Bias in hiring is not newly discovered, in fact, it is something so inherently embedded in the tech sector that it has led to over 68% of the workforce being white and leaving women at fewer than 35%. Representation of cultural, geographic and other minorities in the tech workforce and in leadership roles in general is also underwhelming.
As an IT recruitment agency in Singapore, we are aware of the unfair bias that some candidates can be subjected to. We hope that bringing awareness to this issue can help both candidates and hiring managers better understand unconscious bias. And how to avoid them.
What is an Unconscious Bias?
These may be structural organisational issues or those of biases but this post zooms in on unconscious biases alone. Unconscious bias is in favor or prejudice of an individual and generally one that you are not aware of even while directly being affected by it. Usually, an unconscious bias would trigger automatically and not even give you the slightest feeling that you’re making a biased choice.
While social and behavioral scientists along with engineers worked to identify technical ways to remove these biases from the recruitment process, there is still a long way to go with algorithmic biases still existing. However, it is important to first know what these biases are and how they work. This post is to help you understand some of the unconscious recruitment biases that you might be internally facing and that can hamper diversity and inclusion in your organization.
5 Common Types of Recruitment Bias in Singapore
Below, we list the common types of recruitment bias that can take place in Singapore’s IT and Cybersecurity sector.
1. Affinity Bias
Like the name suggests, this type of bias happens when you’d favor a person that you feel is like you or someone that you’d like to socialise with. This likeness may be because of the same appearance, same background, experience, beliefs etc. It is particularly problematic when this bias unconsciously becomes the merit factor in deciding between two candidates. In such a situation, you end up hiring for what you think is a culture fit for the organisation, but actually hampering diversity of opinion and work within the organisation.
Overcoming this bias is not entirely a step by step process but it would be a good idea to force yourself to look for unfamiliar candidates and find alignment with them as well, so that you can counter the inherent bias.
2. Attribution Bias
If this, then that. This means that you could assume certain causes for actions or occurings in someone’s career trajectory. For example, if someone stayed in a particular role for a long period of time, one could think lack of ambition or ability as the cause, which may be entirely false.
The best way to overcome this bias is to work on information as evidence rather than assumption as evidence of any conclusion that you’re deriving about a candidate. If you do find yourself making an assumption about a candidate during the recruitment process, ask them the question to clarify if your assumption is well founded or not. For example, in the above case, you could ask them why they stayed in the same position for a long period of time and not moved on to another city/company etc.
3. Halo or Horn Bias
The fact that you’ve fixated on this candidate’s master’s degree and you don’t see beyond it, either in a good way or bad. The Halo bias refers to when you find something so impressive about a candidate that no other less favourable characteristics are automatically overshadowed. The reverse of that is the Horn bias where some less favourable characteristic becomes big enough to overshadow the good ones that there might be. For example, thinking that just because a candidate is Harvard educated, you would not look deeper into their work experience and other skills. It might seem that when these things happen, you would definitely realise.
However, the issue is that these are unconscious biases and you might not always realise. In order to tackle this type of a bias, avoid making causal inferences and focus on the value that they can bring to the organisation rather than where they came from in the past entirely. While that is also important, you need not fixate on just one aspect.
4. Contrast Bias
It is the situation when you would compare candidates with each other, for example, if you receive an average fit for a position in the first few days, you’d use that as the gold standard and anything even above average fit would seem great to you. Here, you might be able to hire the best person out of the lot but not the best person for the job.
A systematic way to do away with bias is to set a standard for the recruitment process and use that as the benchmark by weighing candidates against that metric. In which situation, you might not actually be able to recruit someone right away but will find the right fit for the job.
5. Confirmation Bias
It is when we look at what we want to see, quite literally. This can happen when you go in with a preconceived notion or belief that would find instances that would reinforce those beliefs. This could work in many ways causing bias about many things such as someone’s skin color, ethnicity, gender etc. and is one of the most straightforward and clear biases.
The right way to do away with such a bias is to first check the objective list of things that you’re looking for recruiting in that role, and then proceed with the next rounds. Even while interviewing this bias may trickle in that is when you need to take an evidence based approach to making any decisions about the candidate.
Overall, you should also look at de-biasing each stage of the hiring process. For example, while writing job descriptions, you could be biased in choosing language that might prevent a certain group of candidates to not apply altogether. Therefore, it is important to think of all recruitment steps and what biases might there be throughout the process.
As a professional IT recruitment agency in Singapore, BGC Group adheres to a strict code of conduct when it comes to hiring. More information here.
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