Over five years ago, I sat with industrial psychologist Marc Prine and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) expert Liv Minick to create a session around bias that DRG could offer to nonprofit and purpose-driven organizations. At first, the session was called “Eliminating Bias in Your Interview Process.” Within the first 15 minutes of our first call to brainstorm, Marc and Liv shared that there is never a time when people do not bring their biases to the table. NEVER.
Everyone has bias.
Regardless of our background or upbringing, we develop inherent biases, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair.” We learn biases whether we wish to or not, and they show up in everything we do, both personally and professionally, throughout our day.
Everyone has bias, including people that hire. Consider this data about bias in the hiring process:
- 89% of hiring managers make judgments about applicants within the first 15 minutes of an interview.
- 48% of hiring managers admit that bias affects their candidate choice.
- 85% of hiring managers admit to relying on intuition over objective analysis in interviewing.
- There is a 35% increase in company success in organizations that practice diverse recruitment strategies.
So, why hold a session on bias if everyone has it? If everyone inevitably brings bias to the table, why is it important to do anything about it at all?
When I speak about our “Interviewing with Reduced Bias” session with search committees and hiring managers, I discuss four goals: to learn about the variety of biases that exist and how they may show up in recruitment, to slow down evaluating candidates sufficiently to recognize a bias (for or against) when it shows up, to learn how to interview and assess candidates based on the work/role, and to create a shared language so that people can name bias as it arises either in themselves or others.
I have seen these goals in action. As search committees make decisions about which candidates to advance to the next round of interviews, I focus the group to reflect less on if they liked each candidate and more on if the candidate demonstrated their ability to be successful in this new role using past experiences. The key to hiring with reduced bias is comparing the candidates to the job description, responsibilities, qualifications, and core competencies—not to other candidates.
I am sure you are thinking “Sarah, what do you mean? I shouldn’t compare candidates to other candidates?”
NO!
If you have clearly and thoughtfully created a job description that accurately describes the role, then the key is to compare the candidate and their experiences to the job description. Can they do the job? Each candidate will do the job in a different way, but do they have the skills to do the work needed to move the organization forward?
What happens after you have initially learned about bias and you have a basic understanding of your own biases—what’s next? How do you continue to learn?
Omar Lopez is one of the two DRG consultants who run our “Interviewing with Reduced Bias” training, and he shared the following tip: “Our brains were designed to survive in the wild, not objectively hire Chief Financial Officers. Awareness of the constellations of beliefs that shape the decisions you make is always a good idea. That’s why there’s no such thing as too much reduced bias training.”
As you start to think about your organization as a whole entity beyond hiring, I urge you to think about where else bias is showing up and impacting your organizational goals. If the entire organization is struggling in one area (e.g., your pulse survey continues to show that a certain population is not feeling included), then the organization should do specific bias training in that one area. General bias training over, and over, and over is not helpful. Specific training with particular goals to help the organization move forward in a concrete way is how to best encourage growth, foster learning, and ensure successful organizational progress.
