No Hard Feelings: Emotions at Work and How They Help Us Succeed

by Liz Fosslien

How to reduce biased decisions in the hiring process: Prepare. Make sure you understand what skills and attributes you’re looking for in a candidate. If you’re pulled in to interview someone last minute (unfortunately, this happens a lot), ask the hiring manager to give you a copy of the job description and a few example questions. Remove names from résumés when screening. When researchers submitted identical résumés to businesses, those with white-sounding first and last names received 50 percent more responses than those with African American–sounding names, an effect that hasn’t diminished since the first such study was done in 1989. Ask for work samples. Give candidates a typical problem they might face in the role or an issue you’re currently working on. Then ask them to write out a basic overview of the methodology they would use to solve it. Work samples tend to be the best predictors of how someone will perform on the job—significantly better than interviews, education level, and even experience—and make it easier for evaluators to judge candidates based on skills. Don’t try to “break the streak.” Even the order in which we interview candidates can affect how we perceive their competence. As interviewers, we tend to believe there should be an equal number of strong and weak applicants. If we talk to five outstanding people in a row, we’ll assume the sixth candidate is less likely to be good, just to break the streak. Make interviewers give each candidate a numerica...