For example, let’s say you’re a baseball fan. At your company, you have a few colleagues who are also into baseball (like Mike) and some that are not (like Anthony, who can’t stand to watch any sport, let alone baseball). You are naturally much closer to Mike than Anthony, even though you and Anthony actually have more in common.

Social identity theory suggests that people’s sense of self is strongly formed by their group memberships. In doing this, we naturally feel closer towards similar people because those people help us construct our own individual sense of self. Those role models become the “in” crowd and we continuously want to surround ourselves with these people. While these types of interactions may be generally harmless, in an interview they can lead to discrimination. When this happens, it is called Similar-to-me bias or Affinity bias.

This silent problem causes unfair hiring practices by causing interviewers to look past qualified candidates in favor of those that remind them of themselves. The affinity can stem from almost anything – gender, ethnicity, educational background and yes, even a favorite sports team. This results in a biased interview process that will not produce the best hires for the organization.

An Indeed article mentions other examples of Affinity Bias in the hiring process:

• Similar education background
• Matching professional qualifications
• Comparable work backgrounds
• Relatable age and socioeconomic backgrounds

Okay, so Affinity Bias is bad; how do we mitigate it?

Several parts to an answer:

• Comparable/unbiased evaluation processes
• Structured Interview Guides
• Proper training of interviewers
• Rotating interviewers

Processes

One good way to minimize Affinity Bias is by rotating interviewers to reduce natural affinity and to standardize the interview process by utilizing structured interviews. This way candidates are evaluated on objective measures rather than the interviewers’ perceptions.

In an article from the Academy to Innovate HR titled 11 Ways to Avoid Interviewer Bias in Your Selection Process, the author writes:

“For each job, have a set of questions that you ask every candidate. This way, you don’t veer into similar-to-me bias as well as inconsistency in questioning. You won’t accidentally forget to ask one candidate about X, and then reject that candidate because X is an important skill.”

Best Practice Interview Training Option

With structured interviews, you’re more likely to create effective, diverse teams, and help to prevent interviewers from solely hiring people who think, act, and look like them. With the right standardized questions, their focus will be on hiring the best person for the job — a decision they can arrive at only from a candidate’s responses to the objective, skill-based questions — which naturally expands your pool of qualified candidates.

To achieve this, an engaging and effective structured interview process is required and interviewers need to embrace it. APTMetrics has taken a unique approach to structured interview training called the Interviewer Experience. This simulation-based training environment is designed to help enterprises to effectively teach hiring managers the unbiased interviewing skills that lead to better hiring and increased inclusivity. Complimentary evaluation licenses are available.

Every talent acquisition process includes one or more interviews of a candidate. And every interview has a ‘first impression.’  As an interviewer charged with helping identify the best candidates for position, one of your responsibilities is to not fall victim to First Impression Bias.

For example, if a candidate comes in for an interview and they clearly need a haircut, you may be prone to thinking that this candidate could be lazy and underprepared and will most likely bring those habits into their work.  Even though grooming style shouldn’t override evaluating a candidate’s unique set of experiences, competencies, and characteristics.

But human nature is powerful, and a first impression can quickly influence whether an interviewer “likes” a candidate and sets the stage for the rest of the interview to simply confirm the first impression. These snap judgments can result in bad hires because none of the judgments you can make about a candidate in the first few minutes of meeting them will be a useful indication of their motivation or skill, and are really just thin comparisons to past experiences you have had with other “people like that.” You are (unintentionally) filtering out potentially excellent employees by tainting the candidate evaluation process with bias.

Okay, so First Impression Bias is bad; how do we mitigate it?

Two parts to an answer:

• Comparable/unbiased evaluation processes
• Proper training of interviewers

Processes

The way to create and execute comparable evaluations of candidates is to utilize structured interviews, which “ensure candidates have equal opportunities to provide information and are assessed accurately and consistently.”

Google, which reportedly processes over a million applications to hire approximately 20,000 new employees every year, has standardized on structured interviewing. On their re:Work page, they state:

“Structured interviewing simply means using the same interviewing methods to assess candidates applying for the same job. Research shows that structured interviews can be predictive of candidate performance, even for jobs that are themselves unstructured. Google uses structured interviewing — using the same interview questions, grading candidate responses on the same scale, and making hiring decisions based on consistent, predetermined qualifications.”

New Training Option

With regard to training hiring managers on structured interviewing, traditional options range from simple on-demand recorded-and-narrated PowerPoint videos to in-person guided role-play sessions. The former are frequently criticized as non-engaging and having low knowledge retention, while the latter are typically expensive, time-consuming and challenging to scale.

APTMetrics has addressed these issues with its recently released Interviewer Experience, a simulation-based structured interviewing training environment, which helps enterprises to effectively teach hiring managers the unbiased interviewing skills that lead to better hiring and increased inclusivity. Complimentary evaluation licenses are available.