When talking about objective versus subjective recruitment practices I often quote the well known statistic that 58% of Fortune 500 CEO’s are six foot tall or higher, yet only 14.5% of the male population are that height.
Minus a few pro basketballers and the tall population left for CEO roles shrinks slightly further! This statistic is often met with some surprised looks, a few gasps and acknowledgment that people must be unconsciously biased. However, in all the times I’ve used that statistic, no one has ever offered the suggestion that perhaps some of the remaining CEO’s were tall women. It didn’t even cross their mind!
Many HR Departments work hard to remove intentional bias from workplace, yet unconscious bias is rife. Mostly because, well... it’s unconscious.
A little while ago, my colleague Salih wrote about his experience applying for jobs and how changing his name on the application yielded him a better result - another example of unconscious bias. However, the evidence isn’t purely anecdotal. A study of 192 applications by undergrads found that, whilst equally qualified and of the same gender, those who were listed as mothers were 42% less likely to be hired.
It gets worse.
People have recognised that their own unconscious bias may be in direct opposition to their strong conscious values. Nothing reflects this more than Reverend Jesse Jackson’s famous quote, “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life, than to walk down a street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery – then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”
It seems we know unconscious bias exists, even if we don’t want it to. In the ten years I spent in the recruitment industry, I witnessed many displays of bias. Many organisations use a purely subjective recruitment process with the usual resume screening (in which we know that some applicants embellish their experience and recruiters spend an average of 4.5 minutes reviewing), followed by a subjective interview and reference checking. Even key selection criteria seems to be trending out of the process as companies aware of applicants outsourcing their written applications to professional response writers.
Extensive research tells us that applying work samples and objective insight is the best way to identify best talent. Unfortunately, obtaining work sample tests from all candidates is simply not feasible as it is very time consuming and highly expensive. Thankfully, seminal research conducted by Schmidt & Hunter (1998) found that simply adding a short general cognitive ability test (not separate ability tests) to a hiring process that includes structured interviews improves recruitment effectiveness by 24%, making it the most effective addition to your recruitment process.
Psychometric tests go through a rigorous validation process to ensure they are highly objective. It’s just as important that a similar level of scrutiny is applied to the interview process to ensure it is truly ‘structured’, otherwise, you may find that unconscious bias rears its ugly (tall) head!
