Identifying and Remedying Recruiter Blind Spots

Lloyd

There are many factors that affect our decision-making in recruitment: the candidate’s CV, their personal appearance, their references and the skills and experience of the recruiter, to name a few. Sometimes assessing a candidate is easy, sometimes it’s not. Today I want to talk about how recruiters assess candidates, and the importance of being self-aware throughout this process.

We need to be self-aware, as our personal views will affect the hiring decisions we will make. We have our personal inclinations, likes, dislikes, etc. and our decision-making can be compromised by flaws in our own perception and judgement. I want to shed light on how these judgements and perceptions affect our decision-making and how to remove these blind spots.

What do I mean when I say blind spots? Similarly to blind spots when driving a motor vehicle, neglecting an area in recruitment can also negatively affect our decision-making. In this blog post, I will share potential blind spots in employee retention, candidate experience and when hiring solely on hard skills. I will also share some common perception biases that can affect our decision-making in recruitment.

Biases in recruitment

One of the most talked about factors to make better hires. There are common biases that are often spoken of in the recruitment context, so I thought I’d focus on three biases that are less spoken of. 

1. Affinity bias – The tendency to favour people who share similar interests, backgrounds, and experiences with us. Based on my experience, affinity bias can cause us to reject candidates that have different backgrounds and experiences than common candidates. Combating affinity bias is important, especially in a candidate's short market. As an example, we hired a former IT support specialist into our recruitment team because of her drive, people skills and up-front commitment to get up to speed with the rest of the team. This worked out very well in what we needed to achieve in our recruitment campaign!
   
   
2. Illusory correlation – When the recruiter or hiring manager assumes that there is a connection between a trait and a competency. For example, if a candidate is energetic and social in an interview, it might be assumed that this candidate is great in client-facing roles. Asking questions on how the candidate has performed and behaved will help to make a better assessment. In addition, asking referees questions on observed behaviour will also give you a data point to better assess if the candidate is the right fit for the role.
   
   
3. Intuition bias – When a recruiter or hiring manager has too much trust in their intuition or gut feeling on the candidate. This is a very common recruitment mistake. Intuition bias can be mitigated by applying a structure based on the job description and keeping a scoring system, rather than basing your decision on a feeling.
   
   

If you are interested in learning more about bias in recruitment, I would encourage you to have a read of the following material:

Below are some helpful resources on bias:

• Robert Cialdini’s Seven Principles of Persuasion.
• Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow.
• Dian Campbell’s Unconscious Bias.

Employee Retention

The basic principle of retention is that the longer a well-performing employee stays, the more value they provide to their employer. This article by Maia Josebachvili goes into further detail on employee retention. How to understand the ROI of investing in People.

Looking at the graph above, you can see that on and offboarding activities have lower output. During the onboarding and post-offboarding, there is a financial loss. It is not until three to twelve months into the role that the candidate starts becoming profitable. Along with this, the ideal environment and culture, allow the employee to excel further and become highly productive long-term. The below graph shows the difference in output level when retaining a successful salesperson long-term versus short-term.


Above, the turquoise area is the output covered by a successful salesperson who is a long-term fit for the role. The grey area is the output covered by a less successful salesperson who resigns after twenty-three months. Given that the output of a salesperson is very easy to measure, the value of retention becomes very clear in this example. The output for other jobs will be similar, but the retention value should be adjusted for each role. 

This is why a great fit is key, for both the candidate and the company. Keeping happy employees for a longer period is simply more rewarding. Having a long-term strategy can make your TA department a much more valuable part of the business!

Measuring Soft skills

Throughout my career, I have recruited many technical roles. In my experience, hiring teams often overlook the value of soft skills for expertise occupations such as engineering, trades qualified and licensed roles. In order to assess both hard and soft skills, I keep a scoring system during the recruitment process. This involves setting measurable scores for both hard and soft skills. The soft skills assessment can be more challenging to measure, but there are effective ways to solve this.

A common model to measure soft skills is the STAR model: 

• Situation
• Task
• Action
• Result

This model asks how the candidate has acted in a particular situation, what the task at hand was, their action and the result of that action. This can tell you a lot about a candidate's approach where there is a higher emphasis on soft skills.

For example, in the scenario of hiring a technically competent project lead, a lack of proper communication skills may put both project timeline and outcome in jeopardy. Without proper engagement and communication from the project lead, the goals of the project will be ambiguous for the involved teams. As a result, there may be frustrations within the associated teams, delayed timelines and possible resignations from the project. All in all, the project will be more difficult to finish than expected. 

Do you want to know more about digital reference checking and how it can help you make better recruitment decisions? Get in touch!