Who is REALLY Qualified? | Selection Decision Bias | [Part Two]
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Last week, I published the newsletter article edition, Who is Really Qualified? | Candidate Pool Bias | Part One where I discussed how bias can interfere with our perception of who is qualified to be a part of our candidate pool. In part two of this article, we get to talk about how bias impacts our perception of who is qualified to join our team. In other words, we talk about how bias impacts our final selection decision.
Although bias impacts our final selection decision in many ways, there are two ways in particular that I would like to share with you below: (#1) interview performance and (#2) standards of professionalism. Let’s start with the interview performance.
Did you know that interviews are a performance? I wrote an entire article around this topic last year called, The Problem with Rejecting Applicants Based on Interview Performance. Here is what is important to know. Some people perform (i.e., interview) well, and some people do not. Some people who would have performed well on any other day may have had one terrible interview performance on the day they interviewed with you. Alternatively, some people who generally do not perform well during interviews may have had one great interview performance on the day they interviewed with you.
Let’s use a different scenario. Some candidates interview well and turn out to be poor performers. Some candidates interview badly and turn out to be very high performers on your team. My point is this. Effective interviewing requires you as a recruiter and hiring manager to be able to see beyond the performance in order to assess the candidate’s actual knowledge, skills, and abilities.
Remember this. Interview performance is NOT an effective indicator of job performance.
According to research at ERE.net, the recruiting process often has a failure rate of 50%. Why? Oftentimes because bias hides in our perception of an individual’s interview performance and the judgment of the performance as being either good or bad. What may appear arrogant to you may be perceived as confident to another interviewer. What appears to be inappropriate to one interviewer may be cause for a great laugh for a different interviewer. It is all in perception.
When we feel the urge to reject a candidate based on interview performance, it should be a good signal and reminder to pause for a moment, identify and name the negative interview behavior, and ask one very important question.
"Which job qualification does this interview behavior signal that the candidate does NOT meet? "
If you cannot link the interview behavior/performance to the qualifications listed in the job description, it leaves your final selection decision more vulnerable to bias.
When rejecting candidates OR proceeding with candidates, be sure to continue to reference the job description. This will help to ensure that you are not falling into the trap of rejecting someone over a performance that may have no connection to the role they will need to perform.
Let’s move the conversation forward now and talk about the second way that bias impacts who we hire for the role. Let’s talk about standards of professionalism. Last year, I wrote about this very topic in a piece called, Creating Standards of Leadership and Professionalism Rooted in Blackness for The Executive Leadership Council Journal. Here was the bottom line of our article. Bias can impact HOW we define what is or is not professional. Bias can also impact WHO we define as professional or unprofessional.
I want you to take a moment and think about where the idea of standards of professionalism originated. When was the last time you considered who created standards of professionalism in your industry, or even in your workplace? It is those who have been in the workplace the longest. For example, here in the United States, we tend to talk often about standards of professionalism that are rooted in whiteness, or more specifically white, cis-gender, male standards. So the more a person presents in the same manner as a cis-gender, white male, the more they are labeled as professional, but the more their behavior and appearance differs from a cis-gender, white male, the more candidates have historically been labeled as unprofessional.
Let’s talk about this candidly for a moment. If a person comes packaged in a way that is atypical of how you’ve been conditioned to define competitive or professional candidates – does it mean that they are less qualified? Does it mean that they cannot do the work? It does not.
Remember the quote that I shared with you in Part One:
