It doesn’t matter how many interviews you conduct, it’s still nerve-inducing.
There’s a lot riding on an interview – especially for a small business. You invest time in finding who you hope is going to be the right fit for your business. I am a recruiter but I’m also running a small business in what have been pretty tough times over the past few years so I’m on your side.
And that’s where this guide comes in! It’s important to me to be able to share knowledge and provide resources at no cost to small and medium business owners and hiring managers.
Everyone is capable of this mistake
Whether you’re looking to hire your first employee or your hundredth, interviewing is a big deal and something that lots of people get anxious about. It’s not just candidates who get nervous before interviews!
Obviously, you want to make the right decision for your company, and that’s a lot of pressure. If you hire the wrong person, you’ve got to start the process all over again and the money spent in the recruitment process goes down the pan.
Recruiting can often be a learning curve. And interview techniques are something that you hone over time. But there is one key mistake that many people make that could be affecting your decision on who to recruit without you even noticing: cognitive bias.
“Cognitive bias is the way a particular person understands events, facts, and other people, which is based on their own particular set of beliefs and experiences and may not be reasonable or accurate.”
How can cognitive bias come into play?
Cognitive bias can creep into even the most rigorous interview process. Everyone has cognitive bias so having it isn’t the mistake – the danger is allowing it to steer the recruitment process.
You may feel an affinity with candidates from reading their CV; perhaps you share common hobbies or attended the same university.
Unconscious bias can come into play without us realising if we know – or assume – the gender, race or age of a candidate. We may think that an older candidate wouldn’t fit into a predominately younger team, for example. But if anyone’s seen The Intern, we know that’s not necessarily true.
Hiring managers can also make assumptions about a candidate and reject them based on body language, such as not making eye contact, having their arms crossed during the interview or not giving a ‘good’ handshake. There could be very good reasons why candidates may present any of these so called ‘negative’ traits, for example, neurodiversity, but it doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be good at the job.
If the hiring process up to and including the interview is biased, even unwittingly, it can lead to bad hiring decisions, which leads to high turnover rates. It can also affect your efforts to increase diversity in your workforce and become a more inclusive employer.
We, as humans, have innate preferences so it’s impossible to remove 100% of interview bias. But there are steps that you can take to remove it as much as possible and increase your chances to finding the right fit for your next vacancy.
Consider anonymising applications
Shortlisting CVs blind means you must assess them against core criteria and there is no supplementary information available that could skew your decision.
Why not become the inclusivity champion of your business, and put this process in place? As you receive CVs, remove identifying information before sharing with the wider team. It means there’s less chance of unconscious biases occurring at this early stage.
How can you do it?
For small businesses and SMEs, you might not have access to whizzy applicant tracking software or similar, and you’re probably receiving CVs by email and doing everything manually.
What you’ll need to do in this case is to have someone who won’t be involved in the recruitment process make a copy of each CV that comes in and redact all the details discussed above, before the CV is passed to the hiring manager to shortlist. This could be as straightforward as printing the CV off and taking a fat black Sharpie to it. Although this sound a bit time consuming, it’s worth it for the right hire.
Here's what to remove:
The candidate’s name
A 2019 study from the University of Oxford found that candidates with minority ethic names had to send 80% more applications to get the same number of interviews as applicants with White-British sounding names. Scarily, this shows the same level of discrimination as in the 1960s. You’d think we would have moved on by now.
Removing a candidate’s name removes the chance of bias like this from happening. Names can suggest a lot of things about someone’s background, and misleading assumptions can be made based on this.
Their age
Candidates are no longer advised to include their age or date of birth on their CVs and this information should no longer be asked for on application forms. However, someone’s age can be inferred based on the dates they achieved qualifications, such as A Levels, or when they were studying at university so these should be redacted too.
Age is not a reliable indicator of how good a candidate’s skills are. Instead, you should be finding ways to assess their skills more directly.
Any photos
There was a time that candidates were encouraged to include photographs on their CVs. But this can result in affinity bias, meaning that you’re more likely to prefer people who look like you.
Unless you’re a casting director, you don’t need to know what someone looks like before inviting them to interview. It has no bearing on how well they can do their job.
Gender, religion or any other personal protected characteristics
The law says you cannot discriminate based on these characteristics. They shouldn’t be on a CV in the first place as they’re no-one’s business, but if someone has felt the need to include it – redact it.
Names of schools/universities
Is a candidate who went to public school and then Oxbridge going to be better at their job than the comprehensive high school-educated candidate who went on to get their degree from the local polytechnic? Where a candidate went to school or obtained their degree is not a good indicator of whether they have the skills needed to do the job they are applying for.
In fact, there are loads of socioeconomic factors that come into where someone received their education, and it’s best to remove all names and focus on assessing skills instead.
Previous company names
If you really want to widen your candidate pool and hire more diversely, you could think about removing previous company names from CVs. If you see a big blue chip company name on an application, you may make assumptions about the candidate.
And if you always look for where people have worked before, as opposed to the job they did and the contribution they made, you’re always going to end up hiring the same sort of people.
Start with a telephone screening
You’ve gone through the hard work of redacting CVs to anonymise them, and you have a long list of candidates. Now you can put the names back on and give each of them a call (might be a bit of an awkward conversation if you don’t know their name!).
The advantage of a phone screening call is that it reduces potential cognitive bias based on appearance and body language. Ask each candidate the same questions, in the same order for consistency.
Phone screenings are also a quick way to identify unsuitable candidates so that you only interview a small number. Now, you can reduce your applicants down to a shortlist.
Provide anonymous test assignments
Pre-interview test assignments are a good way to assess skills. It can be tempting to use this to get some free work done, but many candidates have cottoned on to this and are, quite rightly, seeing it as a red flag for the employer.
Keep the assignment short and not actual work that would benefit the business. You should also make sure that any tests are accessible for all candidates and, more importantly, relevant to the requirements of the job.
Give every candidate the same assignment so you can make comparisons and assess their knowledge and skills. Have them submit the assignments without their names on and ensure that the assessors are marking anonymous work. This way the output is judged solely on what the candidates have produced without any unconscious bias.
Have more than one interviewer
For junior roles, this might mean having different people taking part in the interview process one at a time, as opposed to a panel interview. However, a panel interview would be suitable for a more senior role.
You might think that panel interviews would be too intimidating for candidates and there are some for whom it could be too nerve-inducing for them to perform their best. However, there are so many positives to panel interviews that it most likely outweighs the negatives when it comes to recruiting for senior roles.
The main benefit is the hive mind mentality. Each person on the panel will pick up on different positives and negatives during the interview. They will each have their own cognitive bias, as do we all, and by working together the panel can decide who’s the best candidate without unknowingly giving into personal bias.
You could also include someone who hasn’t seen the applications already on the panel so that they’re forming their opinion based solely on the interview.
If you can, consider the diversity of interviewers on your panel to promote diversity and inclusion. Interviews are a two-way process and minority candidates might feel more welcome if not faced by three middle-aged white men.
Avoid stress interviews
This is a bit of an old-school interview technique, but you can almost guarantee that the interviewer thinks that what they’re doing is a good idea. ‘Stress interviews’ are designed to catch candidates out.
Stress interviews are about asking trick questions, or by ‘intimidation through silence’ – where the awkward silence after the candidate finishes answering the question causes them to keep talking to fill the gap, start to waffle and potentially reveal a lot more about themselves than planned.
It can leave candidates feeling like they’ve been left on the back foot. And whereas some candidates will enjoy the challenge of having to explain why manhole covers can only be round, it’ll baffle and scare the bejesus out of others.
Nervous, shy or confidence-lacking candidates may fare particularly poorly in a stress interview, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they wouldn’t be good in the day-to-day role.
Interviews are a two-way process. It’s been a candidate-driven market for many years so you just can’t get away with thinking it’s just you interviewing them.
Why make people feel uncomfortable on purpose? What does that say about your business and how you lead?
Use standardised questions for each job role
Consistent questioning will make the interview process fairer. Plus, it means you won’t forget to ask something important.
During an interview you don’t necessarily want to have such a rigid format that no personality can come across, however starting to go off topic can let affinity bias come into play as you start to bond over a shared interest or experience. It’s a delicate balance.
If you create a sheet of standardised questions with room to write answers you can make notes as you go, rather than waiting for the candidate to leave and then trying to remember all the pertinent details. Question and answer sheets also mean you can directly compare candidate’s answers, which brings us on nicely to the next point…
Mark against a standard scorecard
Using a standard scorecard during the interview process means everyone involved in the hiring process can evaluate the candidates using the same criteria, reducing potential bias.
A scorecard could be set out like a matrix and is just a step up from a question-and-answer sheet as discussed above. During the interview score the answers, either with a numerical value or a pre-defined level of achievement, so that you can create an overall score for each candidate. You can then compare each candidate’s overall score to help make your decision.
Each interviewer taking part in the process would complete the scorecard and then you can compare notes at the end.
In a small business where you might not have more than one interviewer, using a scorecard is still useful. It means you’re judging each candidate based on set criteria and will help you to keep the key job requirements front and centre so you can make the best hiring decision.
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