Recruitment should be objective. However, each and every one of us can fall prey to cognitive errors that distort reality. We tend to attribute other positive traits to physically attractive people - intelligence, sense of humor, or high competence. How to avoid a mistake?
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In the 70s, not a single woman played in the New York Philharmonic. Ten years later, they already made up 45% of the team. How did this happen? This huge change was not due to a sudden increase in musical competence among women, but... a screen. It separated female and male candidates from the stereotypes and prejudices of the auditioners. Can "blind" recruitment bring similar results today?
The phrase "How to write a CV" has over 3 million records in Google's search engine. In specialized articles, you can find information about templates, sections, and appropriate clauses. More and more often, the question, "Should you add a photo to your CV?" is asked. It used to be a common practice, but today it is increasingly said that a photo is an element that should be omitted in a CV. And it's not the only one.
Recruitment should be as objective as possible, so the application should primarily assess experience and competences. Unfortunately, each of us can fall victim to cognitive errors that distort the real image of the world. Already girls aged 9-12 in the vast majority believe that being slim and beautiful will ensure their future happiness. And although it should not be so, these views are not far from the truth.
The above beliefs are based on a common psychological phenomenon called the halo effect. As humans, we tend to attribute other positive traits to physically attractive people, such as leadership skills, intelligence, sense of humor, or high competence in their profession.
Although this effect can be quickly verified at the next stage of recruitment, through appropriate personality questionnaires, knowledge or qualification tests, or a simple conversation, it may turn out that more physically attractive people will advance to the next stage than their competitors. Or those without overweight, tattoos, or finally of a certain, positively assessed by recruiters, skin color or origin. Which, although as discrimination based on appearance and origin, is a prohibited practice, at the stage of initial recruitment and CV assessment it is difficult to prove it to recruiters.
Not wanting to allow such threats, it is better to effectively prevent them. Including in the recruitment announcement a request not to include photos in CVs, removing or covering photos in applications before they reach the recruiter, or phone conversations instead of face-to-face at the initial stage of recruitment, can greatly facilitate the decision-making process, without exposing oneself to accusations of fatphobia or attractionism.
The same is true for ageism, or discrimination based on age. The date of birth is another point, the inclusion of which in your CV is debatable. "We are looking for a young and dynamic team!" Such job advertisements are common today. And the age of 50 becomes the boundary for being or not being in the labor market.
Experienced 28-year-old job candidates in Warsaw received an invitation to an interview 4 times more often than their 52-year-old competitors - according to the PIE report "Age discrimination in the Polish labor market". The same document shows that as many as 68% of people aged 50-59 would prefer to employ a 30-year-old man rather than an equally qualified competitor.
Meanwhile, GUS predicts that by 2025, four out of ten Poles will be 50 years old. Society is aging at a very fast pace, and building age-diverse teams can bring a number of benefits. This includes natural knowledge transfer and continuity of processes, but also less rotation. The competitiveness of the labor market makes it difficult to keep real talents in the company. In some industries, employees even go to recruitment interviews "for sport", check out competitors' offers, negotiate higher rates elsewhere, to leave the current company or have an argument in a conversation about a raise.
People over 50 years of age often value stability, and their motivation to keep their job is very high. In addition, these are often very experienced people who have a completely different view on the same issues than younger generations, which can often lead to non-standard problem solutions or completely new ideas.
All this makes that age in the CV should not play a significant role. However, managing a multi-generational team is fraught with many challenges, the main one being understanding one's own prejudices towards older people and the desire to attribute stereotypical behaviors and certain skills or lack thereof to them. To overcome these barriers, education and training are necessary, which will not only change the attitude towards older people, but also develop appropriate communication mechanisms within the company.
A CV without a photo, without a date of birth, maybe even without a name? This could be considered sarcasm, but in fact such practices are used. In the USA, where it is harder than in Poland to recognize the gender of a candidate by their surname alone, many women decide to give only the first letter of their name, so that the recruiter does not know who they are dealing with. Exaggeration? If you look at the research conducted by Yale University in 2012, this caution seems quite justified.
The experiment involved creating one CV template, which was presented in two versions to the subjects. The first version was signed with a man's name and surname, and the second with a woman's. Apart from that, the applications did not differ in any way. Female CVs were rated as worse, weaker in terms of merit, and the candidates were offered a lower salary and fewer duties than in the case of male counterparts. What's more. This situation occurred regardless of whether the CVs were evaluated by women or men.
This is most often due to centuries-old stereotyping and sexism, which often put women at a disadvantage compared to men when it comes to intelligence or competence. As the Hays company report indicates, women are often also judged through the prism of their family situation - "better not to hire her, because she might give birth soon", "better not to hire her, because she already has a child, so she probably won't be committed to work" or through the prism of age - "too young - inexperienced", after 50 - "her ideas lack freshness, she doesn't know the modern world". In addition, women's decisions are more often questioned, and they also have to prove their competence more often than men.
Meanwhile, as McKinsey's research indicates, diversifying the workforce in terms of gender can increase a company's revenue by as much as 15%! Setting gender-neutral recruitment standards, in which regardless of whether a woman or a man submits a CV, the assessment concerns the same variables, or creating job advertisements where job titles are given in both female and male form, can be the first step towards gender diversification of teams.
Especially since as many as 60% of women consider gender diversity in the organization before submitting a CV to a given organization - as PwC research shows. It is also worth remembering that not only the recruitment process itself should be more equal. Companies should create internal standards and quantitative goals related to gender diversity, so that women also have a chance for remuneration, promotions or raises on par with men.
Objective recruitment would be much easier if it weren't for the subjective assessments of recruiters. HR teams came to this conclusion some time ago, which resulted in the inclusion of artificial intelligence in the process of analyzing CVs. It might seem that algorithms will not make cognitive mistakes, will not diminish anyone's competence due to age or gender. Unfortunately, artificial intelligence does not operate in a vacuum, but learns from existing data. And this means that AI is not free from stereotypes.
Brands have had to verify and improve their algorithms more than once when it turned out that they assigned more points to candidates based on information in their CVs than to female candidates. This was the case with Amazon, which taught its application analysis algorithms on the resumes... of men. And so artificial intelligence decided that this is the gender preferred by the brand.
Despite such work accidents, the automation of recruitment processes seems inevitable, especially in large companies. Therefore, awareness of stereotypes and inequalities that AI may share should increase among recruiters, and this process should be subject to even greater "control". Not only at the stage of recruitment itself, but above all during the preparations.
Currently, there is a strong trend related to hiring diverse candidates, and declarations of readiness for this process can be heard from everywhere. However, in practice, this can prove to be much more difficult. Employment is just the beginning. Later, acceptance of differences, development of communication skills, taking seriously the ideas presented by women or older people, and constant integration of diverse teams are needed. However, first you need to take this first step and set up your own screen in your company.
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