Are we right?

Even if we are hiring managers or candidates, we want to have a fair recruitment process and right decisions. I think that everybody who takes part in a recruitment process cames with good intentions, but that are also some errors they can make without realize this. Psychologist call this ”bias”.

Unconscious biases have a critical effect on our judgment and its make us take decisions in favor of one person or group to the detriment of others. To be sure that the decisions are right, we can follow some steps:

• Be informed. Even if you are the HR or the hiring manager, be aware of these biases. Before you make a decision, question yourself if you are not a victim of a bias.

• Resume review – search for competences asked by the job description. On this step, we can not assess how qualitative is the candidate's experience, but we can do a check-list with competencies and select the candidates for the interviews

• Assessment – we can have some technical interviews, but a work sample test helps you more to take the right decision. This result helps you to understand better if the candidate will be or it will be not a performant employee.

• Structured interviews – define a list of questions aimed to predict candidates success. This list is nice to have at the moment when for the same department / team / role you have different assessors.

• Get some statistics from the structure of the actual team. It is good to have a certain pattern, but you can try also to embrace diversity and to bring new types of profile in the team. Also, be aware that it is not fair to compare candidates between each other, but compare them with a standard required for the actual team.

In the end, I think that it is easy to blame the wrong decision. To avoid this kind o situation, you can make data-driven decisions.

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