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Fostering Mutual Understanding: Identify Biased Filters in Hiring with Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, Associate Professor of Psychology, Columbia University
Elitism
One of the key things about bias is that it’s not in anyone’s interest to have bias in a company, and people actually don’t – they want to move beyond bias. The problem is that bias really starts from day one when you’re engaged in the hiring process, and companies tend to do a couple different things.
One of the major things that they do is that they go to what they perceive to be the very, very top institutions: Columbia, Princeton, Harvard, Duke, MIT. So right from the beginning you already have bias, in the sense that you are thinking about who you perceive to be the very elite people in this country. And so we know that there’s bias there. The problem with that is that – what happens is, there are many, many fantastic, amazing individuals who are not even getting an opportunity purely for economic reasons, because they haven’t gone to these top business schools or they haven’t gone to the top law schools. So that’s sort of the first thing.
Familiarity Heuristic
The second thing that happens is, we have a very strong tendency to like people that are just like us, and that can mean any range of things. It can be someone who shares the same interests. It could be someone who shares the same alumni connections. It could be the person that is from the same hometown. So what that does is that creates another kind of filter, where we’re biased toward people who not just look like us, but share our same common values. Ok, so why is this a problem? Most companies actually think this is actually good, because now what’s happening is you’re having a workplace where there’s lots of people that have the same values and interests, and if you’re spending a lot of time together, everyone thinks the same way. The problem with that is that, let’s just say you have a company that’s located in a remote area in northern Pennsylvania. That means you’re going to attract all the same kind of people, that all went to the same school, that all have the same background, and you’re filtering out a whole lot of talent that you could have in that place.
The third thing that happens is, when you are interviewing someone who is just like you, something really interesting starts to happen. It’s called mirroring. So if you’re sort of shaking your leg or you’re, I don’t know, gesturing like this, the other person starts to gesture like that. And what happens is, that increases liking even more. So there’s all of these markers where at the end of an interview, you’re like, “I really like this person,” and typically, what someone says is, “They just feel like they fit in here.” But what’s happening is, you’re just hiring someone who’s just like you, because they’re engaging in the same behavior as you and you have a similar background. So you’re filtering out diversity right from the beginning of hiring.
Career Archetypes
This is really where stereotypes become powerful. Say, for instance, you are interested in investment banking. We know there’s a strong underrepresentation of women and ethnic minorities and veterans in banking. What happens is, each person has an individual idea of what someone in investment banking or in finance looks like. So you know what their CV should “look like,” you know what they should physically look like. So when someone comes into the workplace that doesn’t necessarily look like that, whether it’s in pedigree or what they look like physically, something else starts to happen. If they make a mistake, if they appear to be unprepared, you’re less forgiving of them, and you say, “Well, they don’t really fit in anyway.” So you’re less likely to give them the benefit of the doubt. When someone is just like you, you’re more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt. So each of these small biased behaviors, at the end of say, an hour interview – imagine a day interview, or sometimes these weekend interviews. You can imagine what appears to be objective criteria, again, has these stereotypes baked in, where at the end of say, a hiring season, you now have hired 90% of people who look and sound and came from the same types of schools that you came from, and then you have the rest that, you know, you have a little bit of diversity. And what’s more, because a lot of hiring has to do with feel and fit – this feels right, and it fits well, so, this is one of the ways in which bias plays itself out. But it looks objective, but it’s actually not.