Recruitment Bias - Human Resource Management
The human resource manager's priority is selecting a candidate who will assist the company in realizing its long-term business objectives. However, recruitment bias in HRM remains a significant challenge even today. So, deserving job applicants might miss career enhancement opportunities because a recruiter perceives their competency using highly subjective and unrelated metrics like physical appearance, clothing, gender, nationality, or cultural background.
Types of Recruitment Bias in Human Resources
Confirmation bias in employee selection is the human tendency to ignore or filter out the information that conflicts with our deeply held beliefs and values, creating the "blind manager" problem.
Ingroup bias in human resource management is defined as underestimating individuals who belong to a different discipline and department due to a superiority complex that embraces an "Us vs. Them" perspective. Besides, you might recognize this category of hiring bias in HRM when inspecting the office politics considerations.
Halo effect bias means over-emphasizing one or two qualities associated with a job applicant and neglecting the red flags that indicate potentially unwanted attitudes. For example, a candidate might seem ideal because of where this person went to secure higher education. However, a more objective analysis can highlight that this candidate lacks professionalism or requires training to perform in a team.
Horn effect bias means focusing on one disliked characteristic to reject a job aspirant even when the person might excel on other employability metrics like technical proficiency and documented work history. Therefore, this recruitment bias is the other side of the halo effect bias.
Endnote
This post has elaborated on some types of biases in the recruitment process. They can distract the human resource management professionals from their priority, i.e., finding suitable employees who will contribute their skills, ideas, and hard work to the company's revenue goals and mission statement.
More research efforts can enlist other presumptions and biases that interfere with assessing candidates applying for vacant positions at an enterprise. So, HRM professionals must remain alert about such findings and actively work toward increasing awareness among peers in their network.
Regards,External Resources Used to Study Different Types of Recruitment Bias in Human Resources
- An article titled 13 Common Hiring Biases to Watch Out For, written by Alexandra on Harver.com, assisted me when working on this blog post.
- You can also visit a piece on Workable's site depicting unconscious bias in HR decision-making and what the recruiters can do about it.
