How many of ourselves should we hire?

The biggest trap of hiring is when the recruiter looks for his own precious qualities in the candidates. Finally he finds them, although it would have been better if he hadn’t.

Are we able to keep our objectivity during a selection interview? Can we make decisions while we turn against our own inner value system? The truth is that only a few are able to do that. At the same time even fewer are willing to admit that they are biased.

There is no reason to be ashamed of this, however. Out of the 5184 personality profiles only 114 are able to take fully unbiased decisions: only 2% of society. Decisions related to people, however, are taken by almost everybody. Most of these are based on emotions.

The distorting effects of our emotions, prejudices and projections constitute one of the favourite areas of behaviour research. Tens of thousands of experiments prove again and again how few can entirely liberate themselves from the emotional consequences of their decisions.

For instance, during a classic experiment in behaviorism, 100 British educators were examined. 99 out of them failed at the bias test. In the course of the experiment each educator got a class of 20 students. Different evaluations about the students in the groups were prepared beforehand. One of the group was said to comprise children with weaker abilities, another was said to be the opposite. For the sake of being more convincing, the selected teacher was shown fake intelligence tests, surveys about education and previous test results. So the educator was given a group of problem students with “weaker abilities” and a special class of “promising” students at the same time. Of course both groups comprised students with the same abilities.

After six months the records of the two classes were compared in order to see whether the preliminary (fake) classification had an influence on the grades or not. It was striking how the results correlated with the preliminary preconceptions of the teacher. “Promising” children got excellent results, while “problematic” students appalling ones. Out of a hundred such cases, only one female teacher failed preliminary “expectations”. It was only her who produced groups with the same results – while 99 teachers unconsciously influenced the grades of their students. Before the experiment 67 among the educators judged their ability to remain objective “excellent”.

The example above demonstrates well how our personal opinion, prejudices and previous judgement can blind most of us. A great deal of similar examinations has already been and is being conducted at present as well.

Some universities do research in the domain of likes and dislikes. Thanks to them we know that most of the time (in 87% of the cases) we unconsciously favour people with a head shape, intonation or gesture similar to ours.

Other research groups call our attention to our biases towards people who embody our “projected desires”. According to this, if people say what we would like to hear, they get a good point (in 89% of the cases!). All such examinations are highly informative.

Perhaps that is why objective personality and competency profile tests are so popular in the domain of personnel selection. Especially those are very helpful which take into consideration a lot of aspects. If we can see a candidate from many angles, our prejudices may vanish.

The other option is to hire somebody as a selection specialist from the 2% of the “surely unbiased”. Only, we should remain unbiased when we select that person. Otherwise our company will be full of “us”.