A simple tool for making more effective hiring decisions
I’m afraid there’s no way round it: you are biased, and there’s nothing you can do about it. What’s more, knowing that you’re biased does nothing to stop your biases operating — if anything, it can actually make their effects stronger, because you become overconfident and stop looking out for them.
Calling them ‘biases’ is a bit misleading, because they’re really part of the way our mind works so we can survive in the world. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky started identifying them in the 1970s, when researching the way we make decisions. They’re the mental tools that we use to make reliable sense of the huge amount of data coming in at us at any given moment. In many circumstances they’re extremely useful to us, but in some they aren’t. Since they’re automatic, we need to find a way to work with them.
Detailed thought and decision-making is energy intense — it uses a lot of glucose — and our minds are set up to help us conserve energy. So, often, when we try and answer a complicated question, to save energy, our mind substitutes a simpler question — and we have no way of knowing this has happened! This is how advertising works: there are so many brands of yoghurt. How can we chose which is best from the supermarket shelves? It’s much easier for us to answer the question ‘which brand am I most familiar with’ — and so our minds sneakily answer that question, and tell us this is the answer to ‘which brand is best’. (This is called “the halo effect”). Our amazing sense-making engines then kick in, and supply (after the fact) all the reasons why we knew this was the best brand.
This doesn’t have so much of a consequence with yoghurt, but with recruitment it does.
The question ‘will this candidate contribute to our success in this role?’ is a really hard one to answer. So our minds — in an attempt to help by conserving glucose — often answer an easy one instead, without telling us. Like: ‘is my first impression of this person that I like them’, for instance. And since even that’s a pretty hard question to answer, we may even get a substitute for that which is more like ‘how familiar does this person seem?’ — IE are they like me? Do they talk like me? Do we have interests in common? Does their facial structure fit the template of faces I was regularly exposed to in my early life?
It’s important to remember that you’re not doing anything wrong if this happens: it’s how your mind works. Where you are at fault is if you don’t catch yourself in the act of making this subsitution. Because at that point you’ve stopped being effective: you’re no longer trying to serve the purpose of the recruitment process, and find someone who will do well in this role. You’ve also stopped being fair to the candidate, and may inadvertently be propagating a lack of diversity in your workforce.
Having a rigorous interview process in which we have to write things down helps us avoid these traps. It provides a structure for us to think step-by-step, and not get caught out by our mind’s drive for efficiency.
The good news is there is a tool that can help you — and not only is it free, it’s almost disconcertingly simple. That tool is: a score sheet.
A score sheet has a list of the questions that you’re going to ask, with a space underneath each one to take notes, followed by a space to give a score on a pre-agreed scale (I find it useful to use: 0=Poor, 1=Good, 2=OK, 3=Star)
Each interviewer has their own copy of the score sheet and takes brief notes while the candidate is talking of anything that stands out, good or bad. This might seem unnecessary, but it is very helpful later: you’ll be surprised by how quickly details which seemed clear at the time become distorted or forgotten when you come to discuss them afterwards.
Each interviewer scores each question separately. Your notes on each question will also help you here with another instance of the halo effect: it’s likely that any given candidate will give some good, and some bad answers. But if a candidate’s first answers are good, you will tend to think that their later answers are good too. Your notes will help you separate out each question, and score it fairly.
At the end, add up your scores for each question to reach a total. This score is not the ‘end goal’, but is an aid to your decision-making discussion. Often the best place to start your decision-making discussion is for each interviewer to say the order they put the candidates in, by overall score.If different interviewers ranked candidates differently — why did they do that? Did they observe different things? Or did they weight factors differently? If interviewers ranked candidates the same (or, at least, had the same top score candidate) — would there be any problem with offering that candidate the job? For instance, maybe the strongest candidate by score was weak in an area that, now you look at it, seems critical; and another good candidate is stronger there?
By following a structured process in this way, you can direct your energies towards a more focused, fairer and more effective decision-making process.
