Subjectivity is a common and inevitable element of judgement or evaluation during candidate screening processes and interviews. Inaccurate conclusions are made because of the bias involved during the selection process and most of the time, it is hard to tell which kinds of biases can influence a particular employee selection setting.
Even in Myanmar, more often than not, the job interviewing and screening techniques remain quite traditional, that is, most of the recruiters and hiring managers would only rely on the interviews to determine whether a candidate should be on board or not. Unfortunately, most of the time, these interviews have a lot of loopholes and a lot of deserving candidates have no choice but to read the rejection letters just because the interviews are flawed. Most of the time, those flaws revolve around the bias by the interviewers and it is very important for the HR practitioners and recruiters to know some very common hiring biases and how to leap past them.
In general, most Myanmar recruiters tend to place a significant emphasis on CVs and Resumes to filter out quite a handful of applicants and most of those rejectees could have been the company’s loyalist employees, which is why it is so important to ensure that most of the rejections do not take place until the interviewing stage. Listed out below are six common hiring biases that can adversely affect your business along with some proven techniques to deter them.
Halo Effect
This is a very common hiring bias whereby the interviewer notices a particularly favorable or positive characteristic in a candidate and concludes him to be ‘good’ in other aspects as well. This is usually a very unavoidable mistake because hiring is a repetitive process and recruiting managers tend to make prompt generalizations about the candidates based on just a few cues. For example, a recruiter might assume that if a candidate speaks good English, he must also be smart and intelligent. Or he might be led to believe that if a candidate is good looking, he must also be dominant and charismatic.
Halo effect can be counter-reacted by trying to identify the candidate’s weak points or unfavorable candidates. This approach can help offset the positive bias the recruiters might be having and help them make more objective approaches. Moreover, Myanmar is currently flourishing a number of startups and entrepreneurial businesses with a flat hierarchy where the recruiters look for well-rounded individuals who might have the ability to pitch in with anything, which is why such recruiters should be able to evaluate the candidates’ pros and cons from all angles without settling for just one good quality or aspect. Looking for an outstanding technical quality might be a good choice for established corporates where the employees are expected to be good at one or two things but startup business can be different and they can pretty much demand versatile individuals who are ready and able to give everything a go.
Horn Effect
Horn effect is technically a negative equivalent of halo effect; it is a cognitive bias whereby the recruiter notices a negative trait in a candidate causing the former to keep concentrating on the other negative aspects of the latter. This can actually be more harmful to the candidates since they can risk failing to win a good first impression with the interviewer. Both halo and horn effects are prejudicial behaviors based on first impressions but the horn effect is more or less unidentifiable as a bias during the interviews since they’re somehow designed to be hypercritical and strict with the interviewees and trying to pick negative cues sounds like something natural during an interview.
Nonetheless, hiring managers and HR practitioners need to ensure that they don’t make snap judgements about a candidate especially when they’re negative and unfavorable with the candidate’s probability of scoring the job. For starters, the interviewers can try to counterbalance their negative impression toward a candidate with something positive or desirable in him. The interviewers can also chart out the candidates’ value proposition or unique selling points and see whether they outweigh their shortcomings.
Also, in an Asian environment like Myanmar, people can be really opinionated regarding bad habits or unacceptable workplace behaviors and recruiters tend not to compromise for those nuisances. This is even more prominent with today’s Burmese millennials who are more or less influenced by alien cultures either through overseas experiences or media exposure. So, it’s probably the best if the recruiters can just overlook those readjustable behaviours for some while during the interview and only focus on the more relevant portions of it and then when the new hires are on board afterwards, they can be asked to make amendments to what is not so okay in the workplace.
Similarity Effect
Similarity effect kicks in when the interviewer is able to identify something relatable or a similarity to him in a candidate and develops a prejudicial affinity toward that candidate. It is naturally hard to ignore something when it happens to coincide with what one is experiencing or had experienced and when one can deeply empathize with it. Older generations of Burmese people are more predisposed to finding the candidates who share their characteristics or mindsets, thinking that this uniformity might be a good thing in the workplace. Nevertheless, opinions on whether diversity or uniformity beats the other in the workplace is a subjective point of view in a lot of Myanmar companies.
Interviewers can eliminate the similarity bias by shifting their perspectives; they’re able to relate to some candidates only when they’re trying to make evaluations based on their own individual perceptions. Instead, they can resort to thinking from the company’s or the organization’s perspective and accommodate to the interests of the majority rather than giving way to personal preferences.
Contrast Effect
Contrast effect is usually a screening bias that arises when a candidate is automatically devalued or is deemed insignificant when being compared to someone else who embodies better attributes, values or skills. For example, a recruiter reads a CV and finds it particularly outstanding, leading him to set the owner of that CV as an ideal precedent. But when it is brought to comparison with other mediocre or less-in-quality CVs, it becomes even more prominent due to the apparent contrast that arose. This is just an example of a contrast effect that tends to manifest in cases where there are a lot of applicants and CVs to look into. JobNet’s Applicant Tracking System might be one of the ways to eliminate such kind of bias to a considerable extent by providing a seamless HR support for all recruiters in Myanmar.
Moreover, since a contrast effect is a bias that takes place due to standard misplacements, employers and recruiters need to ensure that the benchmark or the yardstick of what a ‘poor’, ‘mediocre’, ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ candidates are like so that the candidates can be objectively stratified into ranks rather than become victims of contrast effect.
Conformity Bias
Conformity bias is usually an unfavorable outcome of a groupthink or a team-based decision; when a decision is made within a group involving people willing to compromise or conform rather than think critically, the quality or validity of that decision can become unfavorably affected. For example, a panel of five interviewers assesses a candidate; although one interviewer finds some compelling and unique characteristics of that candidate that can add value to the company, the interviewer might choose to turn him down when the rest four interviews do not like him. This tendency is a natural human desire to stick with the majority without opting to take risks because we usually do not intend to get cast out from a group by thinking or speaking differently. Burmese people can usually be overly accepting and compromising due to the unwillingness to offend the teammates or coworkers and as a result, conformity bias can be dominant in work environment.
Nonetheless, we should be well aware that it is completely alright to think from a different perspective and take a different approach. Sometimes, if necessary, interviewing panels should have a devil’s advocate to challenge the majority argument and negate the popular opinion.
Confirmation Bias
Most of us tend to think that many of our beliefs and opinions that we have held for so long are true; we want to seek affirmation or reassurance about our ideologies so badly that we eventually refuse to believe otherwise. As a result, we only try to selectively pick up pieces of information that can corroborate our own belief systems and filter out the rest that negate them. For example, an interview has a long held belief that a particular top university in Yangon yields only the best candidates who can perform well across many industries. That belief has been clung to so hard that the interviewer will only look for any kind of information that can support his belief about top university graduates and overlook any other information contrary to that belief. This can especially be a serious issue in Asian environments like in Myanmar where hiring managers can be opinionated and conservative as a result of cultural norms.
Interviews can train themselves to be skeptical about popular or personal beliefs and try to be open toward many possibilities to avoid having confirmation bias. They can also choose to consult to their superiors or subordinates for third-party opinions about a particular subject matter and take them into consideration before making a recruitment decision.