Here’s How Unconscious Bias Affects Your Company
Recruiters want the best talent for the company. They scout for the ideal candidate everywhere around the world and are unwilling to settle for anything less. They post and advertise jobs in multiple places. They update their career sites regularly to ensure candidates have all the information they need. But all of this raises an important question: What does it mean for a candidate to be the “best” for the company? Is it subjective, based on the recruiter’s preferences? Are the recruiter’s choices entirely unbiased, solely based on the candidate’s qualifications, skills, and experience?
Believe it or not, it is rather difficult to make a decision that is uninfluenced by personal conditioning. This conditioning is called “unconscious bias,” and it can wriggle into the workplace easily: during meetings, recruitment, promotions, etc. As many companies have moved to a work-from-home arrangement, the standard modes of recruiting and the biases that can inflect them have changed as well. In this article, we discuss what unconscious bias looks like and the different ways you can mitigate it in the workplace.
Why Should You Focus on Unconscious Bias?
Our decisions and choices are, unbeknownst to us, influenced by our experiences, backgrounds, and cultural upbringings. This influence is what we call “unconscious bias.”
As the name suggests, it is not a conscious choice but a subconscious preference developed because of the conditioning we have experienced. These preferences often affect the outcomes of promotions, recruitment, and performance evaluations — and that makes it hard to foster diversity and inclusion in the workplace.
Unconscious bias can easily creep into recruitment when recruiters don’t know what good looks like (WGLL). When your WGLL is vague, recruiters and hiring managers hire based on their personal preferences. Factors like a good conversation with a candidate or even the sports teams a person follows on social media can inappropriately influence the hiring decision. Since the effects of unconscious bias are not immediately perceivable, its influence may not work in favor of your company.
It is the responsibility of every organization to avoid unconscious bias, not only for the sake of social justice but also for the sake of profit. Studies show that an ethnically diverse board of directors can help a company earn 43 percent higher profits than average!
The Different Types of Unconscious Bias
Here are some types of unconscious bias often seen in the workplace:
•Similarity bias: This is seen when we prefer people who are similar to us in some manner. We prefer them because we can relate to them easily. We look for shared attributes such as class, ethnicity, hobbies, and interests.
• Attribution bias: This is when we attribute another’s successes to luck and their failures to lack of ability. Meanwhile, we perceive our own success to be the result of hard work, and we chalk our failures up to things outside our control. This bias often becomes prevalent during performance evaluations.
• Beauty bias:This is when we favor attractive people for a role, even though their looks do not contribute to their ability to carry out a job.
• Confirmation bias: This occurs when we refuse to accept or consider opinions and viewpoints that contradict our own.
• Conformity bias: This is when we favor conforming to the popular opinion and do not give individuals space to voice their dissenting thoughts and ideas. This bias hinders creativity and problem-solving.
• Gender bias: One of the most common forms of bias. Common examples include asking female employees to take notes during meetings and preferring men for analytical tasks. This bias can also influence people against hiring working mothers. Sometimes, this unconscious bias can be seen in the language of job descriptions as well. Luckily, most companies take action against gender-based discrimination these days.
•Halo and horns bias: The halo effect occurs when the positive aspects of a person make us overlook their negatives qualities, which could directly impact the role they are handling. The horn effect is the opposite, wherein our negative impression of a person outweigh their positives.
How to Mitigate Unconscious Bias at Work
• Become conscious of your unconscious biases. Let everyone know how bias occurs and help them understand their own biases to take steps to eliminate them.
• Reflect on how these biases are affecting your company. Are there enough female board members? How are salary raises decided? How unbiased are recruitment decisions? What are your commonly asked interview questions?
• Set diversity and inclusion goals for your company. You need talented employees. Period. Diverse opinions and healthy debate breed creativity and innovation. Make sure to act on your diversity goals.
• Revisit your hiring process. How is your recruitment process designed ? Are your job descriptions free of bias? Does your process prevent people from a certain race, gender, or class from applying? How do you ensure all interviewers are on the same page when it comes to WGLL?
• Experiment with blind recruitment. Tools like Textio and GapJumpers can help you ensure that you hire employees for their skills alone.
• Ensure there is diversity among decision-makers, too. Having multiple perspectives on each hiring decision can help greatly in mitigating unconscious bias.
• Encourage people to speak up about the biases they see at work. Ensure that your culture encourages people to come forward when they have issues and concerns.
While you focus on eliminating unconscious bias in the workplace, let Freshteam take care of all the mundane recruitment tasks.
Freshteam by Freshworks is recruitment software that can help you find the right candidates with its job-board integrations, employee referrals, social media recruitment capabilities, and much more. Freshteam can also roll out offers to your candidates, take care of onboarding and manage all of your documents in one place. You can set up your career site, collaborate with your hiring team, schedule interviews, and do a lot more. Try Freshteam for free.
This article by Freshteam is built on the original article that first appeared on the Freshteam blog.
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