Confirmation Bias in Hiring is Insidious to Spot, Difficult to Combat and Bad for Business

Bias plays a major role in hiring practices, albeit an often silent, hidden role.   That’s because people have over 200 unconscious (as in not aware of) biases.  Those biases are bad for business.  But, of the many, confirmation bias is probably one of the most common and also perhaps one of the worst unconscious biases.  It is also one the hardest to overcome.  So what is confirmation bias and why is it so bad for business?

Let’s start by defining it.  Confirmation bias happens when someone analyzes or processes information in a way that confirms their own beliefs or assumptions about an individual.  This bias also involves a tendency to ignore, explain away or even forget information that conflicts with those personal beliefs or assumptions.  Confirmation Bias seeks evidence that confirms one’s existing beliefs or theories.  This bias often piggybacks onto other unconscious biases.

In business, bias is the four-letter word that is truly offensive.  By definition, bias implies prejudice that is in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair.  It is just plain bad business to demonstrate bias in company policies or practices, whether it involves customers or employees.  And, thankfully, most companies in the U.S. actively discourage bias. 

However, there is conscious bias (the intentional kind) and unconscious bias (the unintentional kind of which most people are unaware).  Unconscious bias is an unrecognized mental process tied to cognitive heuristics and how the human brain processes information.  So basically, anyone with a brain has biases.  It is part of how the human brain works.  The brain uses bias as a way to keep us safe and as a tool to process the onslaught of information we process at any given time.  

There is so much talk about achieving and maintaining balance in life.  And it sounds like something that should be easy to achieve.  Just find and stick to the middle.  But even in fairytales, we see that balance is elusive.  In Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Goldilocks was looking for food and a place to rest.  But in the bears’ home, some of the porridge was too hot.  Some was too cold.  Only one was just right.  The same was true of the chair to sit in (too big and too small) and the bed to nap (too hard and too soft).  It seems that extremes are everywhere.  This could be a metaphor for life.  Too much and too little are not good.  The goal is to find the middle of the road which is where we find what is just right.

People have a tendency to go to extremes in their pursuits.  If a little is good, more is better.  Or if a little is difficult, then the least possible is best.  Eating ranges from anorexia to obesity.  Exercise ranges from indolence to Olympic athlete.  Work ranges from laziness to workaholic.  Sleep ranges from insomnia to narcolepsy.  Imbibing ranges from teetotaler to alcoholic.  Political activism ranges from apathy to radical extremist.  Even career pursuits range from abject failure to massive success.  And people tend to gravitate toward one end of the spectrum or the other in most behaviors.  And, sometimes they go from one end of the spectrum to the other.

E-Commerce businesses have a strong online presence.  They have to.  The Internet is their marketplace.  They must have a robust website, strong SEO, social media pages, blogs, vlogs, podcasts, content placement, PPC and retargeting advertising, etc.  That makes perfect sense. 

But what about companies that provide a product or service that cannot be bought, sold, provided or delivered online?  Property Inspector.  Aesthetician.  Automobile mechanic.  Dentist.  Attorney.  Engineer.  It might be a product or service that can’t even be quoted online.  Landscaper.  Commercial Real Estate Broker.  General Contractor.  Event Coordinator.  Accountant.  Such companies get most of their business from word-of-mouth referrals, repeat business and networking.  While those businesses recognize the need to have a website, they may not necessarily see the need for a robust, current, active and engaging online presence.  That is a mistake.

Abraham Lincoln.  Winston Churchill.  Martin Luther King, Jr.  John F. Kennedy, Jr.   Maya Angelou.  Ronald Reagan.   Nelson Mandela.  Susan B. Anthony.  Fred Rogers.  What these very different people from vastly different experiences, cultures, occupations, places and times share in common is that they were all great orators.  We don’t have to necessarily agree with what they said to at least acknowledge that how they said it was highly impactful.  They all understood and mastered the art of conversation.  They could effectively deliver the meaning of what they were saying to their audience.  Part of that was not just by the words they chose, but by how they said what they said. 

Communication is fraught with misunderstandings, misfires, miscommunications and mishaps.  It’s akin to the Abbot and Costello radio comedy skit from 1938 titled “Who’s On First?”.  The premise of the sketch is that Abbott is identifying the players on a baseball team for Costello.  But the players’ names simultaneously serve as the basis for questions and responses.  For example, “Who is the first baseman?” and “The first baseman is Who.”  This leads to repeated misinterpretations and growing frustration between the performers.

You talk a lot.  Don’t worry, it’s not just you.  People talk a lot, regardless of gender.  That’s a scientific fact.  James Pennebaker, the chairperson of the University of Texas at Austin’s psychology department, and his colleagues at the University of Arizona in Tucson collected data for over a decade which looked at how much people talk. 

In one study published in 2007 in the journal Science, researchers sampled the talking patterns of 396 university students (210 women and 186 men) at colleges in Texas, Arizona and Mexico (345 Americans and 51 Mexicans).  To do this, they used a device Pennebaker created called an EAR (Electronically Activated Recorder).  It is a digital recorder that can be stored in a sheath similar to a case for glasses in a person’s purse or pocket.  The EAR captured 30 seconds of ambient noise (including conversations) every 12.5 minutes for a day.  The students in the study could not tamper with the recordings.  Based on the data collected, researchers then estimated the total number of words that each student spoke daily, assuming they were awake 17 of 24 hours.  In most of the samples, the average number of words spoken by men and women were about the same.  The most economical speaker spoke about 500 words daily and the most verbose spoke a whopping 47,000 words a day.  But, on average, it came out to be about the same:  16,215 words a day for women and 15,669 words spoken a day for men (a statistically insignificant difference).  

Getting rid of things that are “no longer needed or useful” is what administrators, accountants and consultants are constantly trying to do.  They point out ways to “cut the fat” and create lean businesses with minimal waste and without superfluous people or processes.  In fact, the second principle of building a lean, agile business is to “cut waste”, according to LivePlan.  Business journals, such as Entrepreneur, Harvard Business Review, and Forbes, regularly tout the need for startup and small businesses to be lean, avoid waste, and eliminate or avoid superfluous processes and positions.  And, following this mandate, it would follow that redundant systems, processes and people should be eliminated.  And yet there is another management philosophy that advocates for businesses having redundant systems, processes and people.  So which is it?  Is redundancy a good thing or bad thing for business?

Businesses have so many options, choices and models from which to choose when it comes to strategies, software, systems, processes, and approaches.  As a result, decisions typically result in outcomes that are highly unpredictable, unreliable, time consuming and error-prone.  On the flip side of the coin, businesses faced with vast choices and options often become plagued by frustration, friction, indecisiveness, decision fatigue, apathy and gridlock.  And many things can make the decision-making process even harder.  Unforeseen innovations.  Pace of change.  Market shifts.  Economic conditions.  Staffing mistakes.  Inability to see or grasp all of the variables.  But businesses need their decision-making to be quick, precise, and mindful of the entirety of their business.  So what is a business to do?  How can a business better handle the decision-making process?