Types of Hiring Biases That are Hampering Your Organization’s Growth

One of the major reasons why recruiters and hiring managers struggle to build and scale bigger and better teams is because they miss out on quality hires due to human errors and biases. 

Hiring is a long and arduous process and requires teams to spend countless hours sifting through hundreds of CVs. But despite all the effort, there is no guarantee that the candidate that is eventually hired is fit for the job. Conscious or even unconscious biases end up impacting the quality and timeliness of hires, which when not addressed, can result in a poor talent pool. 

Hiring biases – The reason for poor quality hires  

HR teams, and even humans in general, are hardwired to make quick decisions. In the field of recruiting, time is of the essence, as new roles need to be constantly filled, and new responsibilities have to be immediately shouldered. But despite the pressure to hire best-fit candidates for any job, hiring decisions to get influenced by various biases which ultimately influence the recruitment process. 

These biases can stem from several aspects, including how recruiters have been brought up, the hurdles they have faced in their personal and professional lives, the social groups they are part of, their overall exposure to diversity, and more. Knowingly, or unknowingly, these biases seep into the decision-making process and form the basis of their judgments. 

In the ideal world, the decision to hire a candidate should be based entirely on their professional ability and skills to do the job well. However, recruitment that is approached in an objective manner, free from subjectivity and bias, is not always the reality. 

Let’s look at a few biases that have the ability to hamper your organization’s talent pool: 

1. Resume Bias: Judging a candidate and making a hiring decision solely on the CV is often a major reason for low-quality hires. Candidates, whose CVs do not match a role, are outright rejected, with no future considerations. At the same time, CVs also cause the Affect Heuristic to come into play, which could make the recruiters rush to conclusions about candidates – before they have all the information at hand to make a fully-informed decision – and thus avoid the boring task of sifting through resumes or sitting through interviews. Although CVs might represent the eligibility of candidates, they do not really reflect their suitability, and should not form the basis of a hiring decision. 
2. Affinity Bias: Affinity or similarity bias stems from the unconscious tendency of recruiters to hire candidates who appear similar to them. From sharing similar backgrounds to graduating from the same educational institutions, recruiters who gravitate towards the familiar end up making hiring decisions that might seem the safest bet – but aren’t the best fit for the job at hand. 
3. Judgment Bias: With recruiters spending a large amount of time sifting through resumes, it becomes difficult to look at every CV in isolation. Rather than allowing each candidate to be evaluated based on the skills and qualifications, recruiters end up comparing or contrasting the current resume with the last one – causing a massive error in judgment – and thus an unconscious bias in the recruitment process. Misreading body language, recruiting people based on their looks, or on the first impression they created are also common biases that tend to impact the objectivity of hiring. 
4. Conformity Bias: Another common bias that tends to influence the hiring process is conformity bias. Instead of exercising individual, independent judgments, many recruiters tend to take cues from the actions and opinions of others on the panel. Such decision-making, which is easily affected by peer pressure, can result in the wrong hiring decisions to be made – primarily due to the fear of being thought poorly of by peers or being ridiculed. 
5. Past Performance Bias: Judging candidates on their past performance and choosing to hire or not hire them is another bias that tends to impact the decision-making process. Since most of such assessments are carried out manually, no efforts are made towards benchmarking their performance against peers from the same job category, education, skill set, or more. 

Removing bias with AI

Traditional hiring processes are laden with several inefficient methods and tactics, that can no longer work in today’s fast-paced digital world. Human bias is a major challenge that needs to be overcome, and the only way recruiters can do that is by opting for an AI-driven recruitment platform. 

An AI-based recruitment platform can improve the efficiency of the hiring process and also maximize objectivity in hiring and selection. 

Here’s how an AI-based platform can help in overcoming the different types of hiring bias hampering modern organizations: 

1. Future role matching: Unlike in a typical hiring process, where CVs of candidates who were not successful for a role are instantly discarded with no future considerations, things are a lot different with AI-enabled recruitment. platforms These platforms have the ability to automatically match past candidate applications that were discarded earlier and considered for other roles in the company as and when they emerge. Such automated matching can ensure they are a better fit for this new role as they will be scored against their CV relevance, loyalty, and performance metrics.
2. Automated sourcing: AI-based recruitment platforms often possess an automated sourcing feature that constantly generates a list of candidates – from a pool – who best match the criteria for a particular role. Instead of manually sourcing candidates, recruiters will be able to pull this data from a combination of dozens of platforms, view candidate profiles in more detail as well as engage with them via email or their social media links. Profiles will then be scored against different metrics, thus eliminating the chances of personal bias or perceptions. 
3. Talent pool building: Modern AI recruiter platforms can also help HR teams build a qualified talent pool of candidates. Created using AI and analytics algorithms, such a pool paves the way for objective hiring while also saving recruiters significant time and cost. Teams can source, score, and rank talent to identify the best-fit candidate for each role based on patented algorithms as well as predict candidate retention and performance, allowing for the best-informed hiring decisions to be made. 
4. Inclusive hiring: When recruiters use manual approaches to hire candidates, they aren’t capable of actively recognizing the diversity and ensuring inclusive hiring. The inability to embrace people from a wide range of qualities, perspectives, and origins restricts the organization’s ability to have different viewpoints and opinions. AI-enabled recruiting platforms can ensure an inclusive crew and open the door to diversity. Utilizing ethical AI features, such platforms can reduce biases related to inclusive hiring while also allowing you to drill down into the specifics of your hiring, from diversity hiring to hiring the best cultural fit.

With hundreds of new roles emerging every single day and thousands of CVs to scan through to find the right candidate, the job for the modern recruiter is only getting tougher. Matching skills and job functions along with seniority and location is no mean feat, but a modern AI recruiting platform can make things extremely easy. 

Leveraging predictive analytics and advanced AI algorithms, modern recruitment solutions can automatically scan through hundreds of resumes, and benchmark candidate skills and capabilities against industry standards. Such platforms allow organizations to assess them in an objective and unbiased manner – for the best hiring decisions, the best candidate experience, and the best retention metrics.