One In Four Interviews Are Biased

You’ve meticulously designed your hiring process, carefully crafted your interview questions, and trained your team to be as objective as possible. You’re ready to hire the very best people for your roles.

But then your interview teams step in with their own ideas of what makes a good interview, often influenced by biased questions and preconceived notions. 

Sound familiar? Are you sitting there thinking that this only happens to other teams? Unfortunately, that’s probably not the case…

How do we know this? Our AI analyzes interviews and detects potential bias from interviewers (and then suggests how it can be avoided and trains interviewers to be better). We examined the data and the results are pretty shocking.

Diving into 100,000+ interviews, we found that almost 25% of them contain bias. 

Let’s just pause there… 25%, 1 in 4, ¼ of interviews…

That’s alarming isn’t it? It’s a lot! We dug in further to understand the most common areas of bias and how often they occur:

Common Forms of Bias

1.) Family Status

A significant amount of bias centers around questions about a candidate’s family status, such as marital status, children, or childcare arrangements. Oftentimes, interviewers think that casually asking a candidate about how many children they have is building rapport, but this type of inquiry may lead to assumptions about the candidate’s commitment to work or ability to maintain a work-life balance.

2.) Criminal History 

Of the interviews that we uncovered with potential bias, 16% of them focused on criminal history. I’m a little surprised to see this so frequently, especially since I would have expected most interviewers to be aware of the importance of avoiding this topic. Most frequently flagged here were interviewers asking about criminal history and background checks before discussing the applicant’s qualifications.
‍
3.) Salary Expectations

Another common Pillar flag is the interviewer asking about salary expectations incorrectly. As we know, in some states it’s illegal to ask about the candidates's current salary, which makes understanding salary expectations a trickier subject to navigate. We recommend discussing the candidate’s qualifications, experience, and the role requirements before bringing up pay. When touching on the topic, focusing on the candidates's salary expectations is a safer approach.

4.) Candidate’s Name or Perceived Identity

This was surprising: 8% of the biased interviews were flagged for the interviewer (repeatedly) mispronouncing a candidate’s name or using the wrong pronouns. This is a sure way to make a candidate feel uncomfortable, so let’s ensure interviewers review applicant materials in advance of the interview, look up how to pronounce a candidate’s name where needed, or simply ask them at the start.

5.) Age

This shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone, but it’s important to avoid asking a candidate their age, whether directly or indirectly. We’ve found that 6% of the biased interviews directly ask about a candidate’s age or use indirect questions, such as those about graduation year or work history length, to estimate it. Unless knowing the candidate’s age is legally required or directly relevant to the job, such inquiries can lead to age discrimination and should be strictly avoided.

6.) Affinity Bias 

This is a less surprising form of bias, but one that we still see often. Affinity bias occurs when we unconsciously favor people who share similar backgrounds, interests, or experiences to our own. We’re commonly seeing this come up in Pillar when related to university loyalties or sports team preferences.

In addition to these common forms of bias, there are a few less common things we see, including:

• Comments on profile pictures - making insensitive or assumptive comments about a candidate’s profile picture
• English proficiency - inquiring too deeply about a candidate’s English proficiency, which is potentially disadvantageous to non-native speakers
• Overconfidence - assuming a candidate is less competent if they are less confident or more reserved in their responses during the interview
  ‍

How to Stamp Out Biased Interviews

As I mentioned, Pillar’s AI coaches team members to improve and grow in their interviewing skills, with a particular focus on addressing bias. Alongside this, here are some things you can do now to eradicate bias from your interviewers:

1.) Use Structured Interviews

Structured interviews where each candidate is asked the same set of questions minimizes bias by allowing the interviewer to judge the skills that are most relevant to the role and ignore non-relevant information. A clear structure where you’re able to compare the candidate’s answers to the skills required makes it much easier to avoid bias.

2.) Use A Diverse Hiring Team

The best interview processes include multiple people to ensure fair judgments are made about each candidate. During the different interview stages, it’s important to have a diverse hiring team to get a fair judgment of every candidate. Think about age, gender, background, seniority level, their skill sets, and ways they think. A diverse interview panel is far less likely to experience bias than a single person or a team of like-minded individuals.

3.) Prepare Interview Scorecards

Using an interview scoring system that grades candidates’ responses to skill-based questions on a predetermined scale is a good way to make a hiring decision based on data, not gut feeling. Interviewers should score candidates during the interview or immediately after while their memories are still fresh and before biases creep in.

4.) Avoid Assumptions

Refrain from making assumptions about candidates based on limited information or stereotypes. Accurate and unbiased evaluations lead to better hiring decisions, as they are based on relevant information and a true understanding of the candidate’s capabilities.

‍5.) Prepare For the Interview

Oftentimes, interviewers show up to interviews completely blind. It’s important to spend some time before the interview to double-check candidate information, including names and background details, and to remind yourself of what your hiring manager needs from you in the context of the overall hiring team.

‍6.) Train Interviewers

Provide training for hiring teams on unconscious bias to help them recognize and counteract their own biases during the interview process.
_________________________________________________________________________

In reality, bias is inescapable, but by keeping the above habits in mind (or by using Pillar’s AI to flag instances), it can be greatly reduced.

The fact that one in four interviews are biased is a significant concern for both candidates and employers. By being aware of these various forms of bias and knowing what is actually going on in interviews, hiring teams can make more informed decisions, foster a more inclusive workplace, and ultimately attract the best talent.

If you’re worried about bias through the rest of the process, we recently launched our AI-powered job description analyzer…because checking for bias ultimately starts with the job description. All you have to do is paste your job description, and we’ll evaluate it for things like gender-specific language, aggressive terminology, requirements that may discourage candidates from applying, and more. You can check it out for free here if interested.

Hope this is helpful,
‍
Mark Simpson
Founder & CEO