NSW Government addresses “unconscious bias” concerns
In light of my recent presentation on Unconscious Bias in the Workplace in Japan, I was happy to read that the New South Wales government’s behavioural insights team has addressed increasing concerns regarding unconscious bias in recruitment by releasing a guide to encourage public service workforce diversity strategies.
The guidebook, which came out earlier this month, examines the effects of groupthink, confirmation bias, clique behaviour and various cognitive biases that can subconsciously influence how decisions are made by government agencies when choosing and promoting staff.
According to the premier’s behavioural insights team, the ways agencies advertise may result in a smaller group of candidates applying, in a similar manner to how the design of forms or letters may affect the way in which the general public responds to them.
The brief guidebook gives a rundown of some of the fundamental academic literature, and stems from a more detailed report co-written with the UK’s own nudge unit, the model upon which the NSW team was principally modelled.
Like the majority of biases it looks at, the in-crowd effect or “affinity bias” is only applicable to the processes of selection and promotion. However, the BIU also stated that confirmation bias, or the tendency to reinforce one’s existing beliefs, is an example of one that also applies to jobseekers.
Apparently, research shows that interviewers can make a decision on whether or not they want to hire the candidate within as little as four minutes! Qualities that are not in alignment with the first impression can be missed, which emphasises the importance of conducting structured interviews.
In comparison, candidates who have a preconception that they will not ‘fit into’ a workplace may subconsciously look for information to validate their preconceptions, which could in turn affect whether or not they decide to apply.
Then there is the availability heuristic, which demonstrates that we are most swayed by the information we can recall the most easily, because occurrences that are recent, emotionally charged, and / or out of the ordinary are the easiest to remember.
An example of this would be when a manager thinks of a recent occurrence in which an employee did not perform up to standard, despite other cases of stellar performance, and as a result, decides that they are not worthy of a promotion.
In a similar respect, a recruitment manager might place more importance on the performance of the most recent assessment task, such as the interview, in comparison to all other assessments carried out by the candidate.
The guide also gives advice on the halo effect, the endowment effect, the representativeness heuristic, stereotyping, status quo bias and stereotype threat, and how all of these affect the processes of recruitment and promotion.
A few of the suggestions given by the NSW nudge unit to attract a more extensive range of applicants were to only include the most important selection criteria on job ads, to make the application process as easy as possible, to promote the visibility of senior staff and to utilize more personalised messages to “target groups”.
The guide also includes a long list of advice for selection, including utilizing a structured list of questions in job interviews, decreasing the importance placed on interview performance, and eliminating personal information form resumes. An interesting suggestion was to place the final decision in the hands of someone outside the assessment process.
This is a great initiative – let’s hope many other organisations will follow this example and show some initiative in their own areas.
