©2010 ERE Media, Inc. Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership |crljournal.com |April 2 0 1 0 13 THE HIRING PROCES S B ias is continuing to plague firms in the recruitment and selection process. The elimination of any intentional bias has been the subject of much debate in both the public and private sectors. However, much attention has been paid to the reduction and elimination of intentional bias in the talent acquisition process, without much emphasis on un-intentional bias.There are many examples of unintentional bias but many talent acquisition professionals lack awareness of these uninten- tional biases. This article will discuss how some of these effects manifest themselves in the talent acquisition process and will present several remedies based on a mixture of scholarly evidence and professional experience. Two very important bias factors are what scholars call “or- der bias” factors.They can occur when information about a candidate is presented in different orders.We have all ex- perienced this form of bias in almost everything that we do. For example, what will you remember about this article: the first or last written statement? Does the structure of this ar- ticle allow you to judge it differently based on what infor- mation is presented first and which one is presented last? T his is, of course, assuming that the information present- ed is the same and that the only factor that changes is the order (sequence) that the information is presented in. We call those biases (ones that deal with order) the re- cency and primacy bias effects.The recency bias error oc- curs when an assessor (i.e. recruiter, hiring manager, etc.) is overly affected by information that was presented later (more recently) rather than earlier in any given selection process. In contrast, the primacy bias error occurs when an assessor’s selection is made based on information that was presented earlier (primary information) rather than later in a process. And although the effects appear symmetrically opposing, the research shows that they occur because of dif- ferent reasons, and that their implications can differ dras- tically.They are not equal but opposite. First, it is important to provide some context to the is- sue of these two types of bias error. Bias error in the con- text of human judgment is based on the judger’s cognitive ability. In other words, they occur because of our brain’s abil- ity (or inability) to judge several pieces of ambiguous in- formation accurately. Dr. Robert Dipboye of Rice Univer- sity used the term “cognitive distortion” in his 1982 Academy of M anagement Review article titled “Self-Fulfill- ing Prophecies in the Selection-Recruitment Interview.” Es- sentially, cognitive distortion occurs when information has to be cognitively collected, analyzed, and interpreted about a particular candidate. In other words, it occurs throughout the entire talent acquisition process, since in- formation about a candidate is received throughout the en- tire process. Dr. Dipboye was not the first to take on the issue of un- derstanding cognitive bias in the recruitment and selection process.The research dates back to the mid 1940s, grew dur- ing the era of growth of industrial psychology, and matured in the mid- to late-90s by the finding of models that accu- rately describe when each effect occurs. T he subject itself has been investigated by psychologists, marketing re- searchers, and human resource theorists amongst others, but the errors have manifested themselves in the subject of statistics before social practitioners ever paid attention to it, and it would’ve been easily detected by statisticians in the amount of skew in any normal statistical distribution (but that’s another subject). Social scientists simply gave it a name and applied it to their cases. Cognitive distortion is essentially a function of cognitive ability in general.The mind can only process so much in- formation accurately. Thus, in the case of the interview The Recency and Primacy Effects in the Talent Acquisition Process Little attention is paid to the unintentional biases that creep into the hiring process. Here’s a look at what they are and some ways to avoid them. By Joe Shaheen