There is sufficient proof that inclusion and diversity directly impact the customer value proposition leading to the profitability and growth of a company. A 2019 McKinsey study shows that companies with higher gender diversity on leadership teams were 25% more likely to have better profitability. Those with ethnic and cultural diversity are also 36% more likely to have better bottom lines than companies with lower diversity ratios. Diversity is conducive to better collaboration and creative solutions, leading to better products.
Despite that, over 50% of companies have yet to make progress in building diverse teams. The slow progress does not stem from bad intentions. Even with well-meaning leaders, affinity bias influences team-building decisions subconsciously.
As Chuck Edward, Microsoft’s head of global talent acquisition, said, “affinity bias is widespread in hiring and often leads people to seek out, and hire, candidates who “look, act, and operate” like them. So I’ve had to be very careful to address it head-on.” By consciously trying to avoid affinity bias, recruiters can ensure they have a better team.
Table of Contents
What is Affinity Bias? How do we have it?
Affinity bias is when people are selected based more on their looks, speech patterns, background, nationality, thought processes, and attitudes than their competence. If you are involved in the team building or hiring processes, it can be hard to hire people without falling victim to affinity bias or the tendency to favor people who remind you of yourself or your friends.
Dr. Helen Turnbull, a renowned thought leader on workplace inclusion and diversity, states that it is the natural human tendency to hire in our image. This tendency to find the common thread manifests our affinity bias.
The root of the affinity bias is our perception of comfort when we are around people like us. Dr. Turnbull argues that “If affinity bias means being biased towards “people who make me comfortable” or “people who are like me,” then, surely, somewhere tucked in the recesses of our minds are the shadows of these thoughts—”people who make me uncomfortable” and “people who are not like me.” The possibility of feeling uncomfortable around people who are different and think differently from us tells our brains to avoid or undermine them.
The affinity bias manifests itself in many forms. While gender, color, and ethnicity are critical and most talked-about forms of prejudices, other factors include age, nationality, language, interests, demeanor, and personality, in any combination.
Founders look for co-founders like them, assuming similar values, thought processes, and beliefs could lead to a homogeneous, complimentary environment. In turn, these other senior team members select more people who reflect their thought processes. Affinity bias occurs when recruiters prefer candidates to whom they can relate, and this preference has the overarching role in hiring decisions. The same attitude percolates down to team leaders when it comes to building teams.
Affinity bias is an unconscious bias. Conscious biases are externally visible. On the other hand, an unconscious bias is an integral part of our psyche. They creep in without us noticing them, so we must understand such unconscious biases and ways to deal with them.
The Culture Fit Conundrum
Culture Fit is a term that describes how well a team member will fit in with the existing culture of their new organization or team. The focus on “culture fit” also encourages us to hire candidates like ourselves. Simultaneously, it is essential to note that Culture Fit is not the same as personality fit, which describes whether a candidate’s personality matches hiring managers. However, looking for cultural fit in practice results in selecting candidates who fit in the dominant culture. This behavior results from our preference for being around people we identify with personally or professionally—the preference results in building teams with even higher affinity.
Why should you avoid affinity bias?
When thinking about affinity bias, it is natural to wonder if not having a diverse workforce is terrible. While there are obvious social implications, wouldn’t a homogeneous team be more effective from a business perspective? Wouldn’t it be easier to work collectively towards growth rather than be bogged down by the differences?
Avoiding affinity bias can bring several benefits to the organization and teams.
Attract better talent
By focusing more on talent rather than personalities, there is a greater chance of finding the right talent that performs the primary role more efficiently and effectively. When you allow the biases to play out, you restrict yourself from having a better person for any given position. Teams with heterogeneous thought patterns bring differing experiences, viewpoints, expressions, and problem-solving styles to the fore. Hence, even team members prefer to work in an environment that fosters it. That’s why more than 67% of active and passive job seekers prefer inclusive workplaces that accept and promote a diverse workforce.
Better decision-making by avoiding groupthink
Diverse teams help better decision-making by focusing more on facts and processing them better. The effectiveness of decision-making techniques like Six Thinking Hats also has roots in diverse thinking principles. The different thought processes that heterogeneous teams help avoid groupthink, where everyone involved in the decision-making process thinks alike.
Applying different, sometimes even opposing, viewpoints and filtering the decisions through those viewpoints help teams make much better decisions. Cloverpop found that more than 87% of the time, diverse teams make better decisions than individuals or homogenous groups.
The idea behind the cross-functional teams is to bring diverse viewpoints, experiences, knowledge and skills together. With affinity bias, the very foundation of the cross-functional teams is impossible.
Optimized strategy for better impact
Externally, the consumer profile is also getting diverse. Even local businesses need to cater to different groups of people. For teams that transcend geographical boundaries, these differences are more pronounced. A diverse team can help you better align the strategy to these differences. A McKinsey article, “Delivering through Diversity,” states, “Top and rapidly improving companies recognize the need to adapt their approach—to different parts of the business, to various geographies, and sociocultural contexts.”
It is evident that besides the ethical and social implications, there are many practical drawbacks to letting affinity bias dictate hiring decisions. Understanding and accepting the positives of consciously preventing affinity bias from dictating the hiring processes paves the way to a better, diverse, yet cohesive workforce that can propel business growth inclusively and positively.
How to avoid affinity bias?
To effectively deal with affinity bias, you need to respond at two levels, cognitive and practical. The cognitive response defines our mindset and allows us to define a better functional response. Dr. Helen Turnbull believes that “affinity bias is part of the human condition and is not going to go away.” That is why you need to shape the mindset to respond to it effectively and consciously.
The Cognitive Response
The cognitive response to affinity bias has the following steps;
1. It is critical to accept that we all have affinity bias and must handle it consciously.
2. Accept that if we let it affect our hiring decision, we might not have the best team, which might impact the business growth.
3. Since we can’t eliminate the bias, we need to develop affinity and empathy for people with differences. We need to accept the difference in thoughts, personalities, and demeanors and be mindful of the situations where our unconscious biases can induce conflict while dealing with these differences.
The conscious acceptance of the bias then drives the practical response.
The Practical Response
There are a few different you build teams. First, you might be given a team from the existing organizational resource pool; in that case, you might have little control over who becomes part of the team. If you can influence the recruitment process, that’s your best chance. However, even if you get the team from the existing people, you can employ similar techniques to review their personalities and make decisions.
Many tools and techniques are at your disposal now that can help you effectively make your hiring processes free of affinity bias to a great extent. The process starts from the time you write the job description till the final hiring decision. Let’s break it down to individual techniques.
Write bias-free job descriptions.
There are many ways affinity bias can creep into job descriptions. It may not be intentional, but you may unknowingly add biased words that unconsciously reflect you. Textio and Ongig have text analysis tools that help you eliminate obvious manifestations of affinity bias from your job descriptions.
Blind reviews of resumes
Certain words and even candidate pictures can trigger affinity bias. Recruiters tend to treat resumes with specific terms favorably over those that don’t have those terms. Tools like Applied and Blendoor help you anonymize job applications, helping you address the bias in hiring effectively.
Adopt non-subjective selection methods.
Pre-hire assessment tools like TestGorilla are emerging as an effective method for non-subjective selection methods. For example, instead of resumes, you can use TestGorilla to test candidates’ overall suitability for your open positions’ requirements.
Such objective assessments let you evaluate candidates for personality, cognitive capabilities, and soft and hard skills. Such an evaluation forms a better basis for hiring decisions than the resume. Even otherwise, pre-hire tests enable better hiring decisions. Studies have shown that recruiters spend 7 seconds per resume, 80% of this time on the name, academic info, and the previous title.
There are hands-on tests and assignments available, too. Such tests are among the top three predictors of a candidate’s performance on the job. By emphasizing essential skills, it is possible to mitigate the impact of affinity bias over candidate selection.
Have diverse and multiple interview panels.
Modifying your interview process also helps you eliminate affinity bias in hiring to a large extent. A single person interviewing the candidate has much more chance of affinity bias impacting the decision. However, choosing diverse interview panels with at least two persons and having at least two or more such panels interview each candidate provides a much better chance of hiring without bias.
Multiple interviews may seem slower than a single decision, but they are often more effective in recruiting a better candidate, no matter the bias considerations. As it is, 63% of interviewers determine the outcome within 15 minutes of the interview. Such a process also helps address confirmation bias along with affinity bias. However, you must ensure that one panel or interviewer’s opinions do not influence the other interviewers.
To Sum Up
There is enough proof that businesses with diverse teams have a greater chance of improving their bottom lines through better team performance. In addition, you can attract better talent by removing affinity bias from your hiring process.
Diversity and inclusion have different connotations. Hiring a diverse set of people does not guarantee inclusion. However, it is the first step. By dealing with the affinity bias and other unconscious biases from your recruitment process, you can ensure that you take the first meaningful step towards an inclusive workplace that fosters creativity and innovation, ultimately leading to a better world.
