Cognitive biases to be aware of during the recruitment process

Defined by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky as “deviations in the cognitive processing of information” which lead to bad decisions, cognitive biases are numerous. There are around 250 of them today.

Present in all areas of life, this phenomenon is also present in hiring processes when it comes to evaluating a candidate. A reality often ignored by those first concerned!

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However, incorrect processing of the information available can lead to recruitment errors (the famous “casting errors”) or to missed opportunities.

Cognitive biases are also factors in discrimination in hiring and exclusion of certain profiles. Click on to discover the most common biases.

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The primacy effect involves paying excessive attention to the first impression. For example, considering that a candidate who arrives late is someone who doesn't take work seriously.

Conversely, the recency effect is characterized by better memorization of the latest information or experiences compared to the oldest. This can lead to favoring the last candidate met, because they are still fresh in your memory.

The mere exposure effect refers to familiarity (and therefore a more favorable judgment) with a person or situation already known. If you know one of your candidates, you should get a colleague who doesn't know them to avoid this bias.

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If certain biases distort our judgment through memory effects, others reinforce our beliefs, such as the membership bias, which consists of favouring individuals who have things in common with us. Be careful if a candidate interests you because he attended the same university or has the same hobbies as you!

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Association bias (or stereotyping or overgeneralizations bias) manifests itself as a tendency to make a decision based on a small number of specific characteristics. For example: deducing that because someone plays team sports that the person is sociable and likes working in a group.

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A similar bias is the halo effect, which consists of forming an overall judgment about a person based on a single characteristic (positive or negative) which has taken precedence over all the others in your perception.

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Also, be careful not to let yourself be trapped by a candidate! For example, the Dunning-Kruger effect consists of overestimating one's knowledge and skills when they are limited, which can lead those who are not as qualified to highlight themselves more.

The naivety bias appears when reason gives way to emotion and the candidate manages to seduce the recruiter with nice words. The best way to get out of this is to question the person objectively about their skills or their concrete achievements.

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In the same spirit, extraordinaryness amounts to granting disproportionate value to an individual because of a specific characteristic that distinguishes them from others. Above all, make sure that their skills are well suited to the position offered!

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Conversely, the entomologist's bias eliminates all subjective aspects by focusing solely on the technical dimension of recruitment. With the danger of missing out on the personality of the candidate.

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Finally, certain biases guide judgment based on a significant fact or a hypothesis that we wish to confirm. This is the case of framing bias, which consists of having too precise an idea of one's expectations of the candidate, of asking them questions that are too biased, which can prevent them from showing who they really are.

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The contrast effect is a final means by which the recruiter judges a candidate simply by comparison to others, or by estimating that he is the ideal candidate by choosing a certain angle of judgment. The risk of casting error or default choice is high!

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“Even if you fight against your preconceptions as much as possible, biases will always occur during a recruitment process. The only thing we can do is help recruiters become aware of their existence, by training them and raising their awareness,” says Vincent Binetruy, France Director of the Top Employers Institute, quoted by the portal 'Parlons RH'.

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For Djamila Akerkouch, from the Bruce recruitment firm, cited by the same media outlet, it is important “that the candidate goes through several different people in order to be able to compare everyone's opinion, to avoid rushing headlong, and to find each other with a profile which, because he was able to convince us thanks to one of our biases, will later turn out not to be the best for the targeted position.”

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