Cognitive and Unconscious Biases - vet clinic interview blind spot dangers - pt 2 - 115

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Continuing on from last week's 1-5 of Unconscious Biases:

6. Overconfidence bias

Plays out when the recruiter is soooo confident in their own abilities to either pick a good candidate, or to eliminate the supposed bad ones, that they allow confirmation bias to creep in. 

7. Similarity attraction bias

Sometimes, the similarity attraction bias plays out and replicas of people are hired – because of likeness / similarity – but they incompetent!

8. Illusory correlation

The illusory correlation is when a person believes a relationship exists between two variables when there is, in fact, no relationship there.

9. Affinity bias

Overweighted emphasis is placed on something intangible and/or irrelevant to the hiring decision.

10. Beauty bias

Beware of hiring someone simply because they have a similar appearance to others in your clinic and/or the departing employee you’re looking to replace.

11. Conformity bias

Conformity bias is a group thinking bias.  

12. Intuition

You owe it to every applicant, your colleagues, your clinic and yourself, to always check all the facts.

13. Contrast effect / judgement bias

When you’ve got a stack of CVs to go through, rather than allowing each resume to stand out on its own merit, it’s easy to fall into the trap of comparing the latest resume – or the one you’re currently reading - to the one you’ve just read.  

#14 – bandwagon effect

This is when one person’s opinion dominates, and no one challenges their opinion.

#15 – stereotyping

This is like affect heuristics because it’s when a decision is made on a superficial, non-relevant factor.

For example, the applicant might be judged wanting because of their accent, body art or piercings, gender or name.

#16 – proximity bias

This is when an applicant is judged positively or negatively in relation to how far or near, they live from a clinic.

7 ways to counter unconscious bias

1.     Do be aware of unconscious hiring biases that you and your team might have and look out for them.

2.     Do ensure your hiring managers have received suitable interview training that covers common hiring biases – we’re happy to facilitate this for you, if you’d like.

3.     Do make hiring decisions based on evidence rather than on subjective assumptions.

4.     Do be consistent and transparent in your hiring process.

5.     Do create a standardised interview guide and ensure you ask every candidate the same questions.

6.     Do create a standardised reference checking guide and ensure you ask all referees the same questions.

7.     Do involve other team members in the interview process and provide a safe psychological space for everyone’s opinions to be considered and, if necessary, challenged.

Episode 114 - the first six cognitive interviewing biases

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