This video is about interviewing candidates and choosing the right-fit for your organization. Here Konstanty Sliwowski, the founder of Caissa Global Recruitment highlights the major flaw of executive recruitment firms while interviewing candidates. He identifies different interview baisses and shows how to look unbiased and make the right hiring decision.
Read on.
The human brain is lazy. Seriously, it spends most of its time looking for shortcuts when processing information. It is thus no surprise that in interviews, it does exactly that.
Research has shown that unstructured interviews (which are by far the most common interview type across organisations) are often the least-informative part of a candidate assessment. Even experienced interviewers may spend the first minute of an interview jumping to a conclusion about a person and the rest of the time subconsciously seeking to confirm that conclusion.
Seriously, how bad is that? Your performance as a candidate is often the result of the first impression you make. This is neither a fair nor valuable assessment of a candidate for your team, is it?
The problem here stems from the fact that most interviewers have never been trained to interview. They take their own experiences from when they were candidates, maybe:
- Read what Google and Facebook do,
- Write down some questions,
- Look at the CV again,
- Then basically “wing it”
There is very little talk of interview structure - how interviews fit into a hiring process, how they represent the business, or setting outcome goals for interviews.
So what should you do to become a better interviewer? Well a lot. But I find that a good place to start is with recognising your own bias.
There are many ways you can be biased. Simply knowing them can help you identify your own biases and thus not falling into the trap they lay. Biases that occur most often during job interviews are:
- Primacy - a tendency to focus on first impressions
- Contrast - rating candidates against one another instead of against a common standard
- Halo/horn bias - letting a single positive or negative trait overshadow all else)
- Stereotyping - I think you know that one
- The similar-to-me biases - basically looking to hire people who are most like a mirror image of yourself
There is also a tendency among interviewers in a process to exhibit something called blind-spot bias. This is basically recognizing that others may be biased but being confident that you are not.
My suggestion would also be to not only be aware of these biases but also to discuss them prior to interviews and question yourself and other interviewers about them during a feedback and hiring decision meeting.
Be aware of your biases; they will enable you to make much better hiring decisions.
In order to make a better hiring decision, you should
- Make a structure of your interview. Unstructured interviews can’t help you evaluate the candidate.
- Avoid being judgemental right from the start. Don’t jump to conclusions too soon.
- Research properly, instead of writing a list of questions to ask.
- Discuss the interview biases. What made you or other interviewers choose/reject a particular candidate
Are you looking for a recruitment agency to hire you the best employee? Do you need assistance in structuring your interview process? Contact us to discuss your concerns.
