Who hasn’t wanted to clone themselves, especially when deep into a project that leaves a weekend in tatters. Dr. Evil of Austin Powers fame hilariously and awkwardly created Mini-Me as this right-hand man. While Mini-Me failed to carry out Dr. Evil’s plans for world domination, he succeeded in illustrating a major problem in human resources that needs more scrutiny than ever. The actor Verne Troyer – who played Mini-Me – immortalized an uncomfortable concept.
The hiring of mini-me in organizations is a problem-behaviour caused by two cognitive fallacies. One is the affinity bias, the liking of people similar to ourselves. The other is the exposure effect, where we like things that we have been merely exposed to. In the readings of cognitive fallacies it becomes clear that the majority of such fallacies are a variant of the “availability heuristic,” when we over-value thoughts that come to mind easily. If we choose what’s comfortable, we reproduce our own status quo.
However, it’s usually the case that an employer needs a diverse team. Even the most excellent leaders need people who have different strengths. In an article at entrepreneur.com, George Deeb asserts;
“Maybe you don’t need a ‘glass half full’ optimist like yourself… Maybe you need a ‘glass half empty’ realist, who will bring a sense of caution to your investment decisions. Or, you may need a similar ‘A-Type Personality’ to lead your sales team efforts… But, maybe a ‘B-Type Personality’ may be a better fit to manage your more introverted team of technology developers. …Maybe what you really need is the opposite of yourself. You need your Anti-Me to help keep yourself organized, on plan and in check. It really comes down to what you see as your personal strengths and weaknesses, and filling in any voids in your skill-sets.” (Emphasis added)
Equity and Inclusion in Hiring Decisions
The most visible consequence of unconscious bias is that organizations hire and promote people in the same demographic category as the hiring manager, increasing the momentum behind historic privilege. In an article in the Guardian in 2016, Matthew Jenkin notes that the context of a selection interview will have an outsized impact on who is chosen. If the context is white and middle-class, candidates who are white and middle class will be favoured.
Bias goes beyond blockbuster items like race and social class. Hobbies, personal experiences, and how we dress can be factors too. If the leadership of an organization is “all of one type” it is a reliable sign that the leadership has lost all curiosity, has no self-doubt, and does not take evidence seriously. The leadership is not reading the news, and if they are, they are only reading it in print.
This is not the mindset of leaders who will make an organization successful in the near future. Yes, we must achieve indicators of diversity, but we must also foster receptiveness to new information, a curiosity about diverse ideas, and ways in which an individual can be excellent in a manner that might be considered weird.
Why Structured Interviews Matter
The professional association in the UK, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), released a paper in 2015 entitled A Head for Hiring: The Behavioural Science of Recruitment and Selection. It looked at, amongst other things, the role of unstructured interviews. The authors found a study that fed research participants a combination of good evidential information, plus random irrelevant information from an unstructured interview. The research subjects upgraded the importance of the random irrelevant information and discounted the good information. “This can be seen as evidence of sense-making – our tendency to identify patterns or detect trends even when they are non-existent.”
It’s not just the interviewers who are at risk of making bad judgment calls. The CIPD paper identified cognitive fallacies in the mind of the interviewee that caused them to self-select away from promising job matches. And walking into an unfamiliar environment, where they feel like an outsider, can cause job candidates to underperform because of the additional stress. When people are using their brains, they are vulnerable to issues of cognitive load in which a complex environment exhausts their brain prior to facing decisions. Those coming from a different context face disadvantage in an environment that might seem “normal” to the host.
Solutions in Diversity Hiring
What is the remedy for these problems? For one, structured interviews are key, as they narrow the range of evidence to information that is relevant. Also, we must actively seek contrary evidence; not taking things at face-value, and seeking information that is outside of what is familiar and comfortable. There is also diversity representation. Charles Hipps, CEO of e-recruitment company WCN, was quoted in the Guardian article and “…suggests having team members from the particular group you are trying to attract present during the recruitment process – whether that’s meeting and greeting candidates or on the interview panel.” Structure a diverse context and it will set a balanced comfort-level with reduced cognitive load.
Employers are also starting to get hard-core, using new tools to improve the selection process. The Guardian article spoke with one company, Elevate, that “uses algorithms to score every candidate’s CV, previous work experience, skills and education, and assesses their suitability for a role. It then ranks candidates much like Google’s search results…” Another company, Joinkoru, conducts validated pre-hire assessments which provide candidate scores that are less sensitive to the candidate’s similarity to current employees. It is also feasible to do blind selection in the process of creating a shortlist, in a manner that obscures the name and sex of the candidate.
Not all of these tools are perfect, and indeed there are emerging risks that algorithms can carry-forward the historic bias of past human behaviours. The rise of the racist robots is a concern. We might not be creating cloned versions of ourselves (yet), but we are at serious risk of creating artificial intelligence which has flaws identical to our broader society.
And the technology can be expensive. Doctor Evil is the only one selling it, and he’s going to charge you (pinky to mouth) one million dollars.
Stuart Murray Speaks 