There is a surplus of research showing that recruiters often are biased in their judgments through expectations or stereotypes, in fact when undergoing recruitment training, recruiters are regularly discouraged to trust their instincts and first impressions about candidates. Indeed many recruiters seem to trust their instincts, gut feelings, and appearance impressions of candidates more than objective tests. Some other research suggests that such first impressions which recruiters form about a candidate could be correct.
For instance, recruiters were often accurate in assessing the personality characteristics of an applicant based on the candidate’s resume. However, when reviewing the personnel psychology literature on how recruiters form impressions of applicants, one gets the impression that recruiters are as a general rule severely biased and constantly misled in their judgments. Studies mostly examine situations in which people meet for the first time addressing whether and how they form accurate impressions about each other’s.
Schmid Mast, Bangerter, Bulliard, & Aerni (2011) were comparing the accuracy of recruiters’ and students’ impression about job applicants based on a simulated employment interview. Both, recruiters and students were able to accurately detect personality profiles of candidates but recruiters were better at this than students. The personality profile measures the relative weight of each of the five personality dimensions: openness, extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness and neuroticism. Results showed that openness, extraversion, and conscientiousness could be assessed accurately by students but that agreeableness and neuroticism could not. On the other hand, openness was the only trait that recruiters were able to judge accurately. Although students assessed more trait dimensions correctly than the recruiters, recruiters were still significantly more accurate in judging the applicants’ personality profile. Researchers think that recruiters are better at assessing applicants as a whole (i.e., their personality profile) instead of assessing how applicants differ on a given personality dimension. Besides personality profile, researchers also examined differences in deception detection between recruiters and students. Findings revealed that recruiters were able to detect lies in job applicants, whereas students were not. Furthermore, study showed that lie detection seems to be an area of expertise of the recruiters, where job experience is essential to the recruiters’ performance. Study also determined that recruiters with an MBA program were more accurate in assessing applicants for sales positions than were recruiters with a psychology degree.
On the contrary of previous research, Cristofaro (2017) was researching how candidates’ attractiveness, in facial and bodily terms, influence recruiters’ impressions in their selection decisions. Research showed that candidates achieved greater hiring score when they are highly ranked in terms of facial attractiveness. If candidates are ranked as having low facial attractiveness but are highly objectified, they are perceived as having better internal dispositions than candidates with low facial attractiveness and low objectification. This result reinforces older assumptions that candidates with greater facial attractiveness have a greater possibility of being hired, because they are perceived as highly confident in their own abilities. However, having extreme attractiveness, in facial and bodily terms, may be negative to the perception of recruiters of their core evaluations. In practice, evidence says that candidates who are highly objectified and also have high facial attractiveness are perceived, by recruiters, as having lower grades of core evaluations than candidates who are scarcely objectified and have great facial attractiveness. This inverted effect of the objectification and facial attractiveness variables, when both reach a peak, contradicts the traditional concept of “what is beautiful is good”, and has been explained as the so-called “beauty is beastly effect”, by which attractive people are considered as unsuitable for some vacancies, because their excessive attractiveness led recruiters to perceive their inner personality traits as not matching the job requirements. Attractiveness, therefore, works according to both mechanisms of the “what is beautiful is good” and “beauty is beastly effect.” Those two effects do not exclude each other but are complementary, depending on the intertwined grades of those variables.
According to Hurley-Hanson & Giannantonio (2006), recruiters may stigmatize applicants who in their judgment violate the image norms of the job applied for, those candidates are perceived as not fitting with the company’s corporate image or do not match the company’s product brand image. If an applicant does not fit the image norm the recruiter perceives their company to need, this lack of fit with may become a stigma. Moreover, the stigma of not fitting an image norm may become one of many factors a recruiter bases their hiring decision on. When a recruiter observes that an applicant does not fit the image norm of the firm, they will begin to assign negative characteristics to that applicant, placing them in categories which have stereotyped beliefs about them, and perhaps excluding them from the organization.
In conclusion, findings suggest recruiters should increase the amount of information about candidates, which has been demonstrated as being a deterrent to those biases, to avoid the errors in selection decisions. Additionally, standardization of the data collection process may also help in preventing biased selection decisions, especially when using internet sources, in order to formally collect job-related information.
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