open roles in the company or when the CEO “has the last word” without being properly involved in hiring procedures.

Affect Heuristics

Affect heuristics are the classic examples of jumping to conclusions too quickly without finding reliable evidence for our assumptions. Superficial factors often turn out to be the basis of these decisions. For example, interviewing someone bald with tattoos running up their arms we could falsely assume that they are irreverent and unable to follow guidelines necessary for performing their job.

This bias is most common when the hiring process is rushed without adequate time for evaluation and backing up assumptions with evidence. When we are in a hurry, we’re more likely to take shortcuts in our decision making process and rely on our emotions rather than proper reasoning.

Illusory correlation

When we make up an illusory correlation, we find connections between facts that aren’t really there. Illusory correlations are often disguised as proof because they relate to actual facts but they are nothing but false evidence. 

For example, gaps in someone’s resume timeline or being unemployed for an extended period of time might bring us to the conclusion that they couldn’t find a job because they aren’t skilled. In reality, being unemployed can have several other reasons such as health issues, focusing on someone’s personal growth, taking care of a loved one, traveling, difficulty finding open roles for a unique skill set, or even the very fact of facing prejudice from recruiters. Hiring managers often fall into illusory correlations when they ask personal questions irrelevant to the job and try to find an attached meaning where there isn’t any.

Attribution Bias

Attribution bias also known as fundamental attribution error occurs when we try to find explanations for someone’s behavior related to their personality and ignore other situational factors. We make judgments on what “kind of person” our candidate is and overlook other social and environmental forces influencing their behavior.

Attribution bias often turns up their head when interviewing international talent. Cultural and societal norms differ in every country so it requires a higher level of cultural awareness to evaluate foreign candidates fairly.

Confirmation Bias

As humans, we love to be right. We naturally try to look for evidence to back up what we think to be true in order to ease our cognitive dissonance and protect our sense of identity and self-esteem. However as recruiters, we need to be careful with wanting to be right at the cost of hiring the wrong candidate.

Confirmation bias makes us seek evidence for what we already know and believe. In an interview process, this might lead to overemphasizing factors that support our early assumptions and ignoring others that would suggest otherwise. There’s a difference between asking an interview question with curiosity and as a way to elicit the response we seek.

Expectation Anchor

When we open a new role, we form certain expectations about what the person fulfilling that role should be like. In the process of defining their job description, we might set certain expectations that aren’t actually important for the job role. For example, a PR manager doesn’t need to be extroverted in order to do their job well.

It’s especially common when hiring for a role of replacement. We might unknowingly try to find a candidate whose personality, appearance, or background is a match to their predecessor instead of evaluating other options. The needs of the team and the company might also change in the meantime and it’s possible that the profile that was the perfect match for the role before isn’t a fit anymore.

Halo effect

Falling for this unconscious bias means overemphasizing a candidate’s positive traits because of one impressive element in their profile. In other words, because of their strengths in a particular area we might magnify their capabilities in all other areas.

We might think that someone who’s charismatic is also intelligent. We could assume that someone who graduated from a notable educational institution or worked with someone famous is also good at their job. While these assumptions could turn out to be true, we need to evaluate them the same way we do in the case of other candidates in order not to fall into confirming our own biases.

Horn effect

The horn effect is the polar opposite of the halo effect. It’s an implicit bias that makes us overemphasize the mistakes and negative traits of an individual because of a particular inadequacy. We assume that if they’re bad at one thing they are bad at all other things.

Interviewing someone under the influence of this bias might also make us implicitly discourage the person with our attitude towards them, which can further undermine their interview performance. No one’s at their best when they feel they’re being judged.

Contrast effect bias

When we fall for contrast effect bias, we tend to evaluate candidates in relation to other candidates, particularly the ones that follow or precede them in the screening process or in the interview flow. We might judge the qualifications of an applicant in comparison to the one that walked in before them rather than the criteria of the role.

Sometimes, there’s no right person for the role out of the pile of resumes received. This unconscious bias can potentially mislead us to choose the relative best candidate instead of expanding and diversifying the talent pool we source from.

Conformity bias

Humans are social animals. One of our most deep-rooted instincts is to conform to others in social situations in order to feel accepted by others. Peer pressure can influence a variety of decisions in our lives and hiring decisions are no different.

When there’s more than one recruiter evaluating a candidate, one might lean towards accepting the opinion of the others despite data suggesting otherwise. This is particularly true when two or more of your peers have the same opinion or when one of them is superior to you in terms of their position.

Benefits of Unbiased Decision-Making

According to our analysts and recruitment experts at Gyfted, there are six key byproducts of reducing bias in your hiring practices. Let’s look at each of them in detail and understand their impact better.

Fewer False Positives

False positives are the people who get hired to join your team despite being unqualified for the role or having values that are conflicting with your company culture. These are the “bad hires” we mentioned earlier who can cause high expenses, damaging strategic decisions, and interruption in your team efficiency.

False positives are easier to measure because once they join your team they will be a part of your performance reviews. Although it’s important to minimize the ratio of unqualified candidates who get through your filter, mistakes do happen and no system is perfect. The bigger problem isn’t that false positives get hired but that when their performance isn’t up to par, they aren’t critically evaluated and fired early enough.

Instead of limiting the opportunities given to candidates with the potential to be trained on the job, it’s more important to take valuable learnings from false positives. This means getting just as efficient at performance reviews and firing as selecting the right candidate. Remember, reducing bias in recruitment doesn’t stop at extending the offer.

Fewer False Negatives

There’s a lot of conversation around false positives or bad hires in the recruitment world and little concern about false negatives. We tend to forget that false negatives are hiring mistakes as well because they are harder to measure: once they are rejected, there’s no way to track the talent potential we missed out on (unless they make a name for themselves in another company that gave them the trust we didn’t).

According to Henry Ward, CEO and co-founder of Carta (formerly eShares), false negatives pose a much higher risk than false positives for this exact reason. You can’t measure the impact of these decisions, therefore you can’t learn from them. Unlike false positives who can be evaluated and fired when necessary, a decision to let valuable talent go can’t be reversed.

Henry Ward also points out that in most companies it’s the consensus of a committee that decides about a candidate. In these committees, each positive vote counts as one against the sum while a single negative vote can veto an applicant with great potential. This way, a consensus is effective in creating fewer false positives but at the same time, it increases the number of false negatives that slip away in your talent pipeline.

The problem with this practice is that it focuses on hiring people with fewer weaknesses and not with greater strengths. Candidates often get rejected for skills they haven’t been trained on or experience that could be complemented by someone else on the team. Instead, Ward suggests focusing on what each candidate is amazing at, their curiosity to learn, and how well they can collaborate with people who complement their skills and experience.

One possible way to do that is to scrap democracy in hiring committees and instead let the hiring manager have the final say, after of course, listening to the inputs of all interviewers. This might not work in every organization but changing the standard interview questions to focus more on strengths rather than weaknesses can create fewer false negatives and encourage a more collaborative work culture.

Decision-Making Quality in Hiring

Developing a more equitable and bias-free approach to hiring trains your team to judge hiring requirements more objectively. This leads to being able to hire people with backgrounds and perspectives different from what your current employees have. We tend to forget that diversity isn’t just about cultural or gender attributes but neurological as well.

Around one in seven people are neurodivergent, which means they have some form of variation in their brain function that affects their sociability, learning, attention, mood, and other mental functions in a non-pathological sense. People with dyslexia, autism, or ADHD often have exceptional skills, yet have difficulty finding a job because of interview processes and job standards tailored to neurotypical individuals. 

For example, people on the autism spectrum tend to possess remarkable pattern recognition skills. However, they might not perform as well in a conventional interview conversation. In addition, they may experience higher levels of stress due to the uncertainty of an interview process where they don’t know what to expect at each elimination round. Because of such factors, only 14% of autistic adults are employed.

When we reduce barriers to inclusivity and bias in our hiring processes, we begin to see behind buzzwords on resumes or a charismatic appeal in interviews and better understand what a candidate’s profile really means. As a result, we can train our ability to think critically and make the right decision in more complex and nuanced hiring situations.

Objective Benchmarking and Meritocratic Selection Of Candidates

Standardized interview processes tend to be better at emitting biased decisions and giving equal chances to all candidates. This leads to a more objective benchmarking system where the right candidate is selected based on merit and not superficial factors.

As we’ve seen with strategies reducing false negatives, hiring professionals with outstanding abilities in certain areas and great collaboration skills is more effective than hiring the ones who are “pretty good” at many things. It brings more expertise into your organization rather than candidates who are fairly good but aren’t exceptional in their domain.

The two key skills to look out for here are effective collaboration and learning ability. Professionals with a high level of expertise who are intransigent won’t be able to implement that knowledge with the help of others. Besides, if they aren’t curious to constantly learn and stay up-to-date within their domain, their expertise will likely become obsolete in the long run. Expertise is needed, especially at the higher levels of your organization, but it should never outweigh the willingness to learn and grow.

One way to assess that and to steer the conversation toward the actual abilities of candidates is to change arbitrary interview questions to those focused on outcomes. For example, instead of insisting on the number of years spent working or a particular educational background, questions should rather revolve around tangible proof of experience and potential. In other words, past projects relevant to the job and attitudes that are important to fulfill the expectations of the role. This strategy also helps filter out “talkers” who shine in interviews but lack the affinity to take action.

Finding Hidden Talent

One of the biggest advantages of unbiased recruitment practices is to uncover “hidden gems” in the labor market, in other words, candidates other companies reject because of their own biases. Besides reducing bias in your hiring process, you can proactively source talent with untapped potential by extending your talent pool to more diverse sources.

Besides neurodivergent professionals, disabled talent makes up another large chunk of the unemployed workforce ready to work. A lot of professionals with impairments in their physical abilities have other hidden strengths and advantages in comparison to non-disabled talent. For example, people with a hearing impairment can often focus really well in loud environments. 

Bias-free hiring policies can differentiate between physical impairment that poses real limitations to performance versus those that don’t affect it significantly. Hiring the first disabled professional might require changes in the company’s facility or communication cadence. However, it’s an investment that opens doors to a more diverse talent pool and pays off in the long run.

Another massive group of hidden talent is people who require an alternative work schedule like parents and remote professionals located in opposite time zones. Collaborative forms of employment can help with creating more opportunities for them.

Job sharing is an example of a work arrangement where two people share the responsibility of a full-time job. Remote employees in other time zones can boost productivity by performing their part in a work collaboration during the nighttime of their coworkers.

At the end of the day, it’s an innovative mindset in recruitment that helps remove bias and barriers standing in the way of diverse talent. That’s the kind of initiative that in turn can boost innovation in the entire organization.

Eliminating Bias In Hiring

Minimizing bias in recruitment has immense benefits but it might seem like a massive undertaking at first. Figuring out how to reduce bias in your hiring process is a constant learning process. Not all strategies will work for your individual business needs but this step-by-step process should give you a framework to get started.

1. Set Measurable Goals

You can’t change what you can’t measure. Whether your method is more qualitative, focused on numbers, or a combination of the two, your diversity and equity goals should be clearly outlined. Run an analysis on where you currently stand in terms of minorities, diverse backgrounds, and the psychometrics of your team.

With Gyfted’s online tools for assessing organizational culture, you can map up your team’s values, strengths, and working style and use their psychographic data to hire for diversity. Your team members’ individual personality profile will only be visible to them, respecting their privacy, which they can bring to their 1-on-1 meetings with you. You’ll still get an unbiased picture of your team’s characteristics so you can make informed hiring decisions based on that.

2. Educate Yourself

The first step to tackling unconscious bias is to make them conscious, hence visible. This is probably the most important step in this process not just for recruiters but for the entire organization. Doing so can also have a positive impact on the company culture as a whole.

Project Implicit by Harvard University is a free resource that individuals can use to assess their unconscious bias in various contexts. This simple, multiple-choice questionnaire reveals our hidden attitudes in the workplace towards a particular socioeconomic group based on gender, color, sexual orientation, disability, body shape, and so on. It’s common for individuals to discover certain prejudices even towards a group they belong to and underestimate their own professional abilities without being aware of it.

By collecting this data anonymously, you may uncover the need for certain talent development initiatives that an organizational coach can help your team with. You can consider bringing in an equity consultant to support your diversity goals or a specialized professional to, for example, educate your team on the right communication to use with disabled coworkers.

3. Expand Your Talent Pool

Attracting a wide pool of applicants starts with writing meritocratic, noise-free and inclusive job descriptions. That’s the first barrier that decides whether candidates from diverse experiences and personalities want to work for you.

Pay attention to omitting gender-coded words that might discourage certain applications, and highlight your diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts. Audit your job postings to make sure they use clear, unambiguous language. Question default requirements that might not be core to the job, that could for instance turn some qualified applicants away, for example “excellent communication skills” may turn neurodivergent applicants away. Specify engagement terms and salary, and also explicitly mention if you accept applications from disabled professionals.

Change arbitrary job requirements (such as the number of years worked in the industry or a specific educational degree) that may exclude talent with an alternative career path or call for knowledge that can be learned on the job. This helps avoid unnecessary blockages for career changers. Instead, focus on requirements focused on outcomes, such as past examples of similar projects and related, as well as transferable skills. 

Once your job descriptions are optimized, make it a priority to go beyond traditional sourcing methods like university partnerships and referrals. Post on diverse professional networks and job boards that support unbiased hiring practices.

4. Remove Bias From Your Selection Process

Anonymous or blind recruitment is one of the most known hiring practices that you can incorporate into your screening process to eliminate early biases. By sorting resumes without visible demographic information such as name, hometown, nationality, or age, hiring managers can focus on evaluating candidates based on their skills required for the job.

A standardized interview process is another great way to reduce bias in your selection flow and give equal chances to all your applicants. Before you set your interview questions and exercises in stone, audit their relevance to the role and separate requirements from preferences based on professionals fulfilling the role prior.

Use a standardized interview scorecard that serves as an additional independent data point besides materials received from candidates. Watch out for putting too much emphasis on body language cues that may put individuals from certain cultures or neurodiverse backgrounds at a disadvantage.

5. Be Clear On Your Hiring Policies

What works for one business might not work for another one. Some recruitment teams prefer to operate democratically and make hiring decisions based on consensus. Others aim to reduce their false negatives by appointing hiring managers to make a final, informed decision.

Some recruiters aim to increase organizational diversity by consciously selecting from underrepresented groups among their equally qualified candidates. Others choose to make the same decision among comparable candidates too.

Whatever approach you take, your selection criteria should support your diversity and equity goals and mirror your organizational values. It’s important to be consistent with your job requirements while also recognizing that minimizing bias is an ongoing learning process. Test out different strategies and listen to the feedback you receive from both candidates and employees of diverse backgrounds.

The Difference Between Bias And Discrimination In Hiring

Forming cognitive bias is a slippery slope that can lead to discrimination. Unconscious biases give way to the stereotypes we form about a certain group of people, for example that blonde women aren’t intelligent or that men aren’t as good caretakers as women.

When these biases affect us on an emotional level, we call them prejudice, a form of judgment we form as an emotional response to certain groups. Prejudice is only a step away from discrimination, which is bias in action. Discriminating someone means showing a different behavior towards them because of the group, class, or other category they belong to (or perceived to belong to). These categories can be their:

• Birthplace;
• Age;
• Race or ethnicity;
• Gender;
• Religion;
• Political views;
• Disability;
• Family status;
• Style & Appearance;
• Or wealth.

If we accept, reject, or treat a candidate differently because of these unjustified distinctions, we talk about discrimination in hiring. This is why it’s so important for us to examine our own hidden biases as hiring managers and choose to act differently than what they might suggest.

Bias Examples From Our Experts

We asked our in-house experts at Gyfted to share what the most common biases are that occur in hiring processes worldwide. Here’s what they said.

Łukasz — Hiring Expert

According to Łukasz, one of the biggest myths in hiring is that stress resistance is the most important trait for any given position. Recruiters often place added pressure on the candidate in interviews or misjudge their capabilities because they seem nervous.

During his career, he’s also seen several hiring managers assume that candidates with experience in certain sectors or companies are more or less qualified than the rest. They think that if company X is on the candidate’s resume, they must still hold their organizational values. In reality, they might have accepted the job because of having limited options in their career and are now looking for a change.

Alina — Psychometrician

Alina shares that representation bias is one of the most common cognitive biases in the world of recruitment. Representation bias means that if we live in an environment where a certain group is overrepresented, we might overestimate their absolute frequency in the population.

Children of divorced parents, for example, believe that there are more divorces in general than those whose parents have never been divorced. Representation bias carries the risk of excluding certain societal groups from our talent pool or repeatedly hiring the same kind of people in the organization.

Magda — Data Scientist

Similarity bias often risks the overall performance of organizations, Magda shares. Recruiters are often drawn towards people who are similar to them and whom they easily get along with. Similarity in views makes cooperation smooth and makes it easier to avoid conflict. However, hiring only the people who agree with you cultivates a “yes man culture” at work.

Teams that have no diversity in perspectives are less creative, innovative, and productive in the long run than those that welcome disagreement in an open discussion. Healthy debates and questioning the status quo doesn’t just require a diversity of opinions but also a work culture that gives space to these productive debates.

Jan — Cognitive Scientist

Jan is one of the scientists at Gyfted developing psychological assessments. He emphasizes how easily recruiters can be swayed by overconfidence and rely on intuitive assumptions, especially in unstructured interviews. Their instinct turns out to be unreliable more often than they would like to admit.

Overcoming Bias In Hiring

Objective and data-driven strategies for candidate selection can help reduce bias in hiring so we can invest in the right talent instead. Blind screening, for example, bypasses initial assumptions we might make based on the photo, date of birth, or hometown of an applicant. A consistent evaluation structure and interview flow give equal chances to candidates to show their strengths.

If we want to get as close as possible to a fully unbiased hiring system, we need to merge the best of human sciences and technology. Our experts in psychometrics, big data, and machine learning are working on the first fully integrated recruitment system to bridge the gap between recruiters and hidden talent.

Unfair Hiring Practices To Avoid

Lack Of Peer Reviews

Small companies often leave hiring decisions up to a single recruiter or let the CEO have the final word. This practice is bound to create biased decisions even while following a set of criteria. Usually, this is because it confuses culture fit screening with choosing the people that the team or the CEO has great chemistry with.

Assessing personality types is an important part of a selection process but it should be done based on psychographic data, not personal sympathy. The person you’d like to hang out with after work is not necessarily the one who has the right skills to get the job done. In the long run, this strategy can also tip the overall balance of the company’s talent profile. For example, you might notice that your team is filled with great ideators and strategic thinkers but no detail-driven executors.

Tokenism

Tokenism in recruitment is the act of hiring talent from a certain minority in order to create the perception of diversity in the company. The difference between tokenism and inclusive hiring is that in this case, hiring managers give preference to representatives of a certain group (normally a race or gender underrepresented in the company) without fair evaluation of qualifications.

Teams that have higher ethnic and gender diversity have better performance because of the variety of perspectives present. Exchange programs and hiring practices that provide equal opportunity can help create that diversity.

However, giving preference to visible differences over competence is just as unfair and inefficient as excluding certain profiles. If your team looks too homogeneous, you need to dig deeper to find the reason why you’re not attracting or considering applicants different from your current team profile.

Nepotism

Some organizations and firms still exclusively hire from a certain higher educational institution or network which excludes applicants from other socioeconomic and educational backgrounds. Partner programs with universities and student organizations are a great way to bring in more junior talent but not if it becomes exclusive criteria.

Another similar practice that some companies apply is to open up referral programs for employees and get recommendations for open job roles. Again, this can be a great way to widen your talent pool and add another layer of prescreening to your selection process — so long as you give equal chances to cold leads as you do to referred contacts.

Falling For Buzzwords

Many conventional screening processes don’t go deeper than looking at the years of experience, previous employers, or highlighted skills of the individual and fail to gain an accurate picture of their real potential. There are even hiring tools that screen resumes for certain keywords found in the job description or defined by the recruiter.

The main problem with this practice is that it makes you focus on what you want to hear and form a decision too early. Once you get sidetracked by a certain bias, you’re more likely to be justifying your sympathy for the person in the later stages of the interview process instead of evaluating them.

Are Your Hiring Decisions Biased?

Here are 5 quick questions to ask yourself (or your hiring managers) that will help you assess your current hiring process and what may influence it.

• Do I typically hire the same kind of people who are like me?
• What do I really mean when I say the candidate is not the right fit?
• Where do I source the talent I consider for the job?
• Do I create an inclusive environment where all candidates feel comfortable accepting an offer?
• What socioeconomic, professional, and personality profiles am I missing from my team?

Reduce Bias In Your Hiring

All of us have biases, whether we are aware of them or not. The first step to making our hiring decisions more just and better for the business is to look into ourselves and ask our recruiters to do the same.

Harvard University has developed a series of tests under Project Implicit that help individuals uncover their unconscious biases that may apply in everyday life and in the context of a workplace. You can test yourself on bias around gender, color, sexual orientation, disability, body shape, and more.

It’s important to create a safe environment for your team to assess themselves without any judgment on the results. Sharing what they’ve learned from the assessment should be optional or expressed in a well-facilitated space without consequences. A qualified organizational coach can then help educate your team and guide them towards change in the way they perceive coworkers, candidates, and even themselves on these spectrums.

Once you’ve developed awareness of what bias might affect your thought process in hiring, here are some practical strategies you can apply to overcome it in each stage of your hiring process.

Minimize Recruitment Bias In Research

Bias in recruitment starts as early as in the research phase where we decide what talent pool we source from. As always, change begins with taking an honest look at the current situation.

What kind of personality profile, experience, and perspective are you missing from your team? What ethnicity, gender, or age is predominant in your company and how does it affect your work culture and strategic decision making? Answering these questions can shine some light on the profiles you need to open doors to in the future. By consciously filling the gaps in our talent research, we can encourage more diversity in the talent we consider. 

For example, if your team is predominantly male, you can set up a recruitment campaign with female-only career days. You can also look out for gendered words in your job descriptions and see if you can make them more gender-neutral. Make your progress measurable and see how much these initiatives actually improve your diversity of applications in a given timeframe.

Eliminate Bias In CV Screening

Blind resume screening is another solution companies apply in order to rule out preferences towards certain socioeconomic groups or people they simply sympathize with. Screening resumes without revealing the candidate’s location, name, date of birth, or picture can help focus on their capabilities and relevant work experience rather than their personal information. Keep in mind that blind screening doesn’t rule out all biases and they might still come up in later stages of the interview process or after the person is being employed.

Remove Bias From Interviews

An interview process is a high-stress situation for most people but while it can be energizing for an extrovert, it can make an introvert completely freeze. If presentation skills are not relevant to the job description (for example, for developers or analysts), you can help these candidates bring out their best selves by offering a voice call instead of a video call or in-person interview.

You can also improve the quality of your hiring decisions by evaluating fixed and mutable characteristics separately. Instead of only assessing past experience, look at the areas where your candidates most want to grow in the future. Instead of judging what they can bring to the table based solely on the opportunities they had previously in life, ask them how they would solve a concrete problem present in your company. Standardize interview questions for all applicants in order to reinforce equal opportunities.

Reduce Bias In Job Offers

No matter how many people are involved in the hiring decisions of your company, you need to keep yourself and your recruiters accountable. Way too often we hear arguments on hiring or rejecting a candidate that begins with “I can’t put my finger on it but…” or “I have a feeling that…” These are not data-driven decisions and therefore shouldn’t decide about future employee contracts.

Intuition and picking up non-verbal cues are useful skills for recruiters to know where to look for red flags or areas in a work profile that need to be further examined. However, these impressions always need to be justified with proper evaluation. You can only do this if you have a unified competency model and hiring workflow for assessing culture fit, team fit, and job fit that’s consistently used for each candidate. Make sure you always request a detailed evaluation from your team before you make the final call.

On the other hand, if your job offers are often rejected, it might be a culture issue. Do you find that profiles of minorities say no to your offer more often than those more similar to your current team profile? If the answer is yes, you might need to work on making your work environment more inclusive.

Look out for anonymous reviews on sites like Glassdoor and take the feedback seriously. You can also run your own survey within the company or ask for suggestions from underrepresented talent on how you could make them more comfortable in their work environment.

Eliminate Bias With Technology

In a conventional selection process, even minor influencing factors such as the time of day or the order of candidates affect our decision. We can’t be completely unbiased but with the right technology, we can get pretty close.

We’re blending psychometrics, big data, and machine learning to create the first fully-integrated unbiased recruitment system for hiring managers. By looking at the complete personality profiles of candidates, you can get accurate data on whether they are a fit for your company culture, team, and job description. Sign up now for early access.

Key Benefits of Eliminating Bias in Recruitment

Now that we’ve seen how reducing bias in hiring and adopting more equitable hiring practices can affect equality and diversity on a larger scale, let’s look at their impact closer to home. As always, the devil is in the details so looking at the inner workings of your hiring process can give you a more nuanced view of what might need changing.

The more you finetune your selection process and criteria, the higher your success rate will be in hiring the best fit for each role. Training your recruitment team for critical thinking will help you improve the quality of your decision-making process and can extrapolate your findings to other areas in your organization. Equitable hiring is a skill that can be trained and it’s a constant learning process for even the most seasoned hiring experts.

According to our analysts and recruitment experts at Gyfted, there are six key byproducts of reducing bias in your hiring practices. Let’s look at each of them in detail and understand their impact better.

Fewer False Positives

False positives are the people who get hired to join your team despite being unqualified for the role or having values that are conflicting with your company culture. These are the “bad hires” we mentioned earlier who can cause high expenses, damaging strategic decisions, and interruption in your team efficiency.

False positives are easier to measure because once they join your team they will be a part of your performance reviews. Although it’s important to minimize the ratio of unqualified candidates who get through your filter, mistakes do happen and no system is perfect. The bigger problem isn’t that false positives get hired but that when their performance isn’t up to par, they aren’t critically evaluated and fired early enough.

Instead of limiting the opportunities given to candidates with the potential to be trained on the job, it’s more important to take valuable learnings from false positives. This means getting just as efficient at performance reviews and firing as selecting the right candidate. Remember, reducing bias in recruitment doesn’t stop at extending the offer.

Fewer False Negatives

There’s a lot of conversation around false positives or bad hires in the recruitment world and little concern about false negatives. We tend to forget that false negatives are hiring mistakes as well because they are harder to measure: once they are rejected, there’s no way to track the talent potential we missed out on (unless they make a name for themselves in another company that gave them the trust we didn’t).

According to Henry Ward, CEO and co-founder of Carta (formerly eShares), false negatives pose a much higher risk than false positives for this exact reason. You can’t measure the impact of these decisions, therefore you can’t learn from them. Unlike false positives who can be evaluated and fired when necessary, a decision to let valuable talent go can’t be reversed.

Henry Ward also points out that in most companies it’s the consensus of a committee that decides about a candidate. In these committees, each positive vote counts as one against the sum while a single negative vote can veto an applicant with great potential. This way, a consensus is effective in creating fewer false positives but at the same time, it increases the number of false negatives that slip away in your talent pipeline.

The problem with this practice is that it focuses on hiring people with fewer weaknesses and not with greater strengths. Candidates often get rejected for skills they haven’t been trained on or experience that could be complemented by someone else on the team. Instead, Ward suggests focusing on what each candidate is amazing at, their curiosity to learn, and how well they can collaborate with people who complement their skills and experience.

One possible way to do that is to scrap democracy in hiring committees and instead let the hiring manager have the final say, after of course, listening to the inputs of all interviewers. This might not work in every organization but changing the standard interview questions to focus more on strengths rather than weaknesses can create fewer false negatives and encourage a more collaborative work culture.

Quality Of Decision-Making In Recruitment

Developing a more equitable and bias-free approach to hiring trains your team to judge hiring requirements more objectively. This leads to being able to hire people with backgrounds and perspectives different from what your current employees have. We tend to forget that diversity isn’t just about cultural or gender attributes but neurological as well.

Around one in seven people are neurodivergent, which means they have some form of variation in their brain function that affects their sociability, learning, attention, mood, and other mental functions in a non-pathological sense. People with dyslexia, autism, or ADHD often have exceptional skills, yet have difficulty finding a job because of interview processes and job standards tailored to neurotypical individuals. 

For example, people on the autism spectrum tend to possess remarkable pattern recognition skills. However, they might not perform as well in a conventional interview conversation. In addition, they may experience higher levels of stress due to the uncertainty of an interview process where they don’t know what to expect at each elimination round. Because of such factors, only 14% of autistic adults are employed.

When we reduce barriers to inclusivity and bias in our hiring processes, we begin to see behind buzzwords on resumes or a charismatic appeal in interviews and better understand what a candidate’s profile really means. As a result, we can train our ability to think critically and make the right decision in more complex and nuanced hiring situations.

Objective Benchmarking and Meritocratic Selection Of Candidates

Standardized interview processes tend to be better at emitting biased decisions and giving equal chances to all candidates. This leads to a more objective benchmarking system where the right candidate is selected based on merit and not superficial factors.

As we’ve seen with strategies reducing false negatives, hiring professionals with outstanding abilities in certain areas and great collaboration skills is more effective than hiring the ones who are “pretty good” at many things. It brings more expertise into your organization rather than candidates who are fairly good but aren’t exceptional in their domain.

The two key skills to look out for here are effective collaboration and learning ability. Professionals with a high level of expertise who are intransigent won’t be able to implement that knowledge with the help of others. Besides, if they aren’t curious to constantly learn and stay up-to-date within their domain, their expertise will likely become obsolete in the long run. Expertise is needed, especially at the higher levels of your organization, but it should never outweigh the willingness to learn and grow.

One way to assess that and to steer the conversation toward the actual abilities of candidates is to change arbitrary interview questions to those focused on outcomes. For example, instead of insisting on the number of years spent working or a particular educational background, questions should rather revolve around tangible proof of experience and potential. In other words, past projects relevant to the job and attitudes that are important to fulfill the expectations of the role. This strategy also helps filter out “talkers” who shine in interviews but lack the affinity to take action.

Finding Hidden Talent

One of the biggest advantages of unbiased recruitment practices is to uncover “hidden gems” in the labor market, in other words, candidates other companies reject because of their own biases. Besides reducing bias in your hiring process, you can proactively source talent with untapped potential by extending your talent pool to more diverse sources.

Besides neurodivergent professionals, disabled talent makes up another large chunk of the unemployed workforce ready to work. A lot of professionals with impairments in their physical abilities have other hidden strengths and advantages in comparison to non-disabled talent. For example, people with a hearing impairment can often focus really well in loud environments. 

Bias-free hiring policies can differentiate between physical impairment that poses real limitations to performance versus those that don’t affect it significantly. Hiring the first disabled professional might require changes in the company’s facility or communication cadence. However, it’s an investment that opens doors to a more diverse talent pool and pays off in the long run.

Another massive group of hidden talent is people who require an alternative work schedule like parents and remote professionals located in opposite time zones. Collaborative forms of employment can help with creating more opportunities for them.

Job sharing is an example of a work arrangement where two people share the responsibility of a full-time job. Remote employees in other time zones can boost productivity by performing their part in a work collaboration during the nighttime of their coworkers.

At the end of the day, it’s an innovative mindset in recruitment that helps remove bias and barriers standing in the way of diverse talent. That’s the kind of initiative that in turn can boost innovation in the entire organization.

Eliminating Bias In Hiring

Minimizing bias in recruitment has immense benefits but it might seem like a massive undertaking at first. Figuring out how to reduce bias in your hiring process is a constant learning process. Not all strategies will work for your individual business needs but this step-by-step process should give you a framework to get started.

1. Set Measurable Goals

You can’t change what you can’t measure. Whether your method is more qualitative, focused on numbers, or a combination of the two, your diversity and equity goals should be clearly outlined. Run an analysis on where you currently stand in terms of minorities, diverse backgrounds, and the psychometrics of your team.

With Gyfted’s online tools for assessing organizational culture, you can map up your team’s values, strengths, and working style and use their psychographic data to hire for diversity. Your team members’ individual personality profile will only be visible to them, respecting their privacy, which they can bring to their 1-on-1 meetings with you. You’ll still get an unbiased picture of your team’s characteristics so you can make informed hiring decisions based on that.

2. Educate Yourself

The first step to tackling unconscious bias is to make them conscious, hence visible. This is probably the most important step in this process not just for recruiters but for the entire organization. Doing so can also have a positive impact on the company culture as a whole.

Project Implicit by Harvard University is a free resource that individuals can use to assess their unconscious bias in various contexts. This simple, multiple-choice questionnaire reveals our hidden attitudes in the workplace towards a particular socioeconomic group based on gender, color, sexual orientation, disability, body shape, and so on. It’s common for individuals to discover certain prejudices even towards a group they belong to and underestimate their own professional abilities without being aware of it.

By collecting this data anonymously, you may uncover the need for certain talent development initiatives that an organizational coach can help your team with. You can consider bringing in an equity consultant to support your diversity goals or a specialized professional to, for example, educate your team on the right communication to use with disabled coworkers.

3. Expand Your Talent Pool

Attracting a wide pool of applicants starts with writing meritocratic, noise-free and inclusive job descriptions. That’s the first barrier that decides whether candidates from diverse experiences and personalities want to work for you.

Pay attention to omitting gender-coded words that might discourage certain applications, and highlight your diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts. Audit your job postings to make sure they use clear, unambiguous language. Question default requirements that might not be core to the job, that could for instance turn some qualified applicants away, for example “excellent communication skills” may turn neurodivergent applicants away. Specify engagement terms and salary, and also explicitly mention if you accept applications from disabled professionals.

Change arbitrary job requirements (such as the number of years worked in the industry or a specific educational degree) that may exclude talent with an alternative career path or call for knowledge that can be learned on the job. This helps avoid unnecessary blockages for career changers. Instead, focus on requirements focused on outcomes, such as past examples of similar projects and related, as well as transferable skills. 

Once your job descriptions are optimized, make it a priority to go beyond traditional sourcing methods like university partnerships and referrals. Post on diverse professional networks and job boards that support unbiased hiring practices.

4. Remove Bias From Your Selection Process

Anonymous or blind recruitment is one of the most known hiring practices that you can incorporate into your screening process to eliminate early biases. By sorting resumes without visible demographic information such as name, hometown, nationality, or age, hiring managers can focus on evaluating candidates based on their skills required for the job.

A standardized interview process is another great way to reduce bias in your selection flow and give equal chances to all your applicants. Before you set your interview questions and exercises in stone, audit their relevance to the role and separate requirements from preferences based on professionals fulfilling the role prior.

Use a standardized interview scorecard that serves as an additional independent data point besides materials received from candidates. Watch out for putting too much emphasis on body language cues that may put individuals from certain cultures or neurodiverse backgrounds at a disadvantage.

5. Be Clear On Your Hiring Policies

What works for one business might not work for another one. Some recruitment teams prefer to operate democratically and make hiring decisions based on consensus. Others aim to reduce their false negatives by appointing hiring managers to make a final, informed decision.

Some recruiters aim to increase organizational diversity by consciously selecting from underrepresented groups among their equally qualified candidates. Others choose to make the same decision among comparable candidates too.

Whatever approach you take, your selection criteria should support your diversity and equity goals and mirror your organizational values. It’s important to be consistent with your job requirements while also recognizing that minimizing bias is an ongoing learning process. Test out different strategies and listen to the feedback you receive from both candidates and employees of diverse backgrounds.

How Psychometric Assessments Help Avoid Hiring Biases

Besides equity initiatives and working on eliminating our own bias, technology can provide a much more efficient and unbiased solution to screening candidates. However, it’s important to choose wisely when it comes to automated solutions because they can easily backfire.

There are several digital tools (some using artificial intelligence) that aim to save time for hiring managers during their selection process. However, if they weren’t built with a scientific approach, they can recreate the same human biases that their creators carry and can actually lead to as many or more false negatives and false positives in selection. 

For example, some recruitment software may filter resumes automatically based on a particular educational background or years of experience, thereby setting arbitrary selection criteria for candidates. So automating resume screening and saving time with the help of technology doesn’t necessarily mean being effective at making unbiased hiring decisions.

This is why we built our recruitment screening software, specifically designed to help recruiters remove bias from their hiring funnels and find the best talent for their open roles. We anonymize candidates for you and do not pick up data on gender, age, race, identity. At Gyfted, we are a team of cognitive psychologists, data scientists, and developers working together to revolutionize how hiring is done. 

Evidence suggests that a robust combination of psychometric assessments works better than any stand-alone hiring method recruiters traditionally rely on. This method also enables reverse hiring where companies “apply” for hiring top candidates, thereby simplifying how recruitment is done and enabling a fair hiring process. The science-based algorithms of Gyfted’s sourcing tool analyze people objectively and leave the decision up to you regarding their fit.

By using our AI tool, you’ll be getting access to a growing pool of hidden talent from diverse backgrounds and their detailed psychological profiles. Our platform considers the personality traits, character, skills, experience, and growth potential of each candidate, as well as their compatibility with your team and company culture. It then suggests the best profiles for you based on your preferences.