Laetitia Sauvage
How I try not to fall into the trap of "bias" in recruitment interviews!
- Laetitia Sauvage
- bias, executives, employment, interview, candidate experience, recruitment
Here are a few examples of biases that are very difficult to avoid during interviews:
- "This candidate has her children in the same school as my eldest, she makes good decisions "
- "This candidate was really super nice, it would be my pleasure to give him a boost."
- "This candidate was the first I met on the job, and that made a big impression on me".
- "This candidate arrived late, so he's obviously not rigorous".
- ...
Recruitment is a meeting between two human beings, and it's impossible to be 100% objective in our assessments.
Here are a few tips I use to minimize my susceptibility to misjudgment and, above all, to avoid unconsciously discriminating during a recruitment interview.
- Identification bias:
I never look at candidates' personal social networks.
- Fatigue effect:
It's the fifth interview of the day, it's 7pm and I find the candidate boring. My recruiter's tip: I never do more than 3 interviews a day, and I avoid the 2 p.m. slot because that's personally when my brain is the least focused, and I know it's detrimental to my assessment of the candidate.
- Halo effect:
This bias consists in clinging to the first impression we have and generalizing it to everything we say. For example: The person arrives late, and I'm going to interpret everything he says through the prism of "this individual is not rigorous in his plans.this individual lacks rigor in his projects"
- Sympathy effect:
The most common: finding a candidate who's so nice that I'm going to want to keep talking to her for hours, or even give her priority in the recruitment process. Except that I tend to confuse likeability with competence.
For these last two biases, it's really the interview methodology that's going to help me remain as objective as possible:
All my interviews follow a structured grid designed in advance in order to :
- Make a valid comparison between talents according to pre-established criteria with recruiting managers
- Be consistent in my questions and practices
- Have objective arguments to explain my decisions to the talents I meet
- Optimize the candidate experience and favor no one
I don't necessarily ask everyone the questions in the same order, to keep the discussion fluid and natural, but I do make sure I go through all the criteria I've identified and prioritized.
Each criterion will be rated and analyzed using the STAR method, so that the talents can give concrete details of what they are talking about.
Example: "I know how to adapt to my interlocutors".
Then I always try to help them rephrase: "OK, can you detail a situation with a concrete action on your part where you showed adaptability, what result did you achieve ?"
My other ingredients implemented according to the needs of my managers and relevance to the mission:
- Designing scorecards for certain professions (e.g. sales)
- Request a work sample if relevant (work on a usecase, business test, book for graphic designers, etc.).
- Questions formulated to analyze behaviors or concrete situations ("Tell me about a time when you ...")
- Certified personality tests to validate certain softskills
- Taking reference
- Writing "hot" CRs and taking "cold" positions
- Inclusive writing for my recruitment interviews
- Practice, practice and more practice!!!!
And how do you manage to get rid of these notorious "recruitment biases"?
